From the «punchity punch punch» department:
Title: A Teletype by Any Other Name: The Early E-mail and Wordprocessor
Author: Al Williams
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2024 15:00:37 +0000
Link: https://hackaday.com/2024/11/13/a-teletype-by-any-other-name-the-early-e-mail-and-wordprocessor/
Podcast Download URL: https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/1024px-Flexowriter.jpg?w=400

[image 1]

Some brand names become the de facto name for the generic product. Xerox, for
example. Or Velcro[2]. Teletype was a trademark, but it has come to mean just
about any teleprinter communicating with another teleprinter or a computer. The
actual trademark belonged to The Teletype Corporation, part of Western
Electric, which was, of course, part of AT&T. But there were many other
companies that made teleprinters, some of which were very influential.

The teleprinter predates the computer by quite a bit. The original impetus for
their development was to reduce the need for skilled telegraph operators. In
addition, they found use as crude wordprocessors, although that term wouldn’t
be used for quite some time.

Telegraph
[image 4][4]An 1855 keyboard telegraph (public domain).

Early communication was done by making and breaking a circuit at one station to
signal a buzzer or other device at a distant station. Using dots and dashes,
you could efficiently send messages, but only if you were proficient at sending
and receiving Morse code. Sometimes, instead of a buzzer, the receiving device
would make marks on a paper — sort of like a strip recorder.

In the mid-1800s, several attempts were made to make machines that could print
characters remotely. There were various schemes, but the general idea was to
move a print head remotely and strike it against carbon paper to leave a letter
on a blank page.

By 1874, the Frenchman Èmile Baudot created a 5-bit code to represent
characters over a teleprinter line. Like some earlier systems, the code used
two shift characters to select uppercase letters (LTRS) and figures (FIGS).
This lets the 32 possible codes represent 26 letters, 10 digits, and a few
punctuation marks. However, if the receiver missed a shift character, the
message would garble badly. This was especially a problem over radio links.

Paper Tape

Donald Murray made a big improvement in 1901. Instead of directly sending
characters from a keyboard to the wire, his apparatus let the operator punch a
paper tape. Then a machine used the paper tape to send characters to the remote
station which would punch an identical tape. That tape could go through another
machine to print out the text on it. Murray rearranged the Baudot code
slightly, adding things we use today, like the carriage return and the line
feed.

The problem that remained was keeping the two ends of the circuit in sync. An
engineer working for the Morton Salt Company solved that problem, which Edward
Kleinschmidt independently improved. The basic idea had been around for a while
— using a start pulse to kick off each character — but these two patents around
1919 made it work.

Patents

Instead of fighting a big patent war, the two companies, Morkrum (partly owned
by the owner of Morton Salt) and Klienschmitt, merged in 1924 and produced an
even better machine. This was the birth of the modern teleprinter. In fact, the
company that was formed from this merger would eventually become The Teletype
Corporation and was bought by AT&T in 1930 for $30 million in stock.

Some early teleprinters were page printers that typed on the page like a
typewriter. Others were tape printers that spit out a tape with letters on it.
Often, the tape had a gummed back so the operator could cut it into strips and
stick it to a telegram form, something you may have seen in old movies.

In addition to public telegrams, there were networks of commercial stations
known as Telex and TWX — precursors to modern e-mail. These networks were like
a phone system for teleprinters. You’d dial a Telex number and send a message
to that machine. Many teleprinters had an internal wheel that a technician
could set (by breaking off tabs) to send a WRU code (who are you) in response
to a query. So connecting to the Hackaday Telex and sending WRU might reply
“HACKDAY.” In addition, you could ring a bell on the remote machine. So a
single bell might be a normal message, but ten bells might indicate an urgent
message.

Word Processing

While replacing telegraphs was an obvious use of teleprinter technology, you
might wonder how people could use these as crude word processors. The key was
the paper tape and a simple paper tape trick. A Baudot machine would have five
possible punches on one row of the tape. You can think of it as a binary number
from 00000 (no punch) to 11111 (all positions punched out). The trick is that
if all positions are punched out, the reader would ignore that position and
move on to the next character. They also usually had a code that would stop the
reading process.

This allowed you to do a few things. First, you could punch a tape and then
make many copies of the same document. If you made a mistake, you could
overpunch the tape to remove any unpunched holes and “delete” characters. It
was also common to use several fully punched-out characters as a leader or a
trailer, which allowed you to line up two tapes and paste them together.

