Wow...So many machines, it's like a mini-museum, but what really impresses me is just how many are up and running. Static exhibits are fine, but to get a real idea of how something old works, I feel it's best to see it working at doing what it was meant to do..
Great to see this. I was at the Telstra Museum in Hawthorn (Vic) just this morning. They have about 6 non-functioning teleprinters, including one old Creed and one Teletype (both without covers). That's all. I worked in the PMG as a mail officer from '69 to '71, then part-time from '72 to '74. I had a huge interest in the printers at whatever office I was working at, and in fact taught myself to type on them, which came in handy for college essays later. At times I was called on to jump on the printer to send telegrams. I even learned most of the TRESS symbols for Victoria by heart, and a fair few interstate. (What to do with that knowledge now … !) I used the Teletypes mostly, but some offices still had Creeds. Those were the days ...
One of the best videos about teletypes out there I've seen to date. I especially appreciated the straight forward presentation of the unit in operation superimposed brief but informative explanations of who made the machine, who used it and what the particular functions were. Job well done and cheers from the U.S.
Thanks. I’m pleased that you enjoyed it. Maybe you will like two other similar videos of mine - ‘using i Telex on the internet’ and a little one, ‘How Telegrams were sent in Australia ‘. Do you have any machines yourself?
Not presently, but I'm interested in the history of digital technology used before the era of consumer computers and the internet. I appreciated you showing all the different types of machines from different countries still running after 50 to 75 years or more. Some have said President Lincoln could be looked at as the first 'internet' president because he used Morse Code extensively during our Civil War, he was very well connected to what was then our electronics communications grid. In fact there is a book called the "Victorian Internet" . Morse Code, Fax and RTTY , dates back to the mid to early 1800's and are the oldest digital modes that are still being used today in Amateur, Marine and Military radio. The telegram might be considered as the first email predating the home computer era by over 100 years. Fax is still in demand today in the commercial world, yet few would know that it predated the telephone by 10 to 15 years. Hellschreiber dates back to the 1920's and has the advantage of sending data over weak or poor signal links and still be intelligible. Sending RTTY to an iPad (and back) was a great example how legacy equipment is still compatible with today's technology. Today, ham radio operators use sound cards and modern PC's to send and receive all types of legacy data back and forth to one another. While ham radio has several RTTY contests a year. Weather fax is sent out on the marine bands and is still considered vital communications for mariners crossing the deep seas. As great as our modern networks and computers are today, it is the mechanical legacy digital equipment that will endure long after today's PC ends up in some landfill or recycled into the latest incarnation.
You obviously have gone into the subject quite thoroughly but nevertheless I knew what you were describing virtually the whole time. I doubt many especially younger people realise that emails and texts were not suddenly invented one day and that they evolved over around 180 years. I did not see you mention the Wheatstone ABC. It was a British invention of 1858 which let any unskilled person send and receive text. See my Wheatstone ABC Video. As an aside, the Australian post office was still using Morse code for telegrams until 1959 and there are still some old operators alive. Over 20 years ago a group of them devised a system of sending morse code over the telephone lines using modems. At public displays they received written telegrams from members of the public which were transmitted to a receiving station elsewhere in the country and from there the telegrams were posted to the addressee. A nice way of demonstrating the past to the public. I adapt their electronics to enable tell printers to work the same way. At the moment nobody is using this system but I am set up anyway.
😊👍 I’m pleased you liked it. In fact lately I have been checking out all the machines and fixing a few that were not working properly. Last week I had a 3-way teleprinter chat with a lady in Brisbane, and a man in New Jersey USA!
I worked for Skokie based Teletype...enjoyed hearing the mechanical magic at baud rates now but a distant memory. sorry that so many cool models have been lost to time and technology shifts. the aggregate motion of the M37 was very magical, but then came microprocessors, higher speed dot matrix printers of simplicity and minimum grease and oil! tnx for the trip down memory lane.
+Larry Hagemann Hi Larry, I'm pleased that this video brought back happy memories. My background was post office telegrams but due to circumstances I sent very few. Also in my state nearly all printers were Creeds but one P.O. I was in had a Teletype. We ran on 50 Baud, you used 45.5 Baud. If you see my video I Telex on the internet you will see that teleprinter communication is not completely dead.
Great web site. I love the sound of the 45.5 baud printer...very stately and soothing. I worked on many parts of the M28, M32, M33, M40 Teletype products, eventually ending up in R&D in the days when the mechanical printers were peaking (owing to GE Timesharing on M33)...the subsequent decline was rather rapid, historically speaking. Everything went to higher speed, minimum mechanical parts, no more paper tape, etc. Teletype Corporation is now gone and the birthplace of many of these units is now a shopping mall in Skokie, IL. The Teletype alums meet twice a year for beer and pizza. I'll bet their garages are treasure-troves of teleprinter history! Have fun. I am a Morse man myself, via my amateur license. Alas, even this is going the way of the endangered species.
