Wiring A Vintage Teletype To The Internet

An anonymous reader writes "Do you have an old teletype with a 5-bit serial interface sitting around that you've been itching to hook up to the Internet? If so, this article at LinuxDevices.com is just what you've been looking for. Henry Minsky has caught the Mini-ITX motherboard bug big-time, arguing that the tiny, yet full-featured boards can now compete favorably with more traditional embedded platforms." Minsky explains that: "Messages and alerts could be printed to the teletype automatically from remote locations (such as our Yahoo calendar), while a user could send messages and access services such as weather and news headlines from the teletype keyboard."

Comments

Re:Teletype printouts

[gl4ss]

better? inkjet????? lcd??

the whole point of such to-paper logging is to log things so that the alerts can't get destroyed afterwards(because of a hacker, or because the machine has melted) by the computer. and i would presume dot matrix to be a LOT cheaper in the long run than paying for large amounts of ink for inkjets(not to mention the feeding system in inkjets tends to suck for such application).

and it's not exactly 'like they used to be', they still do it in critical places (or places where some 'hard' proof is needed for logs).

Re:Ahh, teletypes.

[Alien Being]

"I hear the bell on one of those is an actual BELL!"

The first time I used a teletype machine it was set up as a TWX terminal. You would turn on the paper tape punch and draft a text message using the keyboard and/or input from the tape reader. There was a "Here is" button which would automatically generate the id string of the terminal.

Once your tape was ready to go, you would dial (really dial) a phone number on the built in telephone and when you got the carrier you would start the tape reader and the message would print out on the remote side. As I recall, there was a control code that would enable the remote tape punch. And yeah, it was a real bell. There was another control code to ring it and it was customary to ring it a few times at the end of the message so the remote operator would know to pick it up.

It wasn't unusual for the person on the remote end to type in a quick "thanks" before the call ended.

Reliability

[Detritus]

Old Baudot teletypes, like the models 15 and 19, could run for decades with just occasional preventive maintenance. A typical newspaper newsroom had several teletypes each for the AP and UPI wire services. These would be printing almost continuously, 24 hours a day. They were slow (60 Words Per Minute), but they were built to last forever.

One of my father's first jobs was as a reporter for UPI. He could "edit" a story by reading the punched holes on the 5-level paper tape.

Already done before!

[anonymous coword]

Theres a program called heavy metal that allows you to connect your teletype to your box and be able to surf the web, check the weather, stock quotes, telnet into other machines, be able to convert ASCII into 5-bit and and read e-mail.