Teletypegeräten

Teletypegeräten, often shortened to Teletype or TTY, refers to a family of electromechanical devices used for transmitting and receiving typed messages over a telegraph or teleprinter network. These devices were a foundational technology in the development of telecommunications and computing. The original Teletypewriter Corporation, founded in 1906, pioneered many of these innovations.

A typical Teletypegeräten consists of a keyboard for inputting messages and a printer for outputting received messages. When a key is pressed, it generates a series of electrical pulses representing a specific character. These pulses are transmitted over a communication line to another Teletypegeräten, where they are decoded by a motor-driven mechanism to print the corresponding character. Early models used the Baudot code, a five-bit code, while later versions adopted the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard.

Teletypegeräten played a crucial role in various fields. They were widely used by news agencies to distribute stories, by businesses for inter-office communication, and by governments for official messages. In the early days of computing, Teletypegeräten served as both input and output devices for mainframe computers, allowing users to interact with the machines by typing commands and receiving results on paper. Although largely superseded by more modern technologies like modems and computer terminals, the legacy of Teletypegeräten is significant, representing a vital step in the evolution of instant communication and human-computer interaction.