Hi Larry ! I have been trained at TELETYPE CORP. Skokie, IL. on the whole Model 40 line including the "chain-printers"... Stayed at the "Leaning Tower Hotel" ! This was end of the 70's... Further more been trained on Mod. 14, 15, 19, 28 line, 32, 33, 35, 37 and 38 as well as the Mod. 42 and 43... All RO, KSR and ASR... We had them mainly on CRYPTO equipment... Also worked with Kleinschmidt TT-4/TG, TT-98 pageprinter and TT-76 paper-tape unit... I used to have a Teletype Museum at home in the 70's/80's with all together approx. 75 units ! Good remembrance to hear the different kinds of noise again ! Nice trip down memory lane... TNX !
Great to hear and see all your tprs working away Richard! Reminds me of the 'din' dozens of tprs clanking away in the mid afternoon rush in CandW Larry
It is a long time to think back, but over 10 years ago I thought I had helped them set up several printers working. But like all museums, if no members are interested in a machine, it sits idle. Morse Code is the real love of those who used it in Post Office telegram service.
Fantastic, haven't seen these since my army days in R A Sigs. A while ago. Never of course seen some of them, very rae I guess. Many thanks for preserving them.
Hi. I’m glad you liked it. A video must be worth a few thousand words. To complete the story, this short video may fill in a few gaps for you. How Telegrams Were Sent in Australia ruclips.net/video/OJwDeU5vdfU/видео.html
Tressteleg1's video description is incorrect. Siemens M100's, both brown and blue facelift versions were made in Australia - see Telecomm Journal of Australia for description of Australian manufacturing. The Sagem did not have the first electronic machine. There were a variety available and Siemens Australia were willing to make the parent company's electronic machine in Aust - but Telecom chose the Sagem because Sagem undercut everyone heavily on price. And they turned out to be junk. Junk parts, junk design, high failure rate. Customers hated them, especially when the microprocessor crashed - because that invariably turned all motors, lights, and the buzzer on continuously, emptying all the paper on to the floor.
I don’t know where you got your information, but I was friends with some former and retired Telecom teleprinter technicians. Siemens certainly did build a factory in Australia, Sydney I think. It was an assembly factory which put together parts made in Germany. From what these guys told me parts were not actually made in Australia. As for electronic teleprinters, when Telecom decided to have what they thought would be zero maintenance electronic machines, Siemens told them that they had a model in planning. On the other hand, Sagem said ‘we have them now operating’. Sagem provided several TX 20 types for testing and they worked well. However when factory production stepped up, there were problems as you describe. The problem was that for these, cheap electronic components were used instead of the quality products used in the test prototypes. The technician told me that when they took a new TX20 out of the box, the first thing they did was turn it on and see if it still worked the next morning. Often it did not. After quite some arguing with Sagem, they took back the defective boards and repaired them. Gradually the bugs were and out and they became reliable. As you will see from the video, I have all three models of Sagem teleprinters and it is only rarely that any develops an electronic fault and luckily I have boxes of spare boards which hopefully might work. I have chatted with friends in Germany on the i-Telex group and it is obvious that the Siemens product, I think it is the T1000 but not sure on that, is a load of absolute rubbish. The switched mode power supplies are very prone to failures and the electronic memory for message preparation is very much smaller than my Sagem 2000 and I forget the details but getting it work reliably is very troublesome. On the other hand, test messages I fed into the Sagem 2000 memory stay there indefinitely provided the machine is turned on at least every few weeks to keep the battery charged for the memory. So I stand with what I said previously.
