[GreenKeys] The Teletype Machine That Could Draw

[Joe Clanin]

>I suspect that it would be faster to try hand transcription, as awful as
that job sounds.

Luckily, there's still quite a bit of time before Christmas.

-Joe

On Thu, Apr 23, 2026 at 6:07 PM Jones, Douglas W via GreenKeys <
greenkeys at mailman.qth.net> wrote:

> From: Chuck Rehor -- Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2026 5:52 PM
> > Can we get the two JPG's as text files so we can send to our TTY's?
>
> I wonder if any of today's generally good OCR tools could successfully don
> this conversion.  I suspect that it would be faster to try hand
> transcription, as awful as that job sounds.  Someone did it 50 years ago to
> make the originals.
>
> When I saw the title, however, my mind flashed back not to ASCII (or
> BAUDOT) art, but to the fax machine I remember seeing as a child when I
> visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.  They had two
> machines next to each other in what I recall looked like identical
> housings.  I'm pretty sure one was a Model 32 RO machine printing wire
> service text.  The other was a fax receiver printing weather maps.  Looking
> through the window on top, you could see a helical bar that was turning one
> turn per scan line behind the page while the paper advanced one scan line
> per turn of the helix.  The cloth ribbon ran full width between the page
> and bar that hammered the ribbon against the page and helix for each black
> pixel.
>
> I stared at that machine for several minutes trying to figure out how it
> works.  The above description is from my memory so may be wrong.
>
> In any case, that was definitely a TTY that could draw!
>
>             Doug Jones
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