#teletypewriter

teletypewriter |1933|

siemens teletype 1930s

Standard 5-Level Teletype code common throughout the 20th century. Here is the Morkrum/Teletype encoding, presented with military thoroughness in the 1940s

Punched paper tape was one of the earliest forms of digital data storage. A message could be punched or "perforated" onto a roll of paper tape, and stored physically for transmission or re-transmission later. In the early days of computing, paper tape was used to store computer programs, which were fed into a mainframe computer from a teletype machine.

Introduced in the 1950s, The rugged model 28 by Teletype Corporation was the Cadillac of teleprinters. Designed for continuous use, it transmitted and received 5-bit Baudot code, printing 6 characters per second using a movable block with 64 type slugs.

A Morkrum teletypewriter (circa 1919). This machine employed "5 level" encoding (5 bits, in modern terms). Even with a "shift-in"/"shift-out" capability, this restricted printing to uppercase. Punched paper tape would continue to be used in data processing right up to the 1970s, until it was replaced by magnetic tape and discs.