Bruce writes:

> >The other kind of teletype with a type 'drum' used paper tape with 7 holes
>  >and sounds like the code would be standard ASCII.
>
>  The boxy ones are A/KSR27s and were only available for Baudot code. The
>  ones with the type drums, the A/KSR33s, were made in both ASCII and
>  Baudot versions. The Baudot versions were quite prized in amateur radio
>  circles, because the dear old FCC (Federal Communications Commission, for
>  readers unburdened by it) refused to allow the use of that newfangled
>  ASCII code until about 15 years ago.

Allow me to turn a relatively arcane conversation into a completely boring
morass of facts and say that the earliest A/KSR33s and A/KSR35s didn't really
speak ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). What they
spoke was BSIIC (Bell System Information Interchange Code). ASCII is just a
slightly modified version of BSIIC -- but it wasn't adopted as a new universal
standard until 1967 by the USA Standards Institute (as a more agreeable
computer/communications alternative to IBM's EBCDIC).

All of the printable characters are the same in ASCII and BSCII, but there are
some differences in the control characters. The common control characters,
such as CR, LF, NUL, BELL, HT, SO, SI, XON, and XOFF, are/were there in both
codes, but we've lost the more romantic characters associated with wire and
radioteletype, such as WRU (who are you?), RU (are you?), LEM (logical end of
media), CNFM (confirm), TAPE, and TAPE OFF. These functions have been
displaced to accomodate such character functions as RS, US, DC2, DC4, etc.

Wirt Atmar