[GreenKeys] more info about Telegrapy by Freebody

[Don Robert House]

Very interesting Jack.

If I have my timing straight Teletype may have bought DataPoint  
terminals and relabeled them Teletype AP 200.  I have a couple of  
these terminals and they look nothing like Teletype machines and a  
lot like DataPoint terminals.

Don


On 2 Dec 2005, at 6:28 PM, Jack Rubin wrote:

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

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