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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.misc,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: the early teletype
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2024 06:56:20 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On 14 Nov 2024 03:42:44 GMT, Retrograde wrote:

> By 1874, the Frenchman Èmile Baudot created a 5-bit code to represent
> characters over a teleprinter line. Like some earlier systems, the code
> used two shift characters to select uppercase letters (LTRS) and figures
> (FIGS).
> This lets the 32 possible codes represent 26 letters, 10 digits, and a
> few punctuation marks. However, if the receiver missed a shift
> character, the message would garble badly. This was especially a problem
> over radio links.

You could hear such signals quite frequently on short-wave radio -- a 
rapid series of tones alternating between two pitches -- much faster than 
Morse code.