@@tressteleg1 My knowledge comes from being heavily involved with the Sagem TX20 rollout, TX20 repair, and you can verify what I said because of a lot of press coverage at the time (mostly adverse). On the reliability of the Siemens electronic machine, I have no direct knowledge, but it would be very surprising if it was bad, as Siemens had a VERY solid reputation in all their products. The PMG/Telecom and many other telcos used a lot of Siemens gear. The rest of your comments are re Siemens production are not right. Go read the several articles on Siemens teleprinter production in Australia in the Telecommunications Journal of Australia. Until they became Telstra, the PMG/Telecom required everything they bought in volume to be made in Australian factories. Sure, parts were imported from Germany. It is pedantic to say this means "not made in Australia". Consider Kriesler TV sets: Kriesler was a wholely Australian brand - made in Australia. But most of the parts (resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc) were sourced from Philips and came from Holland. Consider "Australia's own car" - the 48-215 Holden:" Its considered made in Australia, but was 100% engineered and designed in the USA, and the engine and other parts came from GM Canada. Even with parts - Philips/Mullard made a limited range of silicon transistors in Australia. Actually, they imported die from overseas, and scored, mounted, and leaded in Australia. Nothing high tech is wholely made in any one country. What you should look at is the percentage Australian content, which determines how much local employment occurs, how much PAYG tax the govt gets. Sagem got the contract purely on price. Siemens indicated their machine would be a lot more. We had a very nice General Electric machine (electronic, released early 1970's) in internal use, but it too was more expensive and GE wouldn't make it in Australia. Re parts quality in Sagems, you have it not right. The PIA ic's (6820) in particular had an extremely high failure rate, and some sort of logic flaw. We asked Motorola to evaluate faulty PIA's (reputable semiconductor manufacturers will do this for large users, to protect their reputation and improve their processes). We got a funny response. Apparently Sagem somehow got hold of a large batch of early pilot production samples, made available to electronics makers for their pilot runs, that shouldn't have been used in a product sold to end users. It wasn't a case of good parts used in prototypes and cheap parts used in production - production used the same pilot parts that shouldn't have been used. While doing Engineering at uni, I had the job of unpacking sagems from their crates, testing them, and programming the answerback proms ready for delivery to customers. Guided by the other techs, I subjected each to a full battery of tests that were somewhat meaningless in an electronic machine -eg teleg distortion tolerance. But, with an hour of testing, most machines would fail. In this way we detected and weeded out a good percentage of weak parts. Anther test was to set up 2 new machines next to each other, prepare a message tape about 1 page long, and transmit it from one to the other and back again so they keep printing. Whithin a short time the message would be corrupted and then one of the machines would crash, all light on, buzzer sounding, page motor spewing out paper. The Sagem machines did become a little more reliable over time, but were NEVER good. Not the TX20, not the other teleprinters by Sagem. Improvements were software revisions, spraying the inside of the plastic case with conductive paint, substitution of the pancake printhead motor with a conventional carbon brush cylindrical motor, and replacement of the French PIA ic's with good American production. The Sagems were both outputers of electric noise, and sensitive to it. We had one customer who had a comms room with several telex machines and a two-radio radio system form their fleet. All of the Siemens machines were replaced in one go with Sagems. The next day they demanded their Siemens M100's back - the Sagems partly blotted out their radio reception. We had another customer early in the Sagem run that reported their Sagem crashing (all lights on, buzzer sounding, motors running etc.) at about 8:30 Am each day. This was traced to an employee who drove an old truck with unspressed ignition. When he pulled into their car park and parked just outside the room having the Sagem, the Sagem crashed. Telling the chap to park his truck further away solved the problem, but did nothing for our reputation. One of the defects of the Sagem design (apart from no shielding, and an RFI disaster) was that they had no proper address decoding for the peripheral chips. The various chips were chip enabled (active low) direct from address pins of the 6800 processor - one address line for each chip. This meant that any software bug of electrical interference which generated an address not in the EPROM range would turn on multiple chips, shorting out the data bus. This results in NOP instructions, which cause the 6800 to turn EVERYTHING on. All lights on, buzzer sounding, print ribbon traversing, print head slammed hard right, and paper advance motor spewing out the whole paper roll. This would cause office girls to cry, and executives to abuse us. Incidentally, when we got the first Sagems, we were amazed by their complexity. By the time the TX20 arrived (late 1978) we had various teleprinters, all electronic, designed for computer use at much higher speeds and print quality. So we knew what an electronic teleprinter should look like. The TX20 is a dot matrix machine than can run at only 100 baud (50 baud used on the Australian Telex network - there's a speed switch on the adaptation board, in the right had side of the machine). Sagem designed it with both velocity and position feedback to control the printhead position. The motors are normal continuous motors, not stepper motors as you would expect. Internally, we already had Japanese teleprinters for use with computers that ran effortlessly at 1200 baud. They used steeper motors and hardly any electronics, mechanically very simple. As well as being an unreliable heap of junk, the Sagems were a business rip-off. The tender spec required 90% Australian content ("made in Australia") but they were 100% made in France. I used to unpack them - they came with Air France stickers on the crate, often French newspaper pages inside, and packing slips in French.
