Talk:Teleprinter

Airlines
The airline industry still uses teletype. Jigen III (talk) 04:47, 8 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Can you provide any details? Which airlines, what type of teleprinter? What is the connected network?  Dedicated network?  What are the speeds and codes?   Wa3frp (talk) 13:59, 8 August 2010 (UTC)


 * The Aeronautical Fixed Telecommunication Network, which interconnects airports and air traffic control centers worldwide, has protocols defined in ICAO regulations. It's backwards-compatible to the teleprinter era.    All the big stations went to X.400 email over TCP/IP years ago, and they are moving to an XML-based format.  AFTN today is usually a computer at one end talking to a computer at the other end, but with message formats from the teleprinter era.  It's possible that somewhere, at some backwater airport, somebody still has a mechanical teleprinter on the net.  But I don't know of any.  --John Nagle (talk) 17:03, 8 August 2010 (UTC)


 * We type in messages in a computer and it prints out at the recipient station on a large dot matrix teleprinter (i.e. input via computer, output via teletype). For example, "SFOFFDL to ATLFFDL: Be aware pets on DL123, please transfer to DL456 upon arrival". We are also able to communicate between airlines. I don't know if frontline agents (employees that see passenger faces) have access to this system (since they always seem to prefer email), but "under-wing" agents use the system extensively, sometimes exclusively for important matters (missing bags, embargoes, high-value cargo). Everyone refers to it as "teletype" but I don't know what kind of network it is; I think it's dedicated since we can still receive even when the computers are down; I don't know if it's the AFTN above user mentioned. Might be this: Airline teletype system. Jigen III (talk) 08:51, 10 August 2010 (UTC)


 * The lede currently says "Teleprinters are still widely used in the aviation industry (see AFTN and airline teletype system)". Are these aviation TTYs still electromechanical or now fully electronic? John Nagle's above reply suggests the latter. If the latter, then maybe that should be noted, because earlier on, the lede describes teleprinters as electromechanical. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 10:03, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

The Sound
There are two sounds associated with this technology. First, is the chatter of the teletype machine banging away at the paper on which it printed. This sounded rather like a shockingly fast typist. The other is the modem-like squeal and series of beeps these machines used over the wire or over the air when sending messages. Neither of those sounds is to be found here. -- Brothernight (talk) 20:33, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry but the "squeal and beeps" had little to do with teleprinters per se for most of their history. Pure teleprinter circuits used no modems at all, only switched DC over metallic current loop circuits that ran all the way back to a central office; there were no tones. In the late 60s we did start to see TTYs such as ASR33s either with built-in modems, or attached to Bell 103 modems, used with timesharing services... but I wouldn't describe the sound as "squeal and beeps". Their tones were much simpler - just two-tone frequency-shift keying, one tone for mark and another for space. A pair of Bell 103s establishing a connection starts with one steady tone from the answering end, and then another, lower tone from the calling end. FSK as used over radioteletype is similar except that the comms were truly half-duplex and only a single of pair of tones were used for both directions. I believe that re. "squeal and beep" you are thinking of much later, faster modems with much more complex signaling. Such a sound file might belong in the article on modems, but not here. Jeh (talk) 00:12, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

The phrase "telephone typewriter"
A reader questioned (on my talk page) the prevalence of the phrase "telephone typewriter" as a generic term for teleprinters and an alternate source for the contraction "teletype". I did a search for the phrase "telephone typewriter" in Google Books, limiting my search to the period 1900 to 1940. I got too many hits, some accidental coincidences of the words "telephone" and "typewriter". So, I tried the phrase "by telephone typewriter" and I still got a bunch of hits. Here are some, with quotations:
 * Bell Telephone System Technical Publications - Page 55, Bell Telephone Laboratories - 1929: "An office in a large city is connected by telephone typewriter with a factory in a suburban town."
 * Commercial America - Volume 26 - Page 34 - 1929: "Although all the branch factories are connected with the main office by telephone typewriter, the order and instructions for delivery- can be transmitted only ..."
 * Bell Telephone Quarterly - Volume 8 - 1929: "193 Typical Message Handled by Telephone Typewriter Exchange Service"
 * Industrial Digest and Commodities & Finance - Volume 10 - Page 5 - 1931: Centralized accounting, made possible by Telephone Typewriter Service, eliminates the duplication of records."
 * The American exporter - Volume 107 - Page 128 - 1930: "The correspondent broker sends his orders by telephone typewriter to the main office for ..."

