I worked for a couple summers as a "relay operator"; in the USA there is (was? give the hateful time I suppose...) a law, "Americans with Disabilities Act" to the effect that people unable to do a thing should be able to do the thing. Roughly it means "people in wheelchairs should be able to access buildings" and "people unable to see should be able to read newspapers" and "people unable to hear should be able to talk on the telephone." and so on.<p>The "let people unable to hear talk on the phone" accommodation was to provide actual teletype machines to people who can't hear (at the time, many of these devices were some hideous 75 baud 6 bit monsters where there were limited punctuation and only upper case); the phone company would then also run a service where they had operators (I was one, for a couple summers) where people would call this service and that service would act as a bridge (or, "relay") to the other kind of device. So deaf people could order pizza, teenagers could call their friends and talk about teenager stuff, etc.<p>Specific to this conversation, the "relay operator" setup was a telephone system billing computer (that would also setup the phone call) and a standard terminal that'd interface with the person with the TTY. There were 2 800 numbers; one to connect to a TTY and one to connect to my ears; people would connect and ask to talk to a peer, and I'd enter the billing / call info into the phone computer, then actually do the talking on the terminal.<p>Each of these systems had a very distinct keyboard (the phone co keyboard had deep wells on the home keys; the terminal had "normal" nubs on the home keys), and I spent a ton of time entering phone numbers on the phone co's billing computer, with my right hand. To this day, my right hand touch-types "phone company" numbers and normal "ten key" (I did a lot of data entry at other points in my life) with my left hand.<p>[edit]<p>oh -- these things, though "ttys" were called "TDD" or "TTD" or some silly name to imply they were for deaf people, though they were just ttys; the cooler kids, calling that relay number, had 300 or 1200 or even 2400bps modems; I think that's as fast as the phoneco's relay terminal went, though)<p>GA