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