@@tressteleg1 : Incidentally, while Siemens set up a factory in Australia to make the M100, as required by their contract with the PMG (using component part from Germany), the manufacture of the adaptation module for the blue version was outsourced to another Australian maker, Centre Industries. (The adaptation module adapts the basic teleprinter to interface with the PMG//Telecom network.). Centre Industries manufactured the module using transistors sourced from Motorola factories overseas, relays made by Plessey using wire from Holland and soft iron from the UK, light globes from some other country, solder from the UK, nuts and screws from Asia, etc etc. I trust this does not mean to you that the adaptation module was not made in Australia.
Almost forgot - There was another common source of faults/lock ups in TX20's. The EPROM program memory. The TX20 used the old multi-rail 2708 EPROM, already obsolete when the TX20 came out. Notwithstanding that the 2708 needed a good solid dose of UV to guarantee full erasure, quite small amounts of sunlight could produce corruption. You were supposed to cover the windows with metallised light/UV proof labels after programming them, but Sagem didn't bother, and the TX20 case is far from light proof. A photographic flash gun could make a TX20 fail, though it was probably about to a fail anyway. If an install tech left a TX20 in his station wagon while he had lunch, it could make the TX20 u/s.
On checking, I found (eg via crypto museum, industry journal adverts) that the Siemens T-1000 dates from 1976, and was sold in large numbers for both the civilian telex market and to various European military organisations, including the British navy. It is an electronically controlled daisy-wheel teleprinter (but not microprocessor based), functionally much the same as the mechanical M-100. So, Tressteleg1, here again you wrote nonsense, comparing it to the Sagem TX35 (which came out 10 years later, and is CRT VDU based) and saying the T-1000 was "a load of absolute rubbish". See cryptomuseum.com/telex/siemens/t1000/index.htm, which also has T-1000 manuals.
They are interesting machines. And mine is still in working order and used on line with an American friend occasionally. I have heard of Electra House but forget where it is/was.
@@tressteleg1 Electra house was on the embankment in London. Main cable and telex office for london. I worked commercially for Union castle passenger department . Loved the 7erp youcould get a really good manual speed Regards
Thanks for the explanations. As for Creeds, being British our post office bought them pre-war but when the US forces brought Teletypes with them during the war, Creed drifted out of favour so we got no later models after 7B page printers so I know nothing about anything newer.
I should have put 66 words per minute. It’s years since I have had to stop and think about that. The Americans have their own standards which were slightly incompatible with the rest of the world and I was getting mixed up there. I think they use something like 45.5 Baud, but with the stop signal being only one Baud instead of 1.5 Baud, they get a slightly higher word rate than would otherwise occur.
@@tressteleg1 - 66 wpm would indeed be 400 - 404 opm (depending on whether 7.5 or 7.42 unit code was used), and corresponded with 50 baud. Some U.S. media outlets used this higher speed; from 1970 to 1977 a recording of teletypes running at this speed opened and closed every edition of the "CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" in the States. Yes, the U.S. did use the 45.5 Baud which, depending on which unit code was used, was either 364, 368 or 390 opm (the latter being 7.0 unit code). I read that in some cases, an 8.0 unit code at 50 baud (375 opm) was used in Britain to correspond to what the U.S. used.
I can’t comment either way about the use of eight unit code in Britain but I expect that this would only be done in translator stations as Britain and Europe used the world standard I mentioned earlier.That standard entered the US when ?Bell introduced the Telex system using Siemens standard equipment. When the US join the world War 2 they set up several military bases in Australia in their fight against the Japanese and brought with them model 15 Teletypes. Sooner or later these were made compatible with the Australian Post Office teleprinters which at that time were all imported from Britain and of course using British speed standards. When received, my Teletype model 28 and Kleinschmidt ex army teleprinters were both running at 75 Baud speeds but I used the governors to slow them down to the 50 Baud and they work beautifully and of course are much quieter at the lower speeds.
G'day. Great vid. I am an ex operator VK3BPZ but been inactive for 20 years. I have a Klienschmidt 150 TTY and 114 reperforator. Both are in as new condition mechanically. Is there a RTTY collector in Melbourne that would be interested in them? Peter
Wow...So many machines, it's like a mini-museum, but what really impresses me is just how many are up and running. Static exhibits are fine, but to get a real idea of how something old works, I feel it's best to see it working at doing what it was meant to do..
Great to see this. I was at the Telstra Museum in Hawthorn (Vic) just this morning. They have about 6 non-functioning teleprinters, including one old Creed and one Teletype (both without covers). That's all. I worked in the PMG as a mail officer from '69 to '71, then part-time from '72 to '74. I had a huge interest in the printers at whatever office I was working at, and in fact taught myself to type on them, which came in handy for college essays later. At times I was called on to jump on the printer to send telegrams. I even learned most of the TRESS symbols for Victoria by heart, and a fair few interstate. (What to do with that knowledge now … !) I used the Teletypes mostly, but some offices still had Creeds. Those were the days ...
