The 'absolute magic' of Morse code that still connects people globally
bbc.com
bbc.com
Since then, I've been surprised to see a large community grow around it. More and more people are picking up morse code every day, and they appear to come from all over the world, and from all age groups.
Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone) [0] went deaf later in life. He would go to meetings with his assistant and when some asked Bell a question, he would pause, say let me think about that, pause again, and then give a response
What was actually happening was that his assistant was using Morse Code + Phillips Code [1] to tap out the question on Bell's leg under the table. Apparently, no one ever figured out they were doing this.
Also, I HIGHLY recommend the Victorian Internet [2] which is about the telegraph and how it was discovered, adopted and then became ubiquitous. I first read it in the late 2000s and assumed it had been written a year or two earlier but was surprised to learn it had been written in the 1990s given how prescient it was. e.g. it mentioned how local newspapers shut down because who cares about local news when you have global news?
There is also a mention of how being a telegraph operator was VERY similar to be a SWE in the late 2010s in that it paid well, job mobility was very high and it was a hard skill to learn. Edison actually got his seed capital by being a telegraph operator who pivoted into repairing telegraph equipment. There are also many comparisons that can be made to AI and how it's being adopted in the economy and affecting SWEs.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Code
2 - https://amzn.to/4wx75KY (Victorian Internet)
No, now I understand what "aphackernews" is, it's "ap" short for "alexpotato".
And for those that don't have Twitter: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1806069602063159676.html
The book makes a good argument that if you plucked someone from the late 1800s and brought them into the modern day, the internet might be the invention they are least impressed by, since they basically already had one.
The similarities between the telegraph network and the internet go way deeper than I expected. Both at the technology level, like domain names, encryption, data compression, routing tables, etc., and also at the social level like hackers, online dating, insane levels of hype like predicting world peace, and government regulation unable to keep up with the technology. Sometimes I forget how insanely smart people have always been. Awesome book. More timeless than the average book about technology
[1]: https://www.qsl.net/w9aml/documents/TheArtandSkillofRadioTel...
[2]: You can also find it elsewhere; the title is distinctive enough.
1. It can be transmitted by simple means through many mediums - radio waves (amateur radio, as in the article), light (turning a light on and off), sound (I once used a boat horn to communicate with another boat)... technically I could even tap it on someone's shoulder.
2. It's self-clocking; you don't need a way to synchronize between two operators. One of the amateur radio clubs within range of me, K1USN (https://www.k1usn.com/sst) runs a contest that's limited to 20wpm so that new operators can get used to interpreting Morse on the fly.
3. It's fairly easy to recover after a fault - much easier than, say, ASCII. I might lose a few characters, but much like a smudge on a written page, I can figure out where intelligible letters start again without much difficulty.
Some other things that surprised me and may be interesting for other people:
Learning Morse code is like learning a new language. The unit of understanding is not dots and dashes but rather every letter is a unit that one (in modern training) learns to recognize intuitively as such before doing anything else.
On top of that, telegraphy has these three letter Q-Codes where one would assume that these abbreviations are for line efficiency, but also it's because three letters is a nice length that still decodes intuitively as a "word". (Also Q was probably chosen because it so seldomly comes up in "normal" words, so it's like a little attention signal? But that is my speculation.)
One can see in conversation that these three-letter codes often only have to be transmitted once, whereas free text (e.g. proper names) are often sent with redundancy so it's easier to transcribe them as you have to fall back to decoding individual letters. (My ears still sometimes perk up suddenly when hearing Morse code from movies because suddenly I pick up something like CQ without even paying attention.)
People therefore use terms like "musicality" (at least in my language, not sure if that translates to English) to refer to the quality of one's transmission. There is a certain art to it.
One funny exception to the three letter codes that gets used in Germany. If somebody signs off for a lunch break, they'll key ESSEN (translates to "eating"/"food") which would be considered "too long" to decode intuitively but it has a nice drumroll to it so it still works :)
It is not. Cat is still spelled cat.
I passed my 20 wpm morse code license 30+ years ago, and when I hear code to this day, it sounds just as natural as someone spelling cat as "See Aye Tee".
- You can memorize the letters and decode up to around 20 WPM. But this is using the low-bandwidth, logical part of the brain which simply isn't capable of decoding much beyond 20 WPM.
- To go beyond 20WPM you have to hand-off the processing to the subconscious mind. This is the phase that's equivalent to learning a new language. It requires a tremendous amount of repetition to build the mental muscle memory to hear the letters as a single sound instead of a series of beeps. It literally took years of daily practice to get there.
