[GreenKeys] MERRY CHRISTMAS - HAPPY NEW YEAR - SEASON'S GREETINGS

[George B. Hutchison]

GreenKeyers - - -

The ITTY STAFF would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, Happy 
New Year, and all of that other stuff.

We have been working diligently to get another service from ITTY up 
and running, a service which we call ITTY Autostart.

I was a bit premature earlier this month with my first note about it, 
but now I feel that the system is up and stable, and working well.

The internet problems associated with the regional blockages of 
Internet Port 25, the e-mail port, have been successfully worked 
around as far as ITTY and ITTY Autostart performance is concerned.

ITTY Autostart emulates the old days when the 3.612.5 and 14.075 
Megacycle autostart nets were in their heyday.

For instance, it used to be that when IRV, W6FFC, came on the air 
from Los Altos, Calif, machines all over the United States set up for 
autostart would start up and print that which came from the Los Altos 
Hills.

Currently, aside from Contest events, there does not seem to be much 
air copy, even on the amateur bands. That coupled with the extremely 
poor HF propagation which has persisted in recent years makes for 
some dull times, teletype-wise.

ITTY has been in service for a little over five years. Its purpose 
was to give those of you who like to hear the clatter of the machines 
and the smell of the oil to once again serve as a background ambience 
to the hamshacks of those who, for whatever reason, seem to be 
enamored with the machines of days gone by. It makes for an 
interesting experience for young and old alike, seeing a pile of 
oddly shaped pieces of metal with a motor attached dance, wiggle, 
jiggle, and type words right before their eyes.

Keeping current, up-to-date, and interesting copy for ITTY is a labor 
of love for a few people. I would like to publicly thank Wayne 
LeTourneau, WB0CTE, Tom Tillson, mechanical enthusiast, and Don 
House, K9TTY, for their tireless efforts at seeking and preparing 
itens and stories such that ITTY closely resembles the services once 
provided by AP, UPI, and other "over the air" and on land-line news 
networks.

A REAL BIG and SINCERE THANK YOU goes to my friend, Bill Bytheway, 
K7TTY, for his amazing skills and efforts he has expended at creating 
custom software tailored for the service that the ITTY and now the 
ITTY Autostart concepts have evolved into.

WWW.RTTY.COM has a link on it to where you can click and read a bit 
more about ITTY and the ITTY New Autostart.

Both ITTY and ITTY Autostart accept incoming messages using the 
standard e-mail format.

Some TTY enthusiasts grumble at the fact the ITTY format is somewhat 
strict in that the lines must be no more than 69 characters long 
(Helps TTY enthusiassts who live in foreign countries wiith shorter 
TTY line length standards) and should be submitted in a plain-text 
format as opposed to HTML or Microsift's .doc or .rtf formats.

To aid everyone who either may want to contribute an occasional news 
story to ITTY, or almost painlessly get involved with ITTY Autostart, 
Bill has come up with a new piece of software called the RTTYMailer.

RTTYMailer is tailored for ITTY and Autostart, and has many features.

You can select one of the ITTY services to which you wish to send 
information.

You can enter which port you want to use. ITTY uses port 25 and port 
593. ITTY Auto start uses ports 594 and 595.

There is now a built in EDITOR which allows you to easily type in a 
message to ITTY or ITTY Autostart.

It uses all capital letters, and word-wraps at 69 characters so there 
is no worry about line length.

It has a SEND NOW button which immediately sends whatever is in the 
message you have prepared to the address you have specified. You can 
archive your messages, and recall them if they need to be re-sent.

You can pull files out of you computer and open them for modification 
before sending.

It's pretty well self-explanatory.

It's FREE and can be downloaded from a link on the new AUTOSTART page 
available from the mainpage at WWW.RTTY.COM.

All are encouraged to look over the ITTY page, and try things out.

Again, from all of us at ITTY, Merry Christmas

George - W7TTY - ITTY Central