Faxpapers: A 1930s Technology That Delivered Newspapers via Radio

gizmodo.com

22 points·smacktoward··7 comments

That's fascinating. But what was the modulation scheme? What was the printing mechanism? Achieving this, stand-alone without user intervention in a 100% analogue system sounds like a story worth a bit more technical detail..

I think the radio facsimile (the "proper name" for fax-by-radio, still used for weather bulletins sent to ships at sea) page on Wikipedia [0] should shed some light.

I remember writing a "wefax"decoder for the Atari 800XL that grabbed these weather facsimile signals off a shortwave radio. The code was published in a magazine, though the name escapes me at the moment. I thought it was pretty amazing, as a kid, to see images appear slowly on my screen while listening to the dulcet tones (ha!) of the wefax audio stream.

[0]: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiofax

Antic?

http://www.atarimagazines.com/v5n5/wefaxinterface.html

Was that it?

Holy hell, yes. You just made my night. Thanks for finding that!

Thank YOU for writing that. I thought your post said you 'read' an article. Nope, you 'wrote' that? Fascinating :)

Sorry, but as much as I'd like to take the credit, I didn't author the article... By I "wrote" I meant I typed it in. I can see how my choice of words gave that impression, though, and I feel awful! I am truly sorry!

No problem! :) I had loads of fun typing in code from those magazines as well, but never attempted anything with external hardware stuff.

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