[GreenKeys] 28ASR

[Jim Haynes]

On Tue, 12 May 2020, Nick England wrote:
> Sometimes I think the Teletype publications group was run like a
> super-secret govt project - each group wrote about its own little piece, but
> no one knew how it all got connected together.......except for the document
> package shipped with each machine which was always discarded within two
> weeks.

There's some truth in that.  In large old companies a lot of business
practices stem from tradition.  It's a comparatively recent notion to
hire a management consultant who has worked with several different
companies and can tell you how one does in a different way what yours
has been doing.

Consider that from Model 14 onward Teletype was largely a mechanical
company.  Each design group in R&D wrote a specification for its work,
whether it be a keyboard or a typing unit or a tape reader or whatever.
Those specifications mostly covered all the things that mechanical
designers were concerned about, which were adjustments and lubrication
and in some cases disassembly and reassembly.

The specifications then went to the customer manual writing department
which turned them into the manuals seen by the customers.  And these
largely covered individual items which might need adjusting and 
lubricating and understanding how they were supposed to work.

Teletype being owned by AT&T, these manuals then went to Bell Labs where
they got reworked into Bell System Practices for use by the installation
and repair forces of the Bell operating companies who served the Bell
customers.  Others, like railroads and wire services and Western Union
and the government got the Teletype manuals and were free to use them
as-is or to publish their own versions.  Teletype also had the maintenance
school for customers, but of course large organizations like the military
mainly had to operate their own maintenance courses as Teletype was not
set up to train hordes of people.

Fairly late in the game, mid 1960s, the Bell System decided to have the
Teletype customer manual department write the Bell System Practices
to avoid having Bell Labs duplicate a large part of the effort.  There
were other BSPs still written at Bell Labs covering topics that
Teletype didn't have manuals for, such as the complete equipment at a
customer site.

Now for non-mechanical products the process was somewhat different.
I worked on among other things electronic time-division multiplex for
which the Navy was the first customer.  For those products the manuals
were written within R&D and were written to the Navy specification for
manuals.  This kind of product didn't involve any lubrication and
didn't have the usual kind of mechanical adjustments.  Some of these
manuals were issued as Teletype Bulletins like the other customer manuals,
but were also assigned military manual numbers for the same document.
And this is not unique to Teletype - a lot of military radio products
for instance were initially provided with manufacturer-written manuals
and only later got government-written manuals.

Then there is the role of Sales Engineering.  If you wanted something
like a Model 28 KSR set, for example, you couldn't just order it by
that name.  You would talk to a sales engineer who would go over all
the features you wanted and pick a keyboard and typing unit and cabinet
and LESU.  These might be something that had already been done before,
or it might be that a typing unit and keyboard would be coded just for
you based on what you asked for in speed, in character font, in stunt
box features, whether you wanted a line relay, lots and lots of details.
Rather like buying a new car where you tell the dealer what you want
out of a list of options and the factory builds the car for you,
rather than buying a car right off the dealer's lot.

So in the end you have a set that may or may not be like anything that has
been put together before, and you get a set of prints that show how it
is wired.  And ideally you would keep those in the machine so they would
be available when it has to be worked on, but as you say a lot of them
get taken out and lost early on.  These were normally Ozalid prints,
printed just for that specific machine.

Later on came the concept of wiring diagram packages like you find for
Model 33 and such, which are 11x17 in size and printed by offset.
And these, like Western Electric prints, tend to show all kinds of options
so that one print set covers a multitude of different sets if you know
which options are installed and wired.

Another thing that came late in the game were the VCL and VSL machines.
Somehow it was decided that there were usually enough of any specific
machine arrangement being ordered that there could be standard packages
designed.  So a limited number of VSL products were complete sets that
could be ordered without individual tweaks to the design.  VCLs were
similar where the set was a component of some larger system.  So if
what you wanted was covered by a VSL spec you could just order it without
having to have it custom-designed all over again.

There are further complications with Western Union, because W.U. decided
to build its own LESU components rather than using the ones developed by
Teletype.  So if you have one of those you need a Western Union drawing;
Teletype didn't know how they were wired.

Sorry for the great length, but it's just to explain that if you ask for
"a schematic for a 28 ASR set" there is no such one thing.  You might
have a specific set that is covered by a military manual, and it might
be that a schematic you find on the internet is not too different from
the machine you have.

Jim W6JVE