Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ginosko!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!wuarchive!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway From: npl@mozart.att.com (Nickolas Landsberg) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: The 'Public Telegraph Office' Message-ID: Date: 21 Sep 89 13:54:17 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Lines: 29 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 394, message 2 of 5 Hello Patrick, Hope this gets through, have had trouble in the past sending stuff to you, but it mostly wasn't too terribly important, and, anyway someone always had a better answer in a day or two than I did. In the above mentioned article, you mentioned that the speed was around 60 baud. Well, it was actually something called "75-speed" which indicated a maximum speed of 75 WPM, transmitted in 5-level "baudot" encoding. After doing all the mumbo-jumbo af adding start/stop bits, etc. this translates to an equivalent bits-per-second of 56.83 or thereabouts. A system I worked on once had to monitor transmissions from a telco switch which also used this. An interesting sidelight is that they could transmit the full upper-case character set, the numerics and a goodly supply of punctuation using just 5 bits. (Actually, they used a "switch" character to flip-flop between meanings of particular bit patterns. The "alternate" set would continue to be used until the "switch" character was seen again.) Nick Landsberg P.S. I thoroughly enjoy the TELECOM Digest. Thanks for your efforts! [Moderator's Note: Blush. Thank you. If you have trouble getting the mail through in the future, try one of these alternate addresses, all of which terminate here at the Digest in Evanston, IL: telecom@cs.bu.edu telecom@nuacca.bitnet attmail!ptownson (slower, but it gets here) telecom@vector.dallas.tx.us PT]