Programmer Humor

Righto. To be fair I should be probably refer to the coded message as a cipher and the decoded message as the translation. Baudot's original bit system was made for French, it got popular in France and then Britain and eventually the USA. It was later tweaked by another guy so the code put less wear on the machinery verse operators dexterity as Baudot had done. This is called Baudot-Murray code.

Sounds like a backronym

Clever but inaccurate. You can try and convince people that the word "bawdy" also came from Baudot because he was a Frenchman that used his improved telegraphy code to share juicy details about the ladies he courted. I can't say for sure he didn't do that, what with being a successful Frenchman and all.

Haha damn. Good eye. Even proofread it twice. 😑

Basically. Dash, dot and pause could vary depending on the operator. Baudot code is more like dividing each second into 5 spaces (so 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, 4/5, and 5/5 of a second) and sending either a pulse or no pulse at each time period to generate a 5-bit character code.

These early machines used electromagnets and gears to operate so a long pulse, short pulse and pause couldn't be converted to a system that'd mechanically instruct a machine to convert it to a letter. All the inventions that coded and decoded and printed messages used a proprietary code and not morse code (based on my research.) Since "wire services" usually owned their own lines they could transmit any code they'd like so long as it wasn't a voltage so high it'd damage the wires (you could also swap polarity.)

With a bit based system it's much easier to build a machine that can convert those signals into a printer. Theres a few videos online of Baudot type printers being restored and running and you can see how it converts these pulses into movements which select a specific typewriter-letter-hammer before the "print" command slams it against the paper. Really ingenious stuff and amazing they could make these things work using gears, cogs and mechanical linkages.

The first ~10-20 years of telegraphy were the age of morse and typing out code by hand. Ironically, at first they used registers to record the code then translated it but during the Civil War operators figured out they could just transcribe by listening. Then "sounders" were introduced. Post Civil War is when automatic machines started coming around, the first ones using morse code but you'd punch the code into a strip of paper then run it along a set of contacts to send the code quicker than a human could.

During the 1870's-1880's the fun really began as multiplexing became possible and precision manufacturing/interchangeable parts allowed way more complex devices to be assembled. Adding machines, typewriters, teletype.

Even the stock ticker system uses a similar method to Baudot's 5-bit binary. A special signal, not morse code but some other code transmitted by telegraph wire, was used that the ticker was designed to operate on. Those signals drove the mechanisms that rotated the printing wheel so they could print the stock name and price.

Telegraphy is a fun science. Real simple since it's basically electromagnets clicking. But they really did a lot with that tech and as manufacturing improved and transmission quality improved they started squeezing more signals into a single line (multiplexing) as well as making these teletype devices which could print complete messages as a pretty quick WPM rate. And Baudots code was used right up to the early digital phone era in some cases.

simplify "Fahrenheit?"

Celsius.

I'm definitely in favor of "70 faren"