This was a v good video on Ed that I watched earlier today. It made me think about how we do UI design in the modern day
Imagine if you will a hypothetical alternate history where video terminals never caught on and all computer interfaces were teleprinter based
Imagine modern ed-like text editors with full unicode support, text markup and formatting in multiple fonts
The web would be dominated by RSS readers that print out content like a stock ticker, full color pictures included
Portable computers would still be possible, screens replaced by printers and spools of paper, making them a little bigger, but not by much. Maybe looking a bit like this teletype used by deaf people to communicate over the phone
We would still have wireless technologies too, no reason our laptop teletypes couldn't connect to wireless cell service or wifi
And if you don't want to lug around your teleprinter, just print out a few pages of news to read
There still would be ads of course. Fewer, since people would get mad about wasting paper they paid for, Paper waste would go up as literally everyone would print out every bit of information they could possibly want or need.
Since CRTs existed in the era of teletype computing, stuff like TVs and the occasional video interface would exist in a few fields, but I don't know if LCD technology would be quite where it is today. We'd still be watching TV and movies, just not as universally as we do now.
Weird alt history for sure,
