Teletype Corporation

~ the eulogy ~

The company begins in 1906 as the Morkrum Company, named by welding together Joy Morton and Charles Krum, one a salt fortune and the other a mechanical engineer working on how to make a typewriter type at a distance. Morkrum merged with the Kleinschmidt Electric Company in 1925 and the combined firm took the name Teletype Corporation in december 1928. In 1930 AT&T bought it for thirty million dollars in stock and dropped it inside Western Electric, where it stayed for half a century.

What it made was a printing telegraph, which is a phrase that undersells the machine badly. A teleprinter is a typewriter welded to a modem, entirely mechanical, capable of running unattended for years in a room nobody visits. The Model 15 went into service in 1930, about two hundred thousand were built, and they were still coming off the line in 1963. Every wire service story that reached a newspaper in the middle of the twentieth century came out of one of these, which is where the sound comes from: the clatter under a radio news bulletin was a Teletype and everyone knew it.

Then computing arrived and needed exactly this. The Model 33 ASR shipped in 1963 with a paper tape reader and punch on the side, and it became the console for the minicomputer era, cheap enough that a lab could put one next to every machine. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie wrote Unix sitting at Model 33s. The machine was slow, ten characters a second, and that slowness shaped the software: Unix commands are short because typing them was physical work on a keyboard that needed real force.

I have never seen one of these running. I type its name most weeks anyway, because the serial link between a computer and a flight controller comes up as /dev/ttyUSB0, and those two letters in the middle are an abbreviation of a machine that stopped being manufactured before I was born. The baud rates are in there too. So is the reason a text file ends its lines with a carriage return followed by a line feed, which was two separate mechanical actions on a printer with a moving carriage and is now two bytes that software still argues about.

~ the dossier ~

~ before the computers ~

For fifty years the Teletype was how information moved between organizations. Wire services and railroads ran on point to point teleprinter circuits, and the Model 15 was the mainstay of United States military communications through the second world war. The Model 28 came in 1951 and is generally called the most durable thing the company ever built, machines that ran for decades in conditions that killed everything around them.

None of this was consumer equipment. You leased a circuit and the machine came with it, which is the AT&T model applied to text, and it meant that for most of the twentieth century sending a written message across a country was something an institution did rather than a person.

~ the model 33 ~

More than six hundred thousand Model 32 and 33 machines were made. The 33 was the one that ended up in universities, and its influence on computing is out of all proportion to what it was, which was a cheap plastic-geared teleprinter that a serious telegraph engineer would have looked down on.

The paper tape reader is the part people forget. Before floppies were normal, a punched tape hanging in a loop next to the terminal was how you stored a program, and the tape was the artifact you carried around and handed to somebody. The 33 also gave computing its control characters and the habit of treating a terminal as a line of paper that scrolls in one direction only, which is still how a shell behaves.

~ the day it died ~

The video terminal is what did it. Once a screen could show twenty four lines and be erased instantly, a machine that consumed paper and printed at ten characters a second had no argument left, and by the late seventies the Model 43 was a rearguard product. The AT&T breakup settled on 8 january 1982 and Western Electric was folded into AT&T Technologies, so Teletype became AT&T Teletype, a division inside a company that had lost the reason it owned the division. The last of it was gone by 1990.

~ the next chapter ~

No dead company has left a longer shadow in the source code. Every Unix and every Linux calls its terminals tty. Getty, the program that waits for a login, is short for "get tty". The Ctrl key combinations in a shell are the Teletype control characters, and terminal emulators that will never be attached to anything mechanical still identify themselves as vt100s, which were themselves designed to replace these machines.

The company that made them has been dead for thirty six years, and every developer alive still types its name into a config file without noticing. That is a better memorial than most companies get, and none of the people who wrote the abbreviation into the code were trying to build one.

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