I never heard of a modem on a press wire. They used telegraph circuits, not the PSTN. Furthermore, they had "break" keys. Important sometimes if there was someone on the other end to reply (everyone on the wire could read eveything sent by both sides.) These were all mechnical in an earlier day. New York would get very annoyed when the Edinburg, Texas, bureau tried to break between items, as was the protocol, because they were a couple of lines into the next item before the break impulse reached New York. Most of the time the wire was controlled from Chicago, but at night it was sometimes cut through to New York. Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@aol.com snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com
***** Moderator's Note *****I was thinking about the AP machine that printed out news at the radio stations I wokred at in the 70's: they used a modem and it was connected via a dedicated loop provided by Ma Bell.
I had forgotten about the Break keys: my Model 15 KSR had one, and a polar relay as well, but I bypassed them both because I was using it for RTTY on ham radio, and my Terminal Unit drove the 60 ma selectors directly.
Bill Horne