Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Mon, 03 Jun 91 17:10:25 EDT From: "Steven S. Brack" Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Free Teletypes Message-ID: Organization: Blue Moon BBS ((614) 868-998[0][2][4]) Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 427, Message 1 of 9 Lines: 69 wb8foz@mthvax.cs.miami.edu (David Lesher) writes: > [about teletype machines and radio stations] > 1945 > {The Cleveland Press}, like any other paper of its time, had many > machines. There was the A wire, the sports, etc. etc. > Well, they sat next to each other in the City Room, and made non-stop > noise. If one was stopped, another three were sure to be running. You > just ignored it. If the circuits died, they ran 'open' (clacking but > not printing anything) until the loop was fixed. > But late that summer, they ALL stopped at once. Dead. The silence was > so profound that everyone in the building knew about it at once. > Silence continued. After an interval described by one there as > "seemingly hours later" but likely only a minute or so, they ALL > restarted with the same message -- the war was over. From what I understand of news teletypes, there is a break key which interrupts send/recieve along the TTY connection. This key must be held for one minute to silence the feeds on the line. (They apparently detect loss of transmiossion.) This method is used to clear the line for important transmissions, i.e. the end of WWII, the deaths of FDR & JFK, Nixon's resignation. > 1970's. > At a classical music station of some fame, located on a river with the > same name as the Prince of Wales (hint;-}) the machine sat way in the > back of the station, in a semi-soundproof phonebooth sized chamber. .... > But that day, somebody at Cheyenne Mountain had loaded and fed, not > the weekly NORAD test tape, but the WAR! one. Confusion reigned across > the US as the wrong code was used to cancel the bogus message. Some > stations ignored it. Others followed the law and went off the air > ASAP. The lead station in "our fair city" [the one that the others > have CONALRAD receivers tuned to] choose to ignore it. It took hours > to straighten out. How does the EBS/CONALRAD/SCATANA system work? I assume there is a great deal of telecom equipment used in its implementation. > Can you imagine the look on the personality who finds a forest of > paper on the machine, most of which indicates that the USA has been at > war for four + hours, and Wxxx is still on the air? Gulp. I read a report of a college AM station receiving a phone call to the effect that radicals had threatened to douse the city (somewhere in CA?) with a poisonous agent. The phone call was bogus, but convinced the student on duty to broadcast warnings to citizens that they should stay inside and close their windows (this occured, I recall, in the late summer - high temperatures). The hoax went largely unnoticed, because hardly anyone paid attention to the station that broadcast the warning! Steven S. Brack | sbrack%bluemoon@nstar.rn.com Jacob E. Taylor Honors Tower | sbrack@bluemoon.uucp The Ohio State University | sbrack@nyx.cs.du.edu 50 Curl Drive | sbrack@isis.cs.du.edu Columbus, Ohio 43210-1112 USA | brack@ewf.eng.ohio-state.edu +1 614 293 7383 or 419 474 1010 | Steven.S.Brack@osu.edu