Re: Dr. James Marsters, TTY deaf service developer [Telecom]

Yes, sorry about the mix up.

The 33 Teletype could have automatic equipment built in, located in the right hand panel. This had a dial, speaker, and several control buttons. These Teletypes responded instantly to CNTL-D, EOT, and disconnected and shut off. These machines were rented by the phoneco at $100/month (teletype, and modem and control).

The dial or keypad on these machines were all number. In the 1960s some places were still 2L-5N, and numbers had to be converted to ANC. For some unknown reason, our 1968 machine was equiped with Touch Tone, which was rare at that time.

Other Teletypes had nothing, and connections had to be handled manually. (You would dial up, and upon hearing the high pitch sound you would place the phone in the coupler or lift a lever.) I believe these machines were cheaper; the above models seemed to be more common at first, but then supplanted by the manual models. These could be owned or rented from 3rd party dealers. I have no idea of their cost, but presumably much cheaper than Bell. One was supposed to use either a DAA or acoustical coupler, but some people used a screwdriver and made their own direct connections.

As an aside, if your PC still has a dial up modem, you likely could use it just like an old Teletype. On Windows, you probably have a utility program called Hyper Terminal as part of Accessories/ Communications. On DOS, there were shareware programs (one was Telix). You can dial someone and type to talk, without going through any ISP or computer. Of course, it's easier to use Instant Messaging or email.

I have no idea of the monthly access charge for TWX or Telex. Connect times for Telex were I believe pretty cheap, like 5c a minute, but they also charged by character. I would guess toll charges were cheaper because teletype messages used very low bandwidth and piggyback on voice grade lines using the low end frequency. I'm pretty sure an overseas Telex message was definitely cheaper than an overseas voice call back in the 1960s-1970s, and probably a transcontinental voice, too.

There were one or two pioneer computerized information services accessed by Telex; I think a law reference service. The request line was extremely terse and tightly coded and the responses terse as well. Examples of corporate teletype information exchanges shown in literature are coded and extremely terse, too. Back then computers, terminals, and lines cost more than people. An operator could spend quite a bit of time coding an inquiry, with only moment actually keying and transmitting it; then time decoding the response.