[GreenKeys] Official Word From TelegramCableCo

[john at johnwhitney.com]

Greenkeys, thank you for the nice comments regarding...



    https://www.telegramcableco.com/



Yes, that is our website/service and it has been up an running for about three years now.  I wanted a way to keep our Teletype machines active, running, useful, versus just sitting in a back room, doing nothing.



A few months after we launched, I paid our son Steven, in 8th grade at the time, $20 to search on the web and locate our website as if he had never heard of it before.  He spent 30 minutes trying everything he could think of with the search engines, and never reached the website, so we always wonder how people discover it.



We do no advertising, and just print out the Telegrams that come in, getting most in the mail on the same day, or within 24hrs.  While the little venture is nominally profitable, it sure has been fun.



People use it for all sorts of things, birthdays, thank you's, wedding announcements, secret admirers, congratulations, contract canceling, etc.  We even had one person pay us to hand deliver a special telegram (which we did for free), which you can see here...



   http://www.johnwhitney.com/photos/2020/20201010-candy-bomber.html



We have a couple executives at some of the world's largest companies, who regularly use the service.  We've sent Telegrams to all parts of the world, including Nambia, which I had to look up to find out if it was real.  We have also had Telegrams go to congressmen, senators, government officials.  About 1% comes back due to bad addresses.



One Telegram was from someone who drove daily by an unoccupied home, and wrote to the registered owner to see if he could purchase it to restore and live in.  One Telegram was sent in cybercode, groups of 5 numbers.  Our biggest months ever were December 2021 and January 2022.  Not sure why.



There are some interesting parts of the website in regard to Telegrams.  We enjoyed putting these pages together...



   https://www.telegramcableco.com/vintage-telegrams.html



   https://www.telegramcableco.com/vintage-telegram-marketing.html



   https://www.telegramcableco.com/vintage-telegram-forms.html



I was struck by the artwork in the Teletype brochures, and included some of it on the website.  Here is one example...



   https://www.telegramcableco.com/img/28-asr-artwork.jpg



We use the service for sending notes to our own family, as we can do it for the price of an envelope and stamp.  We were able to purchase a 1 foot deep box of 8.5 x 11 inch fan fold sprocket feed paper, so we have a good supply of that.  We built our own hardware interface between the Teletype printers and a Linux PC, and our own Perl software that takes the online order files, and creates text files to output on the Teletypes.



That particular picture of the 28 that 73 Eugene W2HX mentioned...



   https://www.telegramcableco.com/img/28-asr.jpg



...is a 28ASR from Don House in Indiana, that he sold to us a few years back.  Thank you Don.



If you want to see another project we did, also just for fun, to see if we could actually design and build a finished product, visit here...



   https://www.tempeye.com/



The lead-in pictures for the TempEye home page, where the products are on smoked glass, we took ourselves.  We just set things up on our patio table, with smoked glass over some black felt, and then a black golf umbrella above.



Regards,



John Whitney, AF7ZU

john at johnwhitney.com