Note that many of the relevant hits in my first search were from telephone companies in the Bell System. I get the feeling that, as soon as the Bell System began leasing teleprinter services to their customers, they set to work to undermine the trademarky by emphasizing the phrase "telephone typewriter" in their promotional materials and encouraging the public to think of the word "teletype" as a contraction of that phrase, without ever directly abusing the trademark. Judging by the number of hits I got, the scheme worked pretty well. Douglas W. Jones (talk) 19:26, 13 October 2013 (UTC)


 * I was the reader who questioned the 6 October 2013 edit by Dr. Jones that introduced a 1932 reference stating that teletype is derived from telephone-typewriter. It is my opinion, and information that I present below will bear this out, Teletype is derived from telegraph-typewriter. This is based on the following information:


 * Note that Patent 1485212 for a "Radio Telegraph System" (application filed in 1921) uses term "teletype" for the first time in print.


 * teletype became Teletype in 1925 when the original trademark registration was files by the Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Corp. stating a first use in commerce of November 1921.


 * The Kleinschmidt Telegraph Typewriter was the alternate name for the Kleinschmidt Model 5.


 * Teleprinters were invented in order to send and receive messages without the need for operators trained in the use of Morse code. A system of two teleprinters, with one operator trained to use a typewriter, replaced two trained Morse code operators. The teleprinter system improved message speed and delivery time, making it possible for messages to be flashed across a country with little manual intervention.
 * Since these first teleprinters displaced Morse code telegraph system, they were commonly called printing telegraphs in both sales literature and in the underlying patents issued to the inventors. Wa3frp (talk) 20:26, 13 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Ah, nomenclature. The early term was "printing telegraph", from the 1850s up through the early Morkrum machines. "Teletype" is a coined company name, the name adopted by the Morkrum Company.  The USPTO shows the "first use in commerce" date as "1921-10-00".  It's a dead trademark; Teletype Corporation is gone and nobody renewed it.  John Nagle (talk) 19:54, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
 * The article in question was written in the 1930's when the Teletype trademark was still active.
 * On a related note, Baudot is a code family, Telex is a switched teleprinter service. John Nagle (talk) 19:54, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
 * It turns out that Mokrum-Kleinschmidt Corp actually used the phrase "Teletype ... the Telephone Typewriter" in their advertising! Look at the Mokrum Kleinschmidt ad on page 109 of Nation's Business, Dec 1928.  This predates the Bell-System advertising that used the term.  While I never intended to imply that "telephone typewriter" was the origin of the name Teletype, it is clear that those in the industry in the 1920s did indeed use the term to explain the concept -- quite a different thing from that being the origin of the term.  Douglas W. Jones (talk) 21:50, 8 December 2014 (UTC)


 * I hate to say it, because mergers often lead to, or are bad excuses for unbridled deletionism, but I am not sure whether the currently existing printing telegraph article might not actually be partially redundant and ripe for merging. I won't be the one to nominate it, but just saying. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 13:28, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

ASCII?
About the time "Baudot" was changed to "ITA2", the word "ASCII" was also removed from


 * Other codes, such as FIELDATA and Flexowriter, were introduced but never became as popular as ITA2.

...partly because I have no doubt that ASCII was never introduced at all on five-level networks!

However the model 33 did bring ASCII to Teletype Corp's product lineup, and I wonder: Was ASCII in e.g. computer applications really "never as popular" as ITA2 was in the five-level networks? How could we find out? Does the comparison even matter? I don't think so and I'm inclined to leave the statement as it is (of course I am; at present it's my edit) but... comments? Jeh (talk) 08:26, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

US Navy teletype projector
One novel application of teletype were teletype projectors used on US Navy aircraft carriers in WWII. The system enabled messages/briefings to be transmitted to multiple pilots' ready rooms, where they were displayed by a projector. Its pretty interesting, but I'm not sure where to include it in the article. More info can be under 'miscellaneous' towards the bottom of this page. LittleDwangs (talk) 11:28, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

Number of printable characters per line
If known, please add to this article... the maximum number of printable characters per line for various common width paper. I did some quick searching and couldn't find this information, but I might have chosen the wrong words/phrases to search. Thanks! 06:29, 18 March 2023 (UTC) • Sbmeirow  •  Talk  • 06:29, 18 March 2023 (UTC)


 * ASR 33 was 72 characters wide. Don't know about the rest... Skyerise (talk) 19:50, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Raqamli iqtisodiyot
Google translate renders the heading as 'Digital Economy' and the body text as being about Telegram (software) --TedColes (talk) 16:28, 21 April 2024 (UTC)