In a message dated 8/11/2010 8:04:33 PM Central Daylight Time, the Telecom Digest Moderator commented:
I worked for five years in a wire service office with many professional operators who did so regularly. Even I got so I could do it, staring even on a basketball box score. I found that was some of the most challenging copy, since teletypes did not use tabs and you had to judge where the column would be by using the space bar and watching the counter. We had professional operators for all the major wires, but for some the editors/reporters/editors did their own punching. Press wires run virtually continuously, not intermittently, and a lot of the copy is moved in real time, not archived or prepunched. The continuous operation of press wires comes as a shock to some operator not accustomed to the operation. We had a (professional) operator, a 70-year-old woman, who retired at the mandatory retirement age from Western Union. At W.U. the traffic comes and goes, not continuously. She was determined to conquer the continuous operation, and she succeeded, becoming a really sharp operator and one that wire filers enjoyed working with. Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@aol.com snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com
***** Moderator's Note *****Wes, I apologize: I didn't mean to infer that you were incorrect, only that I don't understand the Teletype mechanism well enough to figure out how it was possible to get ahead of the reader.
The operators in the Order Bureau at New England Telephone were able to "Type ahead" of the readers on Model 28 machines, and I could get ahead of the reader on the Model 19 now and then. ;-)
Bill Horne Moderator