Thanks to Tom Friend….

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Tom Friend via groups.io <tom.friend=agileontarget.com@groups.io>
Date: Thu, Apr 23, 2026 at 8:36 AM

Holiday Visits With My Dad to The Teletype Machine That Could Draw

There are memories that do not return as stories, but as textures. Sound first. Then light. Then the quiet certainty that you were standing near something important, even if you didn’t yet have the language to explain why.

For me, the teletype was one of those things.

It sat in my father’s Wall Street office with a kind of earned authority, not sleek, not hidden, not abstract, but solid and unapologetically mechanical. It didn’t pretend to be silent or effortless. It announced itself. You didn’t wonder whether it was working; you could hear it working. From a child’s vantage point, it roared. The clatter of keys striking paper, the staccato rhythm of metal meeting ink, the steady pulse of information becoming physical in front of you. By modern standards it was slow, but to me it felt immediate, alive, connected.

Holiday visits made the whole place feel different. Christmas. Easter. Seasons when the trading floor carried a softened energy, when the adults were still focused but somehow more reachable. I would follow my father through the office, the smell of paper and ink, the low hum of conversations I wasn’t yet part of, the suits and ties moving with purpose, and then there it was: the machine that could draw.

That was the magic. The teletype didn’t just print numbers or quotes. It created images out of nothing but characters. Line by line, it would summon Santa and his sleigh, reindeer in formation, or an Easter bunny taking shape as if the machine were thinking in its own language. You watched the picture arrive in real time, each line a small act of creation, each pause a moment of anticipation. The adults saw a tool. I saw something closer to a living instrument.

Around it, the office felt like a world where everything revealed its mechanism. Even the water cooler in the corner had its own quiet spectacle, the heavy glass bottle inverted on its base, the slow rise of bubbles when someone filled a cup, the tiny hesitation before the water settled again. Nothing digital. Nothing hidden. Cause and effect right in front of you.

Looking back, what made those moments special wasn’t just the machine. It was the transparency of the world around it. Communication had a sound. Information had a physical form. Work had weight. Systems were visible. You could see the process, hear the process, feel the process.

And as a child standing there during the holidays, I wasn’t thinking about markets or infrastructure or the machinery of finance. I was simply watching something unfold that felt bigger than me but not closed off from me. The teletype didn’t hide its workings. It invited you to witness them.

That is what remains.

Not just the memory of a machine, but the memory of a world where connection announced itself, where creation happened in plain sight, and where a child could stand in the middle of it all and feel, even without understanding, that this was something real.

_._,_._,_

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