[GreenKeys] The Teletype Machine That Could Draw

Mon Apr 27 23:41:41 EDT 2026

Great story Nick and Tom!

I've been back to printing some overstrike-art on my Model 33, and attached
here a few pictures that I hope may be of interest.

ASCII files attached in a zip -- these are in the ready-to-print format,
i.e. CR for return-only and then CRLF to advance to the next line.   The
large art prints take a very long time, of course.  Even at 110 baud on the
model 33 they are sloooow.  The emoji are much more approachable.

- Some of my favorite emoji:  "wave", "fish", "shark", "shell", "duck"
- artwork by Katherine Nash (1968) "Spheroids"
- artwork by Frederick Hammersley (1968-1970) "Tiddly Winks", "A Good
Line", "Jelly Centers"

"A Good Line" includes asterisk, which is in ITA2 but not Baudot, so I
don't know how that one will translate to ITTY.  (The Nash/Hammersley
originals were developed in Fortran on an EBCDIC mainframe and IBM
lineprinter, although these versions are my own recreations to fit a
72-character line).  The others should all be Baudot-safe.

If anyone prints them successfully I'd love to know!

Hugh

On Fri, Apr 24, 2026 at 8:54 AM R Russell Miller via GreenKeys <
greenkeys at mailman.qth.net> wrote:

> Hi All.
>
> I've digitized my former paper tape library of RTTY Art pictures and have
> over one hundred examples here that include the one pictured on the
> Teletype machine in the photo on the right.
>
> Many date from as early as the 1950s and 1960s.
>
> Here is one of my sources for RTTY Art:
>
>
> http://www.textfiles.com/art/RTTY/
>
> 73
>
> Russ WA3FRP
>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2026 at 7:37 PM David V. Corbin via GreenKeys <
> greenkeys at mailman.qth.net> wrote:
>
>> Not recommending this product specifically, but there are many out there
>> that you may want to check into
>>
>> https://www.asciiart.eu/image-to-ascii
>>
>> Get Outlook for iOS <https://aka.ms/o0ukef>
>> ------------------------------
>> *From:* greenkeys-bounces at mailman.qth.net <
>> greenkeys-bounces at mailman.qth.net> on behalf of Joe Clanin via GreenKeys
>> <greenkeys at mailman.qth.net>
>> *Sent:* Thursday, April 23, 2026 7:35:14 PM
>> *To:* Jones, Douglas W <douglas-w-jones at uiowa.edu>
>> *Cc:* Greenkeys <greenkeys at mailman.qth.net>
>> *Subject:* Re: [GreenKeys] The Teletype Machine That Could Draw
>>
>> >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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>>
>> >>> Jordan Spencer Cunningham's GreenKeys Search Tool:
>> https://teletype.net/gksearch
>> >>> 2002-to-present greenkeys archive:
>> http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/greenkeys/
>> >>> 1998-to-2001 greenkeys archive:
>> http://mailman.qth.net/archive/greenkeys/greenkeys.html
>> >>> Randy Guttery's 2001-to-2009 GreenKeys Search Tool:
>> http://comcents.com/tty/greenkeyssearch.html
>>
>> This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
>> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
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>>
>> ______________________________________________________________
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>>
>> >>> Jordan Spencer Cunningham's GreenKeys Search Tool:
>> https://teletype.net/gksearch
>> >>> 2002-to-present greenkeys archive:
>> http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/greenkeys/
>> >>> 1998-to-2001 greenkeys archive:
>> http://mailman.qth.net/archive/greenkeys/greenkeys.html
>> >>> Randy Guttery's 2001-to-2009 GreenKeys Search Tool:
>> http://comcents.com/tty/greenkeyssearch.html
>>
>> This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
>> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
>> Message delivered to wa3frp at gmail.com
>
> ______________________________________________________________
> GreenKeys mailing list
> Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/greenkeys
> Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm
> Post: mailto:GreenKeys at mailman.qth.net
>
> >>> Jordan Spencer Cunningham's GreenKeys Search Tool:
> https://teletype.net/gksearch
> >>> 2002-to-present greenkeys archive:
> http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/greenkeys/
> >>> 1998-to-2001 greenkeys archive:
> http://mailman.qth.net/archive/greenkeys/greenkeys.html
> >>> Randy Guttery's 2001-to-2009 GreenKeys Search Tool:
> http://comcents.com/tty/greenkeyssearch.html
>
> This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
> Message delivered to hughpyle at gmail.com
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