So, to insert something, you could identify about a dozen characters around the
insert and over-punch them. Then, you’d prepare another tape that had the new
text, including the characters you punched over. You’d start that tape with a
leader and end it with a trailer of fully punched positions. Then, you can cut
the old tape and splice the new tape’s leader and trailer over the parts you
punched out in the first step. A lot of work? Yes, but it’s way better than
retyping everything by hand.

Once you create your master tape, you could turn out many originals. You could
even do a sort of mail merge. Suppose I have a form letter reminding you to pay
your bill. The master tape would have a pause in key places. So, the operator
would do something like type the date, name, and address. Then, they would
press start. The tape would type “Dear ” and then read a stop code. The
operator could type the name and press start again. Now, the tape would run up
until a later point, and another stop code would let the operator enter the
account number and press start again. The next stop might be for the balance
due, and a final stop for the due date. Pretty revolutionary for the 1940s.

Really high-tech installations used two tapes, one loop with the form letter
and another unlooped tape with the input data. The operator did almost nothing,
and all the letters were printed automatically.

[image 6][6]An ASR-33 (CC-BY-SA-3.0[7] by [ArnoldReinhold])Of course, not all
teleprinters were used like this. Many teletypes had letters in their name to
indicate their configuration. An RO, for example, had no keyboard or paper
tape. KSR teletypes (e.g., KSR 28) had keyboards and no tape equipment. An ASR
(like an ASR 33) had both keyboards and a paper tape reader and writer). These
ASR 33s were especially popular as I/O devices for early microcomputers.
Teleprinters were also used on many early computers. Both the Harvard Mark I
and the MIT Whirlwind I used Frieden Flexowriters, a teleprinter made by
Frieden, a company eventually acquired by the Singer sewing machine company.

Flexowriters were known to be used to generate form letters for both the White
House and the United States Congress. Combined with an autopen, the system
could create letters that people would perceive as hand-typed and signed, even
though they were really automatically generated. You can see a Flexowriter in
action in the video below.

Handwriting Computer

Another trick was to take a tape with a header and a trailer and paste them
together to form a loop. Then the printer would just print the same thing over
and over. I saw a particularly odd use of this back in the 1970s.

I was in a mall. There was a booth there purporting to have a handwriting
analysis computer. I wasn’t willing to spend $2 on an obvious scam, but I
hovered around, trying to understand how it worked. It was oddly familiar, but
I couldn’t place it. The machine was very large and had many blinking lights
and spinning disks. It looked like a prop from a very cheap 1950s science
fiction movie.

People would pay their money and write something on a piece of blank paper. The
clerk would take that paper and place it in a slot. With the press of a button,
the machine would suck the paper in and spit it out with some fortune cookie
message towards the bottom of the page. It might say, “You are stronger than
people realize.”

[image 9][9]The bulk of a Flexowriter like this one was hidden under the
“computer” (CC-BY-SA-3.0[10] by [Godfrey Manning])After a half hour, I
remembered where I recognized the machine from. The big box was, of course, a
fraud. But it was hiding something and the only part of that something visible
was a row of brown buttons. Those brown buttons belonged to a Frieden
Flexowriter. You can see the brown buttons near the top of the unit in the
picture.

Once I realized that was the “brain” of the device, it was obvious how it
worked. Hidden inside was the paper tape reader. It had a loop of tape
containing some line feeds, a fortune, more line feeds, and a stop code. The
whole loop might have had a dozen or so fortune cookies, each with a stop code
at the end of each.

On 14 Nov 2024 03:42:44 GMT, Retrograde wrote:

> By 1874, the Frenchman Èmile Baudot created a 5-bit code to represent
> characters over a teleprinter line. Like some earlier systems, the code
> used two shift characters to select uppercase letters (LTRS) and figures
> (FIGS).
> This lets the 32 possible codes represent 26 letters, 10 digits, and a
> few punctuation marks. However, if the receiver missed a shift
> character, the message would garble badly. This was especially a problem
> over radio links.

You could hear such signals quite frequently on short-wave radio -- a
rapid series of tones alternating between two pitches -- much faster than
Morse code.

On Thu, 14 Nov 2024 06:56:20 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

> You could hear such signals quite frequently on short-wave radio -- a
> rapid series of tones alternating between two pitches -- much faster
> than Morse code.