One of the best videos about teletypes out there I've seen to date. I especially appreciated the straight forward presentation of the unit in operation superimposed brief but informative explanations of who made the machine, who used it and what the particular functions were. Job well done and cheers from the U.S.
Thanks. I’m pleased that you enjoyed it. Maybe you will like two other similar videos of mine - ‘using i Telex on the internet’ and a little one, ‘How Telegrams were sent in Australia ‘. Do you have any machines yourself?
Not presently, but I'm interested in the history of digital technology used before the era of consumer computers and the internet. I appreciated you showing all the different types of machines from different countries still running after 50 to 75 years or more.
Some have said President Lincoln could be looked at as the first 'internet' president because he used Morse Code extensively during our Civil War, he was very well connected to what was then our electronics communications grid. In fact there is a book called the "Victorian Internet" .
Morse Code, Fax and RTTY , dates back to the mid to early 1800's and are the oldest digital modes that are still being used today in Amateur, Marine and Military radio. The telegram might be considered as the first email predating the home computer era by over 100 years.
Fax is still in demand today in the commercial world, yet few would know that it predated the telephone by 10 to 15 years. Hellschreiber dates back to the 1920's and has the advantage of sending data over weak or poor signal links and still be intelligible.
Sending RTTY to an iPad (and back) was a great example how legacy equipment is still compatible with today's technology. Today, ham radio operators use sound cards and modern PC's to send and receive all types of legacy data back and forth to one another. While ham radio has several RTTY contests a year. Weather fax is sent out on the marine bands and is still considered vital communications for mariners crossing the deep seas.
As great as our modern networks and computers are today, it is the mechanical legacy digital equipment that will endure long after today's PC ends up in some landfill or recycled into the latest incarnation.
You obviously have gone into the subject quite thoroughly but nevertheless I knew what you were describing virtually the whole time.
I doubt many especially younger people realise that emails and texts were not suddenly invented one day and that they evolved over around 180 years. I did not see you mention the Wheatstone ABC. It was a British invention of 1858 which let any unskilled person send and receive text. See my Wheatstone ABC Video.
As an aside, the Australian post office was still using Morse code for telegrams until 1959 and there are still some old operators alive. Over 20 years ago a group of them devised a system of sending morse code over the telephone lines using modems. At public displays they received written telegrams from members of the public which were transmitted to a receiving station elsewhere in the country and from there the telegrams were posted to the addressee. A nice way of demonstrating the past to the public. I adapt their electronics to enable tell printers to work the same way. At the moment nobody is using this system but I am set up anyway.
Just for fun, if you wanted a little chat with me on one of my printers, you calling from a computer or tablet, this could be easily arranged.
AWESOME FANTASTIC! this video is pure GOLD! thank so much! from Lima Peru.
😊👍 I’m pleased you liked it. In fact lately I have been checking out all the machines and fixing a few that were not working properly. Last week I had a 3-way teleprinter chat with a lady in Brisbane, and a man in New Jersey USA!
I worked for Skokie based Teletype...enjoyed hearing the mechanical magic at baud rates now but a distant memory. sorry that so many cool models have been lost to time and technology shifts. the aggregate motion of the M37 was very magical, but then came microprocessors, higher speed dot matrix printers of simplicity and minimum grease and oil! tnx for the trip down memory lane.
+Larry Hagemann
Hi Larry, I'm pleased that this video brought back happy memories. My background was post office telegrams but due to circumstances I sent very few. Also in my state nearly all printers were Creeds but one P.O. I was in had a Teletype. We ran on 50 Baud, you used 45.5 Baud. If you see my video I Telex on the internet you will see that teleprinter communication is not completely dead.
Great web site. I love the sound of the 45.5 baud printer...very stately and soothing. I worked on many parts of the M28, M32, M33, M40 Teletype products, eventually ending up in R&D in the days when the mechanical printers were peaking (owing to GE Timesharing on M33)...the subsequent decline was rather rapid, historically speaking. Everything went to higher speed, minimum mechanical parts, no more paper tape, etc. Teletype Corporation is now gone and the birthplace of many of these units is now a shopping mall in Skokie, IL. The Teletype alums meet twice a year for beer and pizza. I'll bet their garages are treasure-troves of teleprinter history! Have fun. I am a Morse man myself, via my amateur license. Alas, even this is going the way of the endangered species.
Hi Larry ! I have been trained at TELETYPE CORP. Skokie, IL. on the whole Model 40 line including the "chain-printers"...
