When I got my teleprinter working, I was immediately faced with the problem of what to print. One source are the Audio Frequency Shift Keying (AFSK) Internet Teletype (ITTY) audio steams from various sources:

• Teletype News Services (60 and 100wpm)
• Internet Teletype (60wpm)
• New York Times News Wire (60 and 100wpm)

The first thing I printed was the Gettysburg Address text copied from some website, which would not have worked without the feature of the interface I happen to have that automatically carriage return line feeds (CR/LF) at a column defined in its settings. Without that feature it would have stopped at the end of line and just typed the same spot over and over. Even with the feature, the formatting was not perfect. In fact, formatting text is a bit of an adventure, particularly if you don’t have software inserting CR/LF at the end of the typing line on your machine.

Unlike modern word processing software, type width is fixed and lines do not “wrap”, meaning the CR/LF has to be placed reliably at the last printable column, which appears to vary from machine to machine. I am using 70 characters per line.

For demonstration, I wanted a military document and I found Operation Atropian Iron at PAVILION Example OPORD_202102 copy. For people who have done military staff exercises, you should be familiar with the “fictional” nations of Atropia, Gorgas, and Donovia. Besides the operations order format, the typical formatting of a TTY message that may have been sent between military teletype machines would be 16-line message format – Wikipedia.

The document below is the operations order in 16 Line format, but assuming software inserted CR/LF. If you don’t have this feature, you can use Notepad++ to insert the CR/LF, which actually would look better since words won’t break in the middle at the end of line.

I have seen the RYRYRY sequence from time to time and wondered what that would be for. The sequence of The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog – Wikipedia is something I am familiar with, being every letter in the alphabet, to test type. The RYRYRY sequence is to test and toggle each bit in the electromechanical parts that represent Baudot – RY (test signal) – Wikipedia. From that article – “The characters R and Y are “01010” and “10101” in 5-bit ITA2 code”. So sending the RYRYRY sequence then alternates the mechanical levers that determine the letter to be printed every character. This is useful if you want to test the device, lubricate the assembly, or just exercise it. I made an RYRYRY file and include it below, a 69 column file with alternating RYs.

I am using a Deramp interface board to send text. Using putty to paste text does not seem to work, I am using TeraTerm – Tera Term Open Source Project – to send text as file, using File/Send File, using the binary option, and 110ms delay per character. Large text files seem to overrun the teleprinter without the delay.