Brings back childhood memories of listening to my dad communicating
with his (deaf) parents via TDD, and hearing the little Baudot trills
coming over the acoustic coupler...

On 2024-11-14, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

> On 14 Nov 2024 03:42:44 GMT, Retrograde wrote:
>
>> By 1874, the Frenchman Èmile Baudot created a 5-bit code to represent
>> characters over a teleprinter line. Like some earlier systems, the code
>> used two shift characters to select uppercase letters (LTRS) and figures
>> (FIGS).
>> This lets the 32 possible codes represent 26 letters, 10 digits, and a
>> few punctuation marks. However, if the receiver missed a shift
>> character, the message would garble badly. This was especially a problem
>> over radio links.

Some Teletype machines had an "unshift on space" option to try to
minimize the amount of garbled data. There were several FIGS character
sets, tailored to various needs; for instance, machines that passed
aviation weather reports had special symbols for wind direction and
cloud cover that weren't need in other environments.

> You could hear such signals quite frequently on short-wave radio -- a
> rapid series of tones alternating between two pitches -- much faster than
> Morse code.

Original Teletype machines ran at 45.45 baud. The later standard
was ASCII at 110 baud (150 baud for a model 37 Teletype).

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

On Thu, 14 Nov 2024 18:45:48 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> Original Teletype machines ran at 45.45 baud.

I remember labels on Creed machines saying “50Bd”.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

> On Thu, 14 Nov 2024 18:45:48 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
> > Original Teletype machines ran at 45.45 baud.
>
> I remember labels on Creed machines saying "50Bd".

I had a Creed 7B 60 years ago, I used it for RTTY. It had two
governers, one for 45.45 Bd, the other for 50Bd. They had white
strobe marks on the circumference to set the speed accurately.

--
>^Ï^. Sn!pe, PTB, FIBS My pet rock Gordon just is.

On Thu, 14 Nov 2024 22:19:48 +0000, Sn!pe wrote:

> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 14 Nov 2024 18:45:48 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>> > Original Teletype machines ran at 45.45 baud.
>>
>> I remember labels on Creed machines saying "50Bd".
>
> I had a Creed 7B 60 years ago, I used it for RTTY. It had two
> governers, one for 45.45 Bd, the other for 50Bd. They had white strobe
> marks on the circumference to set the speed accurately.

Hmmm ... presumably the strobe marks were for use with a fluorescent
light ... driven from AC mains frequency? Did they have different marks
for 50Hz versus 60Hz mains?

No, that wouldn’t work, you would need entirely different gearing for the
strobe wheel ...

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

> On Thu, 14 Nov 2024 22:19:48 +0000, Sn!pe wrote:
>
> > Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> >
> >> On Thu, 14 Nov 2024 18:45:48 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> >>
> >> > Original Teletype machines ran at 45.45 baud.
> >>
> >> I remember labels on Creed machines saying "50Bd".
> >
> > I had a Creed 7B 60 years ago, I used it for RTTY. It had two
> > governers, one for 45.45 Bd, the other for 50Bd. They had white
> > strobe marks on the circumference to set the speed accurately.
>
> Hmmm ... presumably the strobe marks were for use with a fluorescent
> light ... driven from AC mains frequency? Did they have different marks
> for 50Hz versus 60Hz mains?
>
> No, that wouldn't work, you would need entirely different gearing for the
> strobe wheel ...

IIRC 50Bd was the US standard, most common in the rest of the world
was 45.45Bd There was no gearing involved, the governor was attached
directly to the motor spindle and the strobe timing marks were on the
governors themselves. I think (I'm not sure) that there were a
different number of strobe marks on either governor.

I speak from personal experience but it was 60 years ago when I was
a teenager and memory is a tricky thing.

--
>^Ï^. Sn!pe, PTB, FIBS My pet rock Gordon just is.