Stayed at the "Leaning Tower Hotel" ! This was end of the 70's...
Further more been trained on Mod. 14, 15, 19, 28 line, 32, 33, 35, 37 and 38 as well as the Mod. 42 and 43... All RO, KSR and ASR...
We had them mainly on CRYPTO equipment...
Also worked with Kleinschmidt TT-4/TG, TT-98 pageprinter and TT-76 paper-tape unit...
I used to have a Teletype Museum at home in the 70's/80's with all together approx. 75 units !
Good remembrance to hear the different kinds of noise again !
Nice trip down memory lane... TNX !
You have done well there. I may want to visit your wonderful display one day. Thanks Tony.
Great to hear and see all your tprs working away Richard!
Reminds me of the 'din' dozens of tprs clanking away in the mid afternoon rush in CandW Larry
wow great display Richard.. had 17 wonderful years in the NZ telegraph office .. loved every minute of it.. cheers..
Clive Rivers.
Clive Rivers I'm pleased that this brought back some fond memories.
It is a long time to think back, but over 10 years ago I thought I had helped them set up several printers working.
But like all museums, if no members are interested in a machine, it sits idle. Morse Code is the real love of those who used it in Post Office telegram service.
Fantastic, haven't seen these since my army days in R A Sigs. A while ago. Never of course seen some of them, very rae I guess. Many thanks for preserving them.
The little green one is ex the Oz ARMY. They may have used the large black type as well. The rest are former post office/Telecom.
Hi, really liked your Collection of these machines... 😁
T girl
Hi. I’m glad you liked it. A video must be worth a few thousand words. To complete the story, this short video may fill in a few gaps for you.
How Telegrams Were Sent in Australia
ruclips.net/video/OJwDeU5vdfU/видео.html
fascinating. in a past job i had to deal with what these things spat out.
Tressteleg1's video description is incorrect. Siemens M100's, both brown and blue facelift versions were made in Australia - see Telecomm Journal of Australia for description of Australian manufacturing. The Sagem did not have the first electronic machine. There were a variety available and Siemens Australia were willing to make the parent company's electronic machine in Aust - but Telecom chose the Sagem because Sagem undercut everyone heavily on price. And they turned out to be junk. Junk parts, junk design, high failure rate. Customers hated them, especially when the microprocessor crashed - because that invariably turned all motors, lights, and the buzzer on continuously, emptying all the paper on to the floor.
I don’t know where you got your information, but I was friends with some former and retired Telecom teleprinter technicians.
Siemens certainly did build a factory in Australia, Sydney I think. It was an assembly factory which put together parts made in Germany. From what these guys told me parts were not actually made in Australia.
As for electronic teleprinters, when Telecom decided to have what they thought would be zero maintenance electronic machines, Siemens told them that they had a model in planning. On the other hand, Sagem said ‘we have them now operating’. Sagem provided several TX 20 types for testing and they worked well.
However when factory production stepped up, there were problems as you describe. The problem was that for these, cheap electronic components were used instead of the quality products used in the test prototypes.
The technician told me that when they took a new TX20 out of the box, the first thing they did was turn it on and see if it still worked the next morning. Often it did not.
After quite some arguing with Sagem, they took back the defective boards and repaired them. Gradually the bugs were and out and they became reliable. As you will see from the video, I have all three models of Sagem teleprinters and it is only rarely that any develops an electronic fault and luckily I have boxes of spare boards which hopefully might work.
I have chatted with friends in Germany on the i-Telex group and it is obvious that the Siemens product, I think it is the T1000 but not sure on that, is a load of absolute rubbish. The switched mode power supplies are very prone to failures and the electronic memory for message preparation is very much smaller than my Sagem 2000 and I forget the details but getting it work reliably is very troublesome. On the other hand, test messages I fed into the Sagem 2000 memory stay there indefinitely provided the machine is turned on at least every few weeks to keep the battery charged for the memory. So I stand with what I said previously.
@@tressteleg1 My knowledge comes from being heavily involved with the Sagem TX20 rollout, TX20 repair, and you can verify what I said because of a lot of press coverage at the time (mostly adverse).
On the reliability of the Siemens electronic machine, I have no direct knowledge, but it would be very surprising if it was bad, as Siemens had a VERY solid reputation in all their products. The PMG/Telecom and many other telcos used a lot of Siemens gear.
The rest of your comments are re Siemens production are not right. Go read the several articles on Siemens teleprinter production in Australia in the Telecommunications Journal of Australia. Until they became Telstra, the PMG/Telecom required everything they bought in volume to be made in Australian factories.
