[GreenKeys] Re: Five Level Baudot / ITA2 keyboard layouts

[Don Robert House]

Brooke,

Somehow I think I am failing to understand your question.  The  
teletypewriter keyboard in the USA and Great Britain are both QWERTY  
keyboards.  The French and German keyboards are different.  The only  
difference in operating a 3 row keyboard is the use of Carriage  
Return Line Feed Letters for alphabet and Figures for upper case  
characters.

Near the end of 5 level Baudot (actually ITA2) Teletype, Lorenz and  
Siemens built 5 level ITA2 Keyboards with four rows.  The upper row  
of numbers did not operate unless the FIGS key was depressed first.   
In the Bell System we had women that went to each new Teletype  
installation and trained the operators.  Larger companies had their  
own Chief Operators that trained the operators.

Some difficulties always came up due to the different needs of  
different businesses. There were basically 3 different standard sets  
of upper case characters.  Fractions was used for Teletypewriter  
Exchange Service (TWX)  Communications (expanded punctuation) was  
used for most businesses with a couple of differences in the position  
and related code for the exclamation mark, the question mark, the  
pound sign, the apostrophe, and the quotation mark.  The third  
standard was for weather machines.

Training and practice was what people needed to master the three row  
system.  With the advent of ASCII the keyboards became more like  
typewriters but still with the need for Carriage Return, Line Feed,  
and Rubout.  Some machines were modified to use a key labeled NEW  
LINE to accomplish Line Feed automatically with the generation of  
Carriage Return.

I hope this helps.

Don
K9TTY

On 2 Sep 2007, at 2:45 PM, Brooke Clarke wrote:

Hi Don:

Do you know of any instructions to Baudot keyboard operators?
Was there some easy way to remember which keys to press for which  
character or was it just memorization of 32 patterns?

Have Fun,

Brooke Clarke
http://www.PRC68.com
http://www.precisionclock.com



Don Robert House wrote:
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