Re: the early teletype

On 14 Nov 2024 03:42:44 GMT, Retrograde wrote:

By 1874, the Frenchman Èmile Baudot created a 5-bit code to represent
characters over a teleprinter line. Like some earlier systems, the code
used two shift characters to select uppercase letters (LTRS) and figures
(FIGS).
This lets the 32 possible codes represent 26 letters, 10 digits, and a
few punctuation marks. However, if the receiver missed a shift
character, the message would garble badly. This was especially a problem
over radio links.

You could hear such signals quite frequently on short-wave radio -- a
rapid series of tones alternating between two pitches -- much faster than
Morse code.