On 2024-11-14, Sn!pe <snipeco.2@gmail.com> wrote:

> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 14 Nov 2024 22:19:48 +0000, Sn!pe wrote:
>>
>>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Thu, 14 Nov 2024 18:45:48 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>>
>>>> > Original Teletype machines ran at 45.45 baud.
>>>>
>>>> I remember labels on Creed machines saying "50Bd".
>>>
>>> I had a Creed 7B 60 years ago, I used it for RTTY. It had two
>>> governers, one for 45.45 Bd, the other for 50Bd. They had white
>>> strobe marks on the circumference to set the speed accurately.
>>
>> Hmmm ... presumably the strobe marks were for use with a fluorescent
>> light ... driven from AC mains frequency? Did they have different marks
>> for 50Hz versus 60Hz mains?
>>
>> No, that wouldn't work, you would need entirely different gearing for the
>> strobe wheel ...
>
> IIRC 50Bd was the US standard, most common in the rest of the world
> was 45.45Bd There was no gearing involved, the governor was attached
> directly to the motor spindle and the strobe timing marks were on the
> governors themselves. I think (I'm not sure) that there were a
> different number of strobe marks on either governor.
>
> I speak from personal experience but it was 60 years ago when I was
> a teenager and memory is a tricky thing.

To further muddy the waters, 45.45 baud was just an average.
Start and data pulses were 22 milliseconds long, while the
stop pulse was 31 milliseconds. (I guess the mechanism wasn't
quite fast enough to process the received bits...)

Damn, the things one remembers...

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

On 14/11/2024 22:29, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Nov 2024 22:19:48 +0000, Sn!pe wrote:
>
>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, 14 Nov 2024 18:45:48 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>
>>>> Original Teletype machines ran at 45.45 baud.
>>>
>>> I remember labels on Creed machines saying "50Bd".
>>
>> I had a Creed 7B 60 years ago, I used it for RTTY. It had two
>> governers, one for 45.45 Bd, the other for 50Bd. They had white strobe
>> marks on the circumference to set the speed accurately.
>
> Hmmm ... presumably the strobe marks were for use with a fluorescent
> light ... driven from AC mains frequency? Did they have different marks
> for 50Hz versus 60Hz mains?
>
> No, that wouldn’t work, you would need entirely different gearing for the
> strobe wheel ...

You used a tuning fork with a thin "slit" attached to each leg. The
slits were arranged so they opened and closed as the fork vibrated
creating a tuned shutter.

You viewed the bands on the governor through the slit and so could
adjust the speed and when they were stationary the spped was correct.
You had different forks for 45.5 and 50 baud. Some machines could do
75baud as well.

I found this site with some pictures and more info. There will be others...

https://www.cryptomuseum.com/telex/tools/fork/index.htm

Dave
G4UGM

On Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:34:06 +0000, David Wade wrote:

> You used a tuning fork with a thin "slit" attached to each leg. The
> slits were arranged so they opened and closed as the fork vibrated
> creating a tuned shutter.

Ah, of course. The “Bulova Accutron” method of accurate timing
calibration, before the technique was obsoleted by cheap quartz crystal
oscillators. ;)

On 15/11/2024 01:48, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:34:06 +0000, David Wade wrote:
>
>> You used a tuning fork with a thin "slit" attached to each leg. The
>> slits were arranged so they opened and closed as the fork vibrated
>> creating a tuned shutter.
>
> Ah, of course. The “Bulova Accutron” method of accurate timing
> calibration, before the technique was obsoleted by cheap quartz crystal
> oscillators. ;)

Yes, I own a couple of Accutrons. Always interesting. These days I use a
digital tacho thing that refelects off a reflective stick on strip to
time my TTYs

Dave

On 2024-11-15 00:11, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2024-11-14, Sn!pe <snipeco.2@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, 14 Nov 2024 22:19:48 +0000, Sn!pe wrote:
>>>
>>>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, 14 Nov 2024 18:45:48 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Original Teletype machines ran at 45.45 baud.
>>>>>
>>>>> I remember labels on Creed machines saying "50Bd".
>>>>
>>>> I had a Creed 7B 60 years ago, I used it for RTTY. It had two
>>>> governers, one for 45.45 Bd, the other for 50Bd. They had white
>>>> strobe marks on the circumference to set the speed accurately.
>>>
>>> Hmmm ... presumably the strobe marks were for use with a fluorescent
>>> light ... driven from AC mains frequency? Did they have different marks
>>> for 50Hz versus 60Hz mains?
>>>
>>> No, that wouldn't work, you would need entirely different gearing for the
>>> strobe wheel ...
>>
>> IIRC 50Bd was the US standard, most common in the rest of the world
>> was 45.45Bd There was no gearing involved, the governor was attached
>> directly to the motor spindle and the strobe timing marks were on the
>> governors themselves. I think (I'm not sure) that there were a
>> different number of strobe marks on either governor.
>>
>> I speak from personal experience but it was 60 years ago when I was
>> a teenager and memory is a tricky thing.
>
> To further muddy the waters, 45.45 baud was just an average.
> Start and data pulses were 22 milliseconds long, while the
> stop pulse was 31 milliseconds. (I guess the mechanism wasn't
> quite fast enough to process the received bits...)
>
> Damn, the things one remembers...

