Model 15 machines have such a long life. I've restored two of those, plus three Model 14 machines, an earlier 1920s design. My machines have been to about a dozen steampunk conventions.[1] People send in their messages by texting, and they're printed on the Model 15, then delivered by a messenger. The video shows two acting students running our steampunk telegraph office. They're great at it. Web site: [2]
For smaller conventions, we have a semi-portable, a Model 14 tape printer in a road case made to fit. The tape is pasted down on telegram blanks, just like real telegrams up to the mid-1950s.
I normally run these off EeePC subnotebooks that run XUbuntu Linux. Those subnotebooks are about $30 on eBay, so I bought some of them for small projects. It's like having a Raspberry PI with a keyboard, screen, battery, and power supply all in a convenient clamshell case. I could run them as a Linux terminal, but I usually run them with a Python program that performs the telegraph office functions.
The lack of lower case is less of a problem in this application than the lack of emoji. I put the entire dictionary of emoji names into the program, and it spells out the emoji as (happy face), etc. That's amused some people who sent emoji-heavy messages.
The Right To Repair people would love those machines. Every part is individually replaceable. The price of this is a huge number of adjustments, plus annual oiling and cleaning. Few people today would put up with that much periodic maintenance in an office machine. It does let them be restored a century after they were built.
That's the thing about tech of that era, a moderately equipped machine shop can build almost any of it.
If there was a big crisis, We could retreat back to 1930 level of technology with relative ease in fact, maybe even later. That gives us radio, telephones, telegraphy, et al. All that tech can be made in small workshops.
Er, no. Making a Teletype machine required a sizable plant. Morkrum had over 200 employees before they shipped their first production machine.
Those machines required a large number of precision stampings and small machined parts. Lots of custom tools and dies. Tooling up to make all those was a big job.
Once they had all the tooling and plant, the Model 15 was cheap to make, despite its complexity. Teletype tried making a cheaper, simpler Model 26, but it cost more to make than the Model 15 because the manufacturing process for the heavy-duty machine was working so well.
From the beginning, most Teletypes were rented, not sold, and came with maintenance included. So the machines had to be reliable. The Model 15 seems way overdesigned.
Flat parts were both hardened and Parkerized, a caustic process that deposits a rust-resistant oxide and turns metal grey. (Sometimes used for guns.) Fine-thread screws. Lock washers on every screw. Insulation that won't age or crack. Plus, the keyboard, typing unit, and motor are all very easily replaceable; they even disconnect electrically and slide out. The screws and round parts are all custom. They must have had a huge number of automatic screw machines turning them out. All round parts fit precisely.
This was not made in a small workshop. More like a factory that covered a city block in Chicago.
That's all true, but it's only true if you're making thousands of them a year, not hundreds. Much of what was stamped could be machined instead, you use stamping for economy and labor savings.
WE Hawthorne Works in Chicago was similarly large, and to build in quantity you'd need it to be just as large now, but to build a couple hundred strowger switches a month? Not as large.
The hardest part of bootstrapping to 1930 is making copper wire - doubly so for wire suitable for electrical coils.
Why would you make a 1930s machine using 1930s processes? Use a CNC machine, metal injection molding, and change the design to be able to use off the shelf screws and bolts where ever possible. Forgot all the brass, looks nice but it will add to the build.
That's, to me, the amazing thing about machining: pretty much any invention from the dawn of civilization up until the vacuum tube can be made in "a moderately equipped machine shop." Because, if a part requires a custom tool to build, it's very likely there's a version of that tool you can build with just the same 1930s tech you use to build anything else, in about four hours.
A good chunk of hobbyist-machinist YouTube is essentially just people bootstrapping themselves into a complete shop's worth of tools starting from three or four primitives, and it's kind of wonderful to watch.
(I'm always kind of disappointed whenever one of these hobbyist folks get a CNC mill or something, because it throws off that bootstrapping feeling. I know it was never their goal, but they were coincidentally pulling it off until that point.)
Anyone who is interested in this sort of thing may wish to take a look at the seven-book Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap series by the late David Gingery. While intended as a guide for the hobbyist, the series could easily serve as a blueprint for how to go from scraps of metal, wood and earth to a fully functioning machine shop in a post-apocalyptic scenario. And if you add in Herbert and Lou Hoover's excellent translation of De Re Metallica you're well on your way to having a blueprint for rebuilding humanity's pre-WWII tech base from scratch.
Thanks, first time I've heard of them, will be going through those (they seem to be available at archive.org [0]) soon!
