[GreenKeys] Misnomer of Teletype pictures!

[jsheetz]

It always makes me cringe to see "ASCII art" or anything along
that line. I don't know who started using that term but it sure
gets misused. ASCII is the American Standard Code for Information
Interchange. It is an 8-level or 8 bit code used by computers.
The "pictures" that most of us refer to were really works of
art done on Teletype machines using punched paper tape and the
5-level Baudot code. These machines of course had only UPPER CASE
fonts. If you go to an ASCII capable printer or "Teletype" machine
you can use both upper and lower case characters as well as many
other special characters. These are all 8-level ASCII machines.
   Teletype machines were used to create all of the early
"Teletype Pictures" which were normally relayed around the 
country or world for that matter at the Holiday Season.
At that time nearly all of the pictures pertained to that
time of the year.
   Amateur radio operators who were using discarded 5-level
Teletype machines to communicate via radio discovered the
existence of some of the old paper tapes that had been used
by the landline services. At first many of these tapes were
transmitted over the air and soon the hams started making up
their own pictures. They became known as RTTY pictures because
RTTY was the common term for amateur Radio Teletype. Technically
these were still "Teletype pictures" but with the adoption of
radio for transmission they simply became known as "RTTY PIX"
or RTTY pictures. The idea of "ASCII art" came entirely with
the advent of computers. Obviously that name caught on with
the "computer generation" and so we have it today. If you
are dealing with a picture that was completely generated by
the use of a computer then the term ASCII art could apply.
Nearly all of the pictures which have been transmitted and
relayed around the world by amateur radioteletype were really
created on Baudot machines with a 3-row keyboard. All of the
number symbols, 1, 2, 3... and most of the punctuation were
actually created by sending a "shift" code and then the
corresponding letter code for the appropriate symbol. It was
always necessary to send an "unshift" or "letters" code to
get back to alphabetical characters. You should never see
a lower case character in a true RTTY picture! You should
not even see an asterisk (*) because that did not exist in
the Baudot code.
   Well, that's about it for the moment. I'll just keep
cringing as I see more "ASCII art".
   John, K2AGI, an Old Timer.