[GreenKeys] Couple Teletype Presentation Pictures

[Paul Birkel]

Is that the reason that we still have military message formats (e.g., USMTF)
in which SCREAMING // CAPS // IS THE STYLE // STILL -- blame it on 5-level
code equipment in-use?

I know that it's been hard to scrub that legacy out of modern message
transmission formats, but was never sure why that was so.  Where/when might
one have expected to see 5-level code equipment in regular usage?

-----Original Message-----
From: GreenKeys [mailto:greenkeys-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of
Jones, Douglas W
Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2016 10:23 PM
To: greenkeys at mailman.qth.net
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] Couple Teletype Presentation Pictures

From: john at johnwhitney.com [john at johnwhitney.com] Saturday, May 14, 2016
2:07 PM

> I asked my son, and he said that was likely a student who's name is Cam.
He said Cam has a little secret society in the school based on his name.
Notice it says CAMMUNISM not COMMUNISM.

The world being what it is these days, I was speaking with a colleague of
mine at the U of Iowa.  He's from Latvia, and it turns out he's a Russian
Army veteran.  He has lots of fond memories of Soviet-era teletype
equipment, all five-level code machines.  He apparently put considerable
time into maintaining them.  He was fascinated to learn that I'm working on
repairing an old Teletype, and when he apologized that the equipment he had
experience with was all ancient 5-level code equipment, I pointed out that
the US armed forces continued using 5-level equipment for decades after the
computer industry had moved to 8-level codes.

                     Doug Jones
                     jones at cs.uiowa.edu

(I thought I'd sent this to the whole list, but it turns out I only sent it
to John Whitney, so John, if you get two copies, sorry.)
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