Winn L. Rosch Hardware Bible, Sixth Edition

Teletypes

Banks of switches were hardly the way to get big programs of hundreds or thousands of bytes into a computer. What engineers longed for was a device that could directly generate digital codes with a familiar interface, a familiar means for people to use it. Fortuitously, exactly what they needed was already widely used in the communications industry. The teletype machine traces its roots back to 1902 when researchers finally cracked one of the toughest problems plaguing the printing telegraph since Samuel Morse created the first one in 1845. With the creation of the start-stop code (which lives on today in the RS-232C port, see Chapter 11, “Ports”) in 1908, Charles and Howard Krum produced the first practical automatic printer connected ...