[GreenKeys] Early early computer-created teletype art

[Jim Haynes]

I've been meaning to reply to or comment on this message and just now
getting around to it.

On Fri, 9 Aug 2019, Ralph   Irish wrote:
> I never knew John, but I did see him at the Dayton Hamvention, in the RTTY

I never knew John either, but did receive a bunch of Teletype manuals and
things from his estate thanks to Jack Hart (which I scanned and are now
on the navy-radio.com web site).  Also Jack sent me a 21-A printer, which
is the same as the first TTY printer I ever owned and never got to work.
I guess I could now if I wanted to put the energy into it.  And I later
acquired John's TTL/2 TU which someone had on ebay.

> I was a subscriber to the RTTY Journal when it was owned by Frank (Dusty)
> Dunn, W8CQ, and followed it for
> several more years after Dusty sold it to Don Crumpton, who had a "6" call
> out in California.

I was a subscriber to the original RTTY put out as a labor of love by
Merrill Swan W6AEE and his wife Margaret under the auspices of the
Southern California Radio Teletype Society (which may not be the correct
name) and stayed with it through part of the Dusty Dunn ownership.

I had long been fascinated by Teletype machines as a youth.  It was not
until I read Wayne Green's column in CQ magazine, June 1953, that I was
aware a Teletype machine was something an individual could own and that
hams could use them on the air.  I was not yet a ham, but I was excited
about the prospects of at least becoming a RTTY SWL.  Wayne's article
mentioned two leading publications, the ARTS bulletin put out by the New
York group and RTTY put out by the Southern California group.  ARTS
claimed to be the "nation" RTTY society, but in fact its bulletins
came out irregularly while RTTY became the de-facto national RTTY
publication with its regular monthly publication.  I found a 21-A printer
for sale by Paul Lemon W6DOU of Hayward, CA and bought it.  This was a
tape-strip printer with multiple magnet input intended for time-division
multiplex service that Western Union had phased out.  Hence one needed
some kind of receiving distributor to make it work with single channel
TTY signals.  RTTY had published an article on an electronic distributor
designed by Cecil Crafts W6ZBV.  I contacted Merrill asking for a copy
of that article, and subscribing to the magazine.  Thus began a long
friendship by mail.  I built the distributor but never got it to work;
still I had a lot of fun playing with the machine and exercising it by
hand.  A friend who ran the local Western Union office supplied me with
all the tape and ribbon I needed.  The FCC had permitted FSK only the
year before, so amateur RTTY was in its infancy.  RTTY DX was practically
unheard of.

Then I got to college at University of Arkansas which had an active ham 
club.  I worked hard to get my code speed up to 13 WPM so I could get a 
conditional class license in preparation for being able to operate RTTY. 
I wasn't interested in starting as a novice.  The only problem was lack of 
a TTY machine.  That was solved a couple of years later when Teletype 
opened a plant in Little Rock and some officials visited the University in 
Fayetteville to look at the engineering school.  They left us a copy of
the product catalog and invited us to pick out some things we could use
that they would supply.  So one summer we received a Model 28 KSR and a
Model 14 typing reperf and a table with a tape perforator and XD.

Probably because of that and my involvement I was offered summer jobs
with Teletype in Chicago for two summers.  While there I got to meet
Ray Morrison W9GRW and saw his fabulous garage and basement.  On one
visit to him he gave me enough pieces to put together a M15 KSR set.
I was living in a YMCA that had a radio club that summer, so I spent
a lot of time in the club work room cleaning and reassembling the
Model 15 and getting it to work.

I went through the Air Force ROTC program and after graduation found 
myself at Edwards AFB in the Mojave Desert of California.  This was about
a 2-hour drive at the time from Merrill Swan's home in Arcadia, so as
soon as possible I went to meet him.  After that there were many Sunday
afternoons when we got together in his ham shack and talked about RTTY
theory and practice.

A few years later I was working for Teletype Corp. outside Chicago. For 
some reason I was not a participant in the local RTTY group CATS except 
that there was an annual meeting held at McCormick Place in connection 
with the National Electronics Conference.  This was attended by hams from 
all over - Merrill Swan showed up, and W4MGT Henry from Kentucky, and Irv 
Hoff then-K8DKC from Michigan among others.  Henry was a Real Colonel
from Kentucky, being head of the state police there.  He was one of
the first to buy a brand new Model 32 machine.  But Jaffe K9BRL was
there - he had a company Electrocom making one of the first if not the
first store-bought RTTY demodulator intended for amateur use.
> 
> Henry had come up with an interesting modification to some TUs.  His plan
> was to use two  IDENTICAL  channel...

An idea that was later adopted for several late-generation RTTY 
demodulators - the Electrocom 400 family, the HAL ST-8000, the Dovetron,
presumably to sell to the government where it was necessary to tune
to a variety of mark and space frequencies and shift.

More to follow...