Sure, parts were imported from Germany. It is pedantic to say this means "not made in Australia". Consider Kriesler TV sets: Kriesler was a wholely Australian brand - made in Australia. But most of the parts (resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc) were sourced from Philips and came from Holland. Consider "Australia's own car" - the 48-215 Holden:" Its considered made in Australia, but was 100% engineered and designed in the USA, and the engine and other parts came from GM Canada. Even with parts - Philips/Mullard made a limited range of silicon transistors in Australia. Actually, they imported die from overseas, and scored, mounted, and leaded in Australia. Nothing high tech is wholely made in any one country. What you should look at is the percentage Australian content, which determines how much local employment occurs, how much PAYG tax the govt gets.
Sagem got the contract purely on price. Siemens indicated their machine would be a lot more. We had a very nice General Electric machine (electronic, released early 1970's) in internal use, but it too was more expensive and GE wouldn't make it in Australia.
Re parts quality in Sagems, you have it not right. The PIA ic's (6820) in particular had an extremely high failure rate, and some sort of logic flaw. We asked Motorola to evaluate faulty PIA's (reputable semiconductor manufacturers will do this for large users, to protect their reputation and improve their processes). We got a funny response. Apparently Sagem somehow got hold of a large batch of early pilot production samples, made available to electronics makers for their pilot runs, that shouldn't have been used in a product sold to end users. It wasn't a case of good parts used in prototypes and cheap parts used in production - production used the same pilot parts that shouldn't have been used.
While doing Engineering at uni, I had the job of unpacking sagems from their crates, testing them, and programming the answerback proms ready for delivery to customers. Guided by the other techs, I subjected each to a full battery of tests that were somewhat meaningless in an electronic machine -eg teleg distortion tolerance. But, with an hour of testing, most machines would fail. In this way we detected and weeded out a good percentage of weak parts. Anther test was to set up 2 new machines next to each other, prepare a message tape about 1 page long, and transmit it from one to the other and back again so they keep printing. Whithin a short time the message would be corrupted and then one of the machines would crash, all light on, buzzer sounding, page motor spewing out paper.
The Sagem machines did become a little more reliable over time, but were NEVER good. Not the TX20, not the other teleprinters by Sagem. Improvements were software revisions, spraying the inside of the plastic case with conductive paint, substitution of the pancake printhead motor with a conventional carbon brush cylindrical motor, and replacement of the French PIA ic's with good American production.
The Sagems were both outputers of electric noise, and sensitive to it. We had one customer who had a comms room with several telex machines and a two-radio radio system form their fleet. All of the Siemens machines were replaced in one go with Sagems. The next day they demanded their Siemens M100's back - the Sagems partly blotted out their radio reception. We had another customer early in the Sagem run that reported their Sagem crashing (all lights on, buzzer sounding, motors running etc.) at about 8:30 Am each day. This was traced to an employee who drove an old truck with unspressed ignition. When he pulled into their car park and parked just outside the room having the Sagem, the Sagem crashed. Telling the chap to park his truck further away solved the problem, but did nothing for our reputation.
One of the defects of the Sagem design (apart from no shielding, and an RFI disaster) was that they had no proper address decoding for the peripheral chips. The various chips were chip enabled (active low) direct from address pins of the 6800 processor - one address line for each chip. This meant that any software bug of electrical interference which generated an address not in the EPROM range would turn on multiple chips, shorting out the data bus. This results in NOP instructions, which cause the 6800 to turn EVERYTHING on. All lights on, buzzer sounding, print ribbon traversing, print head slammed hard right, and paper advance motor spewing out the whole paper roll. This would cause office girls to cry, and executives to abuse us.
Incidentally, when we got the first Sagems, we were amazed by their complexity. By the time the TX20 arrived (late 1978) we had various teleprinters, all electronic, designed for computer use at much higher speeds and print quality. So we knew what an electronic teleprinter should look like. The TX20 is a dot matrix machine than can run at only 100 baud (50 baud used on the Australian Telex network - there's a speed switch on the adaptation board, in the right had side of the machine). Sagem designed it with both velocity and position feedback to control the printhead position. The motors are normal continuous motors, not stepper motors as you would expect. Internally, we already had Japanese teleprinters for use with computers that ran effortlessly at 1200 baud. They used steeper motors and hardly any electronics, mechanically very simple.
As well as being an unreliable heap of junk, the Sagems were a business rip-off. The tender spec required 90% Australian content ("made in Australia") but they were 100% made in France. I used to unpack them - they came with Air France stickers on the crate, often French newspaper pages inside, and packing slips in French.
