TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Stock Market Ticker Tape Machines? (R

Re: Stock Market Ticker Tape Machines? (R

Michael Quinn (quinnm@bah.com)
Mon, 15 Aug 2005 15:31:23 -0400

Someone wrote:

> This ticker could be considered the last successful Teletype product
> of the almost-all-mechanical genre. The Model 37 and Model 38 page
> printers achieved few sales and never got completely debugged.
> Everything after that used a lot of electronics instead of complicated
> mechanisms.

Only within the last 20 years did the US Navy move away from
electromechanical Teletype Model 28s and variations thereof. When I
was the communications officer aboard the then state-of the-art fleet
flagship USS Blue Ridge in Yokosuka in 1987, we had at least 50 of
those clunky noisy boat anchors. They had more more moving (and
malfunctioning) parts than a British Leyland MGB, but a good teletype
tech could assemble a working teleprinter blindfolded after an atomic
bomb explosion.

(By way of perspective, our then also state-of-art message
communications processing system featured a shock hardened rack
mounted 1 MByte hard drive with tape backup. We had to replace it
once at a cost of $100 + K as I recall).

Regards,

Mike

Springfield VA

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