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Wiring A Vintage Teletype To The Internet

Posted by simoniker on from the abacus-up-next dept.

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."

6 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Once again... by CGP314 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

    No.

    1. Re:Once again... by hplasm · · Score: 5, Funny
      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? No.

      I'm too busy overclocking my Babbage Engine. More Steam!!

      Blast it! That cooling fan is too large!

      --
      ...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
  2. Once again: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    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?

    (nervously) Who sent you?

  3. Re:Ahh, teletypes. by Alien+Being · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.

  4. Re:So Minsky... did it work? by hqm · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Yup, works fine. I even had it hooked up as an alarm clock, I had a cron job to print the news and weather at 7:30 AM every morning. In the original military cabinet, it was loud enough to wake people up upstairs, but then I put it into a quieter cabinet, and it was too quiet to wake us up anymore.

    But we use it every day, our Yahoo calendar sends events to it by email (no I won't tell you the address), and we see a printout every morning of the next day's events, easy to tear off and take with you on your way out.

    The original inspiration for this was from Tom Jennings' "World Power Systems" site. Check it out. I used his ASCII-baudot conversion routines.

  5. Patterns with punched paper tape by jeepliberty · · Score: 5, Funny
    In tuning and calibrating the signal on a radioteletype it is customary to send RYRYR. This presents a pattern on the 5-level punched paper tape like


    1 o.o.o.o
    2 .o.o.o.
    3 o.o.o.o
    4 .o.o.o.
    5 o.o.o.o

    And of course, if you ever get gibberish, you should physically observer the tape for a messages:
    1 ooo...o..ooo..ooo....o...o.ooo
    2 o..o..o...o...o......oo.oo.o
    3 ooo...o...o...oo.....o.o.o.ooo
    4 o..o..o...o...o......o...o.o
    5 ooo...o...o...ooo....o...o.ooo