[GreenKeys] GreenKeys Digest, Vol 109, Issue 58

[John Nagle]

On 2/17/2013 8:11 PM, greenkeys-request at mailman.qth.net wrote:
> Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2013 23:11:54 -0500 (EST)
> From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com
> To: COURYHOUSE at aol.com, greenkeys at mailman.qth.net
> Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] Teletypes in police stations... anyone done a
> 	definitive stud...

> I  found the below  bell labs  ad  floating out there  a while back but...  
> not  on the  police...
>>From what Ralph  tells  us -- things  got  sent on a loop to  all ttys   
> but  only  some  printed... whereas this  system here   seems to be a fully 
> switched  system?
>  
> I  guess  I am  curious   how the    police station  would  talk   out to 
> other  things   would the system  than also work something like   this   one  
> below where they could select  a target to type  to?!

    Small departments (a few police stations) often had a simple loop
through all the stations, so anybody could send to everybody.

    State systems like Michigan's were often polled multidrop
systems, where outgoing messages were prepared on tape, put in
a TD, and picked up the next time the poller sent the appropriate
poll sequence to the stunt box.  That's what those big 28ASRs
with all the extra features were for.  A Plan 55-A office
(a building full of reperfs and switchgear) could manage a network
like that, but by the 1960s, Michigan was using a program on a
small Burroughs mainframe to run the net.

				John Nagle