Phil Kane wrote:
On Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:13:01 EDT, AF6AY wrote:

The only problem there
is that it ALSO is a 'set-up' kind of 'test' (any touch-typist on
a TTY would 'win') and has very little entertainment value.

My secretary at March AFB (early 1960s) could and did type faster than
the Model 28 could cut tape. It frustrated her no end.

My cohort at the old U.S. Embassy in Guinea-Bissau and I could jam one
up as well. Nothing like poking tape on numerous multi-page outgoing
cables five or six days per week to build typing speed and technique.
The 28's were set up so that we never saw what we typed appear on paper.
If you really wanted to check your work, you'd have to gather up the
perf tape and look at it. Those machines were replaced just after I
left Bissau in late 1987. I took the very last State Department 28 in
Africa out of service in Sierra Leone in 1990. We had to destroy the
innards, but a colleague wanted the cabinet. He re-worked the thing and
turned it into a bar in his living room. His wife arrived at post a
couple of months later and the new bar was quickly relegated to the
fellow's ham shack.

During my early time at State, most places were using Teletype Model 40
equipment with the three 8" disk drives and the fastest, most rugged
impact printer I'd ever seen. That stuff was gradually replaced by
computer equipment in the 1987 to 1992 time frame.

I ran a Model 15 in Cincy and also had a Model 33 for a while. I wanted
a 28 with the 3-speed gear shift badly. W8JIN offered me one long after
I'd begun using a Commodore C-64. I gave it about thirty seconds
thought before rejecting it as too big and heavy.

Len's point about touch typists winning a speed contest with Morse ops
would depend entirely upon how fast the typist was. The second junior
op I had in Bissau would have been lucky to do 30 wpm on a keyboard.

With the teletype model 40 stuff, there was not any typing of cables at
all. Secretaries typed the cable and they were fed into an OCR. The
operator might have to correct a formatting error or the occasional
misread character. With the advent of the classified LAN's and the
computerized equipment, drafters would electronically release cable text
and addressees to the communications center and the ops would send the
messages. Incoming traffic was routed in the same way, mostly
automatically. Anything not understood by the computer would route to a
'spill que' to be manually assigned action and info offices.
Occasionally the Deputy Chief of Mission would telephone or e-mail a
request that the action office for a given cable be changed.

By then, part of our work involved keeping message router databases (the
military addressees--especially Navy--could change frequently) up to
date. The computerization was supposed to result in the paperless
office. It didn't. The stuff was just printed somewhere other than in
the comm center.

Dave K8MN