@@tressteleg1 : Incidentally, while Siemens set up a factory in Australia to make the M100, as required by their contract with the PMG (using component part from Germany), the manufacture of the adaptation module for the blue version was outsourced to another Australian maker, Centre Industries. (The adaptation module adapts the basic teleprinter to interface with the PMG//Telecom network.). Centre Industries manufactured the module using transistors sourced from Motorola factories overseas, relays made by Plessey using wire from Holland and soft iron from the UK, light globes from some other country, solder from the UK, nuts and screws from Asia, etc etc. I trust this does not mean to you that the adaptation module was not made in Australia.
Almost forgot - There was another common source of faults/lock ups in TX20's. The EPROM program memory. The TX20 used the old multi-rail 2708 EPROM, already obsolete when the TX20 came out. Notwithstanding that the 2708 needed a good solid dose of UV to guarantee full erasure, quite small amounts of sunlight could produce corruption. You were supposed to cover the windows with metallised light/UV proof labels after programming them, but Sagem didn't bother, and the TX20 case is far from light proof. A photographic flash gun could make a TX20 fail, though it was probably about to a fail anyway. If an install tech left a TX20 in his station wagon while he had lunch, it could make the TX20 u/s.
On checking, I found (eg via crypto museum, industry journal adverts) that the Siemens T-1000 dates from 1976, and was sold in large numbers for both the civilian telex market and to various European military organisations, including the British navy. It is an electronically controlled daisy-wheel teleprinter (but not microprocessor based), functionally much the same as the mechanical M-100. So, Tressteleg1, here again you wrote nonsense, comparing it to the Sagem TX35 (which came out 10 years later, and is CRT VDU based) and saying the T-1000 was "a load of absolute rubbish". See cryptomuseum.com/telex/siemens/t1000/index.htm, which also has T-1000 manuals.
I operated creed 7 b and erp for 25 years oh happy days I worked at gpo Electra house
They are interesting machines. And mine is still in working order and used on line with an American friend occasionally. I have heard of Electra House but forget where it is/was.
@@tressteleg1 Electra house was on the embankment in London. Main cable and telex office for london. I worked commercially for
Union castle passenger department . Loved the 7erp youcould get a really good manual speed
Regards
Thanks for the explanations. As for Creeds, being British our post office bought them pre-war but when the US forces brought Teletypes with them during the war, Creed drifted out of favour so we got no later models after 7B page printers so I know nothing about anything newer.
Sounds like 400 - 404 opm speed was used, no?
Nowhere near that fast. They run at 50 Baud or 60 words per minute.
@@tressteleg1 - Funny, I thought 60 wpm (approx. 368 opm) was 45.5 baud.
I should have put 66 words per minute. It’s years since I have had to stop and think about that. The Americans have their own standards which were slightly incompatible with the rest of the world and I was getting mixed up there. I think they use something like 45.5 Baud, but with the stop signal being only one Baud instead of 1.5 Baud, they get a slightly higher word rate than would otherwise occur.
@@tressteleg1 - 66 wpm would indeed be 400 - 404 opm (depending on whether 7.5 or 7.42 unit code was used), and corresponded with 50 baud. Some U.S. media outlets used this higher speed; from 1970 to 1977 a recording of teletypes running at this speed opened and closed every edition of the "CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" in the States.
Yes, the U.S. did use the 45.5 Baud which, depending on which unit code was used, was either 364, 368 or 390 opm (the latter being 7.0 unit code). I read that in some cases, an 8.0 unit code at 50 baud (375 opm) was used in Britain to correspond to what the U.S. used.
I can’t comment either way about the use of eight unit code in Britain but I expect that this would only be done in translator stations as Britain and Europe used the world standard I mentioned earlier.That standard entered the US when ?Bell introduced the Telex system using Siemens standard equipment. When the US join the world War 2 they set up several military bases in Australia in their fight against the Japanese and brought with them model 15 Teletypes. Sooner or later these were made compatible with the Australian Post Office teleprinters which at that time were all imported from Britain and of course using British speed standards. When received, my Teletype model 28 and Kleinschmidt ex army teleprinters were both running at 75 Baud speeds but I used the governors to slow them down to the 50 Baud and they work beautifully and of course are much quieter at the lower speeds.
G'day. Great vid. I am an ex operator VK3BPZ but been inactive for 20 years. I have a Klienschmidt 150 TTY and 114 reperforator. Both are in as new condition mechanically. Is there a RTTY collector in Melbourne that would be interested in them? Peter
Please email me at tressteleg(at)icloud.com and use the normal symbol for (at). Thanks...
Oh that whine on the video - what went wrong in editing?
Thank You Tony. They all get a run on the i-Telex network from time to time. Feel free to email me at tressteleg(at)gmail.com