[GreenKeys] Extel and MITE and ...

[Jim Haynes]

On Tue, 3 Nov 2020, Ralph   Irish wrote:
> MITE was one of several companies making 5-bit teleprinters for general use.
> EXTEL, was another.  EXTEL was supposedly started by EX-TELephone
> company employees. I can't acknowledge this, but I suspect others on here
> could.

It's often believed that the ExTel name came from ex-Teletype, since one
of the company founders was Walt Zenner, retired as VP of R&D of Teletype,
and some other former Teletype employees worked there.  The other founder
was Peter G.S. Mero, who had a colorful history.  He was Hungarian, as I
recall, and worked for ITT before WW-II.  During the war he was the
communications man for the American OSS.  I don't know much about what he
did after the war, but he had a business with a product similar to a
Telautograph and Walt Zenner did some inventing for him while he was
still working for Teletype.  No conflict there because the Bell System
was not interested in a Telautograph-like product.  Mero's product was
called Electrowriter.

Well a few years back my former boss from Teletype and I got together
and we phoned Walt and he gave us a short history of ExTel.

The first product of the Zenner/Mero company was a stock ticker called
Quotemaster with the feature that it would print only the stocks the
subscriber was interested in.  They named the company Quotemaster.
TransLux, the company that made displays for stock brokers' offices,
bought the rights to Quotemaster and planned to have them manufactured,
but that never happened because of a downturn in the economy.

With TransLux owning the Quotemaster name the company needed a new name.
In England the London stock exchange had a telegraph company for its
ticker and news operations.  It was called Exchange Telegraph, nicknamed
Ex Tel.  Since that name was not registered in the U.S. Peter Mero
adopted it for the name of the new company.

(There's more interesting history but I'll save that for a little later.)
> 
> When Hank, W6SKC made the first public demonstration of his revolutionary
> TU, under the  DOVETRON  name, he brought the TU and an EXTEL printer
> to Dayton along with a cassette recorder and tapes of 'questionable signals'

I sorta remember a very early Dovetron from the early 1960s, but the ones
most of us are familiar with are those built with ICs and having
independently tunable mark and space frequencies.  I have one of these
(that doesn't work) that appears to be substantially like the patent
4,013,965 Circuit for preventing errors 1977 where all the parts are on
the main board.  Apparently this didn't work all that well, because
most of the ones I have seen are a later model that has a lot of parts
pulled off the main board and has a "binary bit processor" daughter board
plugged into some of the IC sockets on the main board.  Then the binary
bit processor board went through several revisions.

> minimum of
> moving parts.  If I owned one, that keyboard would be a good investment.  I
> don't know
That keyboard doesn't seem to go with any of the MITE machines most of
us are familiar with, which used a mechanical keyboard.

MITE is interesting and somewhat mysterious.  One Bernard Howard was the 
owner of all the patents on those machines.  Not much is known about him. 
There is the little bio in the Western Union Technical Review which says 
he was in the aerospace industry for a while, but nothing to indicate he 
had any experience with printing telegraphy.  And then he disapears from 
the literature.  The common MITE machines have a lot of moving parts. 
And some cleverness that Teletype would have done well to emulate.  I'm 
thinking of the idler gear so that only one gear had to be changed to 
change the speed of the machine, and this could be done without tools. 
And a transistor selector magnet driver with a bridge rectifier on the 
input so that the machine was not polarity sensitive.

Apparently at one point MITE competed with Teletype for a contract
for a lightweight teleprinter.  The Teletype machine was the ancestor
of the 32/33 line, and only a few machines of the military sort were
made.  There is an article by Gordon White in CQ magazine - my copy
of the article is missing any identification of the date and page
number.  He digs up a lot of dirt about the high cost of the machines,
about bribing Senator Dodd to try to get the machine into the Navy
with a no-bid contract, and all the problems with the machines.

There is also an article on the website www.decadecounter.com of the
Vintage Technology Association.  You can google for it.