- Once you've mastered the individual letters you eventually start hearing combinations of letters as unique sounds. And at some point, you start to hear entire words, not letters.
- If I attempt to perceive individual letters at higher speeds I almost always end up missing the rest of the word. At these speeds, the conscious, logical brain becomes a liability that must be to be surpressed to decode effectively. As a 30 year software developer, this has been VERY difficult to do.
- When I get into the flow, I don't "think" about the letters or "hear" a series of beeps. The words somehow just magically pop into my mind.
Morse code is not a new language, but it is a new way of writing, which is almost the same as a new language in many ways.
You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead. Hey uh, you want a drink?
Morse code is very much like a language in that there are audible intonations that differentiate between See, Aye and Tee. Being able to copy that in your head is the same as listening to English and not needing to reach for the dictionary every other word.
- hear di-dah (sound), think dot-dash (printed symbols), in the table that's an A
- hear di-dah, think "A"
- hear dah, di-di-di-dit, dit, hear the word "the"
- add more and more words
Along with that progression, the mental buffer got bigger, as it has to in order for you to recognize whole words. If I was having a conversation near my speed limit, a good way to break me was to send a long unusual word
There's a parallel code specifically for tapping, called "Tap Code" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun_(film)
Wrote a memoir by blinking at the right time going through the alphabet ordered by frequency
It would never be able to keep up with modern levels of connectivity, but at the time I thought the bit rate might be high enough to be interesting.
But by the time arduino landed I was more interested in visual information radiators. I soured on the whole idea when I discovered that flow control hardware wasn't on any of these boards. Made it feel very much like sticks and rocks.
Or you could do software flow control and use XON and XOFF for a simpler but, imo, clunkier solution
How quickly those disappeared, the mobile phone was replaced by the "smartphone" and we entered into an abyss of data collection, surveillance and targeted advertising
In retrospect the era of the Nokia 3310 seems like such a brief period of time
"Today we are reinventng the phone" - Steve Jobs
Thanks but no thanks
I wanted a mobile (cellular) phone and a pocket computer as separate devices
Silicon Valley ruined this
I even did morse ringtones per a caller for few frequent ones. Even if you don't read it by ear, they are very distinctive.
Tried building a morse decoder in software and it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to hit human performance levels.
Nice article.
I.e. it's more akin to something like a linefeed control character that could also be represented as \n.
It also had no meaning initally, so meanings like "save our souls" are backronyms (it's originally a German signal anyway).
You see it in industry that uses radio too.
I needed some dozen of short, reasonably unobtrusive but distinct sounds. You know where this is going.
I ended up assigning a set of two-letter codes, first letter = source, second = same letter for generic, others for specific initials, so things like NN = other, EE = email, WW = WhatsApp, TB = text message from Bob.
When generating the Morse WAVs I set it to 40 WPM where longer sequences mostly blur into "outlines", but they are short, so I manage, and I added some 0.3 s padding on both ends to account for things like sound ducking and other hiccups. Works great.
https://qrp-labs.com/Morserino
One of the nifty features is it has wifi so you can "talk" cw over the internet (vband), but also to a training "qso bot" as well
It's not really something used for real communication though. Most people I've seen just swap call signs and give a bogus "5 9" signal report. I've never really understood the fun of making long distance connections and then not actually communicating but ok.. The "contest" scene never was for me.
I don't have the space for HF antennas so I don't have any radios for it either (after all, portable HF isn't really a thing either and I don't own a car in which I could have used the higher HF bands)
You start just distinguishing two letters (usually K and M). I would recommend using a trainer app that gives you a string of letters by sound, and to write them down on paper. Then you can check how many you got correct. Do not try to replay letters multiple times, just skip it and move on. If your result is better than 95% or so you can continue and introduce a third letter, and so on.
There is a certain order of letters considered more or less canonical for use in the Koch method which you can look up.
Edit: Back then I learnt it with https://lcwo.net/, it's distraction-free and quite nice.
It's a lot like how when you read you almost never read every letter, you look at the entire word and that turns into an idea in your mind.
The good thing is the human brain is quite good at associating specific sounds with meanings, as this is how all spoken language works. So you're just learning some new sounds for letters, not a completely new way to represent information. I'd guess that part comes pretty quickly for most people.
Learning to tap out the letters on a key is probably a bit more challenging, as that requires some physical dexterity, but like playing a musical instrument, I'm sure most people can become at least adequate at it with some practice.
Here’s another one: