Model 15 machines have such a long life. I've restored two of those, plus three Model 14 machines, an earlier 1920s design. My machines have been to about a dozen steampunk conventions.[1] People send in their messages by texting, and they're printed on the Model 15, then delivered by a messenger. The video shows two acting students running our steampunk telegraph office. They're great at it. Web site: [2]<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://vimeo.com/124065314" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/124065314</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.aether.ltd" rel="nofollow">http://www.aether.ltd</a>
Amazing video. A lot of the quirks of UNIX and editors like vi make way more sense when you become aware of the role of the teletype in early computing.
Finally, existence proof for all those Hollywood movies where the hero macgyvers a vacuum cleaner and a radio into a multi dimensional portal.<p>I mean, it proves you can upvert old stuff anyways ;)
This reminds me of the Model 33 [1] we had connected up to a ZX Spectrum [2], back when I was a kid.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Interface_1" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Interface_1</a>
So I currently have some Google cloud credits for a very computationally intense project. I have a 160 core VM with Debian on it and every time I start up the terminal it blows my mind that this blinking little cursor costs ~$17k per month (if I left it on). For the sake of achieving ludicrous anachronism, I now want to hook this machine up to the teletype.
Next step: Using a a Linotype [0] as a Linux terminal :)<p>I would love to have my terminal output cast in lead!<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine</a>
This is amazing! I'm very jealous. I've wanted to get ahold of these to do the very same thing for a long, long time. I made do with a cheap hack instead:<p><a href="https://drewdevault.com/2019/10/30/Line-printer-shell-hack.html" rel="nofollow">https://drewdevault.com/2019/10/30/Line-printer-shell-hack.h...</a>