They were in use at my time, somewhere, but I never saw one. Faxes were
what they used.

Did teletypes use phone lines, with an audio coupler? Or dedicated lines?

--
Cheers, Carlos.

"Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> writes:
>On 2024-11-15 00:11, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
ts...)
>>
>> Damn, the things one remembers...
>
>They were in use at my time, somewhere, but I never saw one. Faxes were
>what they used.
>
>Did teletypes use phone lines, with an audio coupler? Or dedicated lines?

Yes.

(both)

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote at 21:54 this Thursday (GMT):
> On Thu, 14 Nov 2024 18:45:48 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> Original Teletype machines ran at 45.45 baud.
>
> I remember labels on Creed machines saying “50Bd”.

Maybe they just rounded up to look better?
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom

On 2024-11-15, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:

> "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> writes:
>
>> On 2024-11-15 00:11, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> Damn, the things one remembers...
>>
>> They were in use at my time, somewhere, but I never saw one. Faxes were
>> what they used.
>>
>> Did teletypes use phone lines, with an audio coupler? Or dedicated lines?
>
> Yes.
>
> (both)

Well put. :-)

Common dial-up services were Telex (Baudot, typically with Teletype
model 32s, although a PPOE used a Siemens machine), and TWX
(Teletypewriter Exchange), which ran ASCII, typically on Teletype
model 33s.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:
>On 2024-11-14, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>
>> You could hear such signals quite frequently on short-wave radio -- a
>> rapid series of tones alternating between two pitches -- much faster than
>> Morse code.
>
>Original Teletype machines ran at 45.45 baud. The later standard
>was ASCII at 110 baud (150 baud for a model 37 Teletype).

RTTY can still be heard on the amateur radio bands at various baud
rates and shifts based upon the current band conditions. It is quite
possible to copy 110 baud RTTY by ear and an old friend of mine could
do so. It's dying out though because the modern digital modes have
much better performance under marginal conditions.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

On 18 Nov 2024 09:01:47 -0000, Scott Dorsey wrote:

> It's dying out though because the modern digital modes have much better
> performance under marginal conditions.

The more efficiently information is encoded, the more it resembles random
noise.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

> On 18 Nov 2024 09:01:47 -0000, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>
>> It's dying out though because the modern digital modes have much better
>> performance under marginal conditions.
>
> The more efficiently information is encoded, the more it resembles random
> noise.

Which theorem is that?

On 2024-11-15 21:23, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2024-11-15, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:
>
>> "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> writes:
>>
>>> On 2024-11-15 00:11, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>
>>>> Damn, the things one remembers...
>>>
>>> They were in use at my time, somewhere, but I never saw one. Faxes were
>>> what they used.
>>>
>>> Did teletypes use phone lines, with an audio coupler? Or dedicated lines?
>>
>> Yes.
>>
>> (both)
>
> Well put. :-)
>
> Common dial-up services were Telex (Baudot, typically with Teletype
> model 32s, although a PPOE used a Siemens machine), and TWX
> (Teletypewriter Exchange), which ran ASCII, typically on Teletype
> model 33s.
>

I suppose an operator had to type directly at the machine. Or, was there
a method to type at some kind of offline machine, then take over
something, like perforated tape?