I'd like to point out another interesting 18-part series of videos about prototyping (in his words "a short course on how to build stuff" :)), by engineer/inventor/professor Dan Gelbart: [1]
Including the vacuum tube, you just need glassblowing equipment and a good vacuum pump, and some other specialized tools. That said, the first voice transmissions used either alternators or high speed rotary spark gap transmitters.
Another thing is audio amplification can be done without tubes or transistors, you can use a mechanical amplifier which is literally a transducer that is mechanically coupled to a carbon microphone, and a local power source (battery) making it possible to build analog phone lines that run several hundred miles without tube type amps.
Sure, I mostly brought up vacuum tubes as an endpoint because constructing the specialized tools to make one is no longer a four-hour job. You run into a wall where, to get to the point where you can do the glassblowing, you have to first bootstrap an entirely-separate set of primitives (kiln, quench, anvil, grinding/polishing stones, etc.) that you may not have needed up until that point if you’d just been working with scrap stock.
(And then the same is true of everything after that, because transistors require photolithography, and photolithography requires good lenses.)
Of course, if you’re unlocking your tech-tree in a breadth-first direction, you’ll already have the glassworking primitives around due to them being common prerequisites for refining metal ore :)
Amazing video. A lot of the quirks of UNIX and editors like vi make way more sense when you become aware of the role of the teletype in early computing.
It is a shame that there are no @ or #, otherwise xe could have demonstrated why the old defaults for the line discipline's special characters were as they were.
I notice that xe did not attempt to manually turn the iulcl or olcuc line discipline flags on with stty. Linux does not actually support xcase, though, not that there is a backslash anyway. (-:
> Hacker voice "I'm in" and the telex sounds off in the background.
In the video it's the other way around: he logs in from the teletype around the ten minute mark. So I guess that kind of "proves" that a time-traveling dieselpunk hacker genius should be able to do the same ;)
Cool! Made a "light" attempt at this when I was a kid, hooking up a matrix printer to my MSX computer [0], and learning BASIC's PEEK and POKE from my dad, to make a kind of typewriter: type a character, it prints at the curpos and advances the printhead; backspace moved the head one place back; return advances the page one line. Lots of fun :)
So I currently have some Google cloud credits for a very computationally intense project. I have a 160 core VM with Debian on it and every time I start up the terminal it blows my mind that this blinking little cursor costs ~$17k per month (if I left it on). For the sake of achieving ludicrous anachronism, I now want to hook this machine up to the teletype.
This would not have wholly worked with Linux. As I've noted elsewhere in this discussion, Linux does not support all of the Unix mechanisms. It does not implement the XCASE line discipline flag; so, unlike on Unix, on Linux one cannot use the xcase mechanism to get lowercase on an uppercase-only terminal.
FreeBSD doesn't support the Unix mechanism, either. Nor does NetBSD.
Xe could have connected it to an OpenBSD system. OpenBSD still supports the whole mechanism.
Model 33's also didn't have lowercase. It was not that common in terminals until the early 70's at least. The DEC VT05, for instance, didn't have lowercase.
If we're playing competitive nostalgia, I owned (and used) a 5-channel teletype (electromechanical, lots of oil). Not having lower case would have been sheer luxury.
Interesting perspective when you realize you're looking at a UART implemented in tin.
This is amazing! I'm very jealous. I've wanted to get ahold of these to do the very same thing for a long, long time. I made do with a cheap hack instead:
For smaller conventions, we have a semi-portable, a Model 14 tape printer in a road case made to fit. The tape is pasted down on telegram blanks, just like real telegrams up to the mid-1950s.
I normally run these off EeePC subnotebooks that run XUbuntu Linux. Those subnotebooks are about $30 on eBay, so I bought some of them for small projects. It's like having a Raspberry PI with a keyboard, screen, battery, and power supply all in a convenient clamshell case. I could run them as a Linux terminal, but I usually run them with a Python program that performs the telegraph office functions.
The lack of lower case is less of a problem in this application than the lack of emoji. I put the entire dictionary of emoji names into the program, and it spells out the emoji as (happy face), etc. That's amused some people who sent emoji-heavy messages.
The Right To Repair people would love those machines. Every part is individually replaceable. The price of this is a huge number of adjustments, plus annual oiling and cleaning. Few people today would put up with that much periodic maintenance in an office machine. It does let them be restored a century after they were built.
[1] https://vimeo.com/124065314
[2] http://www.aether.ltd