[GreenKeys] more info about Telegrapy by Freebody

[Jack Rubin]

Just thought I'd share a little more info about why I'm specifically looking
for a copy of "Telegraphy" by JW Freebody as opposed to some other historic
treatise on telegraphy - I learned about this book while listening to an
interview with Vic Poor, who, among other things, was head of R&D at
Datapoint where ARC (later ARCNet) was developed in the mid-70s. In the
interview, Poor mentions that the arcnet local area network protocol was
based on a networking protocol developed by AT&T to link multiple teletypes,
and that Freebody describes this protocol in his book, "Telegraphy". I'm
restoring several Datapoint terminals and researching the history of the
company, thus my interest in obtaining a copy of this book.

Vic has deep connections to our community - before arriving at Datapoint (it
was actually Computer Terminal Corporation - CTC - when he was hired), he
was one of the founders of Frederic Electronics and much of the technology
developed for "intelligent" switches and TUs at Frederic found its way into
Datapoint terminals. The Datapoint 2200, developed as a programmable
terminal emulator, was actually a standalone computer with mass storage,
programmable memory and a full instruction set. Vic took that instruction
set to a start-up semiconductor manufacturer with the desire of reducing the
chip count in the 2200, where the computing logic was implemented in
standard ttl. The semiconductor manufacturer was Intel and the result of the
Datapoint contract was the 8008, Intel's first 8-bit processor. In the end,
Datapoint never used the chip and Intel went on to develop the line into the
8080, etc., but that's another story...

There are other connections as well - Vic is a ham and was a big RTTY fan in
the '50s. He hired Jonathan Schmidt, first at Frederic and then at
CTC/Datapoint. Jonathan had been Irv Hoff's roomate at the University of
Michigan and was instrumental in Irv's TU designs. He later became the
"system architect" for the Datapoint 2200. Irv was close to both companies -
his review of the Frederic 1200 has been posted to Greenkeys and he actually
used a Datapoint 2200 for RTTY work. 

Hope this is of interest.

best,
Jack