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 18/11/2024 14:11, Carlos E.R. wrote:
> On 2024-11-15 21:23, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>> On 2024-11-15, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:
>>
>>> "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> writes:
>>>
>>>> On 2024-11-15 00:11, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Damn, the things one remembers...
>>>>
>>>> They were in use at my time, somewhere, but I never saw one. Faxes were
>>>> what they used.
>>>>
>>>> Did teletypes use phone lines, with an audio coupler? Or dedicated
>>>> lines?
>>>
>>> Yes.
>>>
>>>   (both)
>>
>> Well put.  :-)
>>
>> Common dial-up services were Telex (Baudot, typically with Teletype
>> model 32s, although a PPOE used a Siemens machine), and TWX
>> (Teletypewriter Exchange), which ran ASCII, typically on Teletype
>> model 33s.
>>
>
> I suppose an operator had to type directly at the machine. Or, was there
> a method to type at some kind of offline machine, then take over
> something, like perforated tape?
>
>
Well if your machine had a punch you could prepare a tape off-line , and
then send full speed when you had it ready and checked. In the UK Creed
did produce "perforators", so a keyboard with a punch so I am sure
Teletype did in the USA

https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/creed_keyboard_perforator_type_44.html

Dave

According to Carlos E.R. <robin_listas@es.invalid>:
>> Common dial-up services were Telex (Baudot, typically with Teletype
>> model 32s, although a PPOE used a Siemens machine), and TWX
>> (Teletypewriter Exchange), which ran ASCII, typically on Teletype
>> model 33s.
>
>I suppose an operator had to type directly at the machine. Or, was there
>a method to type at some kind of offline machine, then take over
>something, like perforated tape?

Telex calls were charged by the minute and most Telex machines had paper tape
readers and punches, so what one usually did was to type up the message on tape
first, then make the call and run the tape through at full speed.

Some applications were store and forward with switching centers where young
women on roller skates whisked torn tapes from one station to another.

The model 32 and 33 were intended for light service. The much larger and
sturdier models 28 and 35 were used for heavy service.

The Teletype company wasn't very good at making cheap fragile stuff so the model
33 turned out be very reliable, leading to its use as the console of a decade of
minicomputers. I spent a lot of time waiting for paper tapes to chug through the
reader of a model 33 attached to a PDP-8.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

> Telex calls were charged by the minute and most Telex machines had paper
> tape readers and punches, so what one usually did was to type up the
> message on tape first, then make the call and run the tape through at
> full speed.

Later, say late 70s / early 80s, devices like HP 264x terminals with
cassette data storage drives were used to pre-type and store messages,
then send from tape. I saw this exact setup used in a government office
in Saudi Arabia.

De

On 2024-11-18 15:49, David Wade wrote:
> On 18/11/2024 14:11, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>> On 2024-11-15 21:23, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>> On 2024-11-15, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:
>>>
>>>> "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> writes:
>>>>
>>>>> On 2024-11-15 00:11, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Damn, the things one remembers...
>>>>>
>>>>> They were in use at my time, somewhere, but I never saw one. Faxes
>>>>> were what they used.
>>>>>
>>>>> Did teletypes use phone lines, with an audio coupler? Or dedicated
>>>>> lines?
>>>>
>>>> Yes.
>>>>
>>>>   (both)
>>>
>>> Well put.  :-)
>>>
>>> Common dial-up services were Telex (Baudot, typically with Teletype
>>> model 32s, although a PPOE used a Siemens machine), and TWX
>>> (Teletypewriter Exchange), which ran ASCII, typically on Teletype
>>> model 33s.
>>>
>>
>> I suppose an operator had to type directly at the machine. Or, was
>> there a method to type at some kind of offline machine, then take over
>> something, like perforated tape?
>>
>>
> Well if your machine had a punch you could prepare a tape off-line , and
> then send full speed when you had it ready and checked. In the UK Creed
> did produce "perforators", so a keyboard with a punch so I am sure
> Teletype did in the USA
>
> https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/creed_keyboard_perforator_type_44.html

Interesting. Also schematics. Mechanical.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 2024-11-18 18:31, Dennis Boone wrote:
> > Telex calls were charged by the minute and most Telex machines had paper
> > tape readers and punches, so what one usually did was to type up the
> > message on tape first, then make the call and run the tape through at
> > full speed.
>
> Later, say late 70s / early 80s, devices like HP 264x terminals with
> cassette data storage drives were used to pre-type and store messages,
> then send from tape. I saw this exact setup used in a government office
> in Saudi Arabia.

I knew telex was used, but I never worked at, or visited, a place using
them.

What I did use was telegrams. I seem to have a vague memory that you
could also send a telex from a post office, but I may be imagining it.

We could send faxes from a post office. We still can, I think. It is
called "burofax", and it has legal standing. I mean, you send one and it
is considered a certified method of communication. For example, to leave
your job, one legal method was to send a burofax.

--
Cheers, Carlos.