#teletype

The Baudot Basement - John Lucas

This was probably my favorite exhibit, featuring all sorts of old baudot teletypes.

Without cell phones, people surround the teletype machine at the Associated Press Building on Rockefeller Plaza for the latest news, May 10, 1940.

Wacs At Teletype Machines At A Bomber Command Headquarters In Pine Tree, High Wycombe, Bucks, England. 

Record Group 342: Records of U.S. Air Force Commands, Activities, and OrganizationsSeries: Photographs of Activities, Facilities and Personnel

Imagine if you will a hypothetical alternate history where video terminals never caught on and all computer interfaces were teleprinter based

Imagine modern ed-like text editors with full unicode support, text markup and formatting in multiple fonts

The web would be dominated by RSS readers that print out content like a stock ticker, full color pictures included

Portable computers would still be possible, screens replaced by printers and spools of paper, making them a little bigger, but not by much. Maybe looking a bit like this teletype used by deaf people to communicate over the phone

We would still have wireless technologies too, no reason our laptop teletypes couldn't connect to wireless cell service or wifi

And if you don't want to lug around your teleprinter, just print out a few pages of news to read

There still would be ads of course. Fewer, since people would get mad about wasting paper they paid for, Paper waste would go up as literally everyone would print out every bit of information they could possibly want or need.

Since CRTs existed in the era of teletype computing, stuff like TVs and the occasional video interface would exist in a few fields, but I don't know if LCD technology would be quite where it is today. We'd still be watching TV and movies, just not as universally as we do now.

Westrex // Teletype Terminal ASRKSR33 (UK, 1960)