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Morse Coders Beat SMSers
dgnicholson writes "Jay Leno did a text off between two text messengers and two Morse coders. The Morse coders handily beat the young whippersnappers with time to spare. It might be a fun phone app to make a Morse code messenger, if you kept your headset in and had an external sender, could be interesting. Perhaps a Morse code Skype device."
Morse code was created for the purpose of sending text over REALLY low bandwidth. Cell phones were created to talk to people. The idea of entering text with a numeric keypad was a wart they hung on the side of the phone when they realized that a full keyboard wouldn't work.
Personally, I just don't understand the appeal of text messaging. Maybe that marks me as an old fogey (27), but I just don't need my tendonitis to get any worse, TYVM.
Though he also had the crappy cell phone keyboard (which was probably the point), and the sending ham had a high quality paddle that by itself was bigger than the guy's phone ...
AD5RH
Firstly, the morse code they used was the final optimised product. It basically uses huffman-like compression for english only. Thus texting other languages using morse would not be so efficient.
Secondly they used TAP method which is outdated and inefficient. Predictive text input is much faster. Also, the US is not the big SMS country. It hardly has GSM! More people still use outdated devices like pagers.
Thirdly they also tested the transport medium. An SMS may be relayed faster via different networks (sometimes immediate) and can be re-read if something was missed (unless ticker-tape is used). This is not fair, as for very long distance morse messages one can have intermediaries as well which would lengthen the process considerably.
Fourthly, most people cannot send morsecode while receiving it, thus also making asynchronous conversation slower. (And you cannot receive morse from multiple sources sil
I've recently been to Japan and had the rare privelege seeing a teenage school-girl on a Train sitting and texting on two phones at the same time! Beat that!
But what you may not know is that the really long Morse SMS tone on Nokia phones says "connecting people"
If Morse code is so much better than using text messaging, why doesn't everyone do it?
Rhetorical question. The answer, obviously, is that it is a pain in the ass to learn and gain any serious encoding/decoding speed.
It's a lot like typing (which most of us take for granted). Objectively, it is the fastest way to transcribe data. However, it requires quite a bit of practice to get up to a level fast enough to make it better and more useful than normal writing.
No, it's not the fastest way to send data. For example you can type faster than you can send morse. The reason the morse coders won was because of the tools they used. A morse code key, which is an electrical switch, is optimized for extremely short contacts. It also can be fine-tuned for individual senders. Phone touchpads were originally designed for entering only short phone numbers, so speed was not really an issue. It was more important to prevent the user from dialing a wrong number. So there's a lot more resistance built in to the phone keys.
The results would have been closer if the morse coders had to use a cell phone to send their code, maybe just pressing the 1 button on and off. I think in that case the texters would have won.
I live in Japan, and probably send twenty text messages for each call that I make. Though I must admit, the Japanese software seems better than what I remember in the states. The word-completion is usally really clever if I am typing in Japanese. Also, typing in Japanese is intrinsically easier because in general, each kana corresponds to two English letters. I wish people would use this service more in the states, for all of the reasons people have been mentioning. Despite the enormous number of cell phones in Japan relative to the US, you are forced to listen to people yapping away on them far, far less often. This might be my favorite element of Japanese society, I swear.
The greatest thing is, this program actually converts what you type to Morse code.
Looking at the video, it takes the Morse guys approximately 20 seconds to transmit the message. I can also gather that the text message was typed in without predictive text input, which is significantly slower. I just did a test myself and was able to write the given sentence in 15 seconds with predictive text input, and I'm not even a particularly fast texter. Of course you still need to add network delay (+ SMS center delays) to that, so it wasn't a fair comparison to begin with. But Morse code isn't that fast, really.