Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal [video]
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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]
[0] https://archive.org/details/GingeryMetalWorkingShop/mode/2up
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.
(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 :)
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. (-:
I mean, it proves you can upvert old stuff anyways ;)
It is interesting how you can track the history of remote terminals and make them work at all. It shows the true value of clear documentation.
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 ;)
I would love to have my terminal output cast in lead!
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.
* https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/57d747eef2b80ca9ffb95407...
Interesting perspective when you realize you're looking at a UART implemented in tin.
I briefly used a 33 (as a peripheral to a CNC training computer) and I still miss that cadenced hum.
https://drewdevault.com/2019/10/30/Line-printer-shell-hack.h...
Any informative websites?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NuvwndwYSY&list=PL-_93BVApb...