Introduced about 1963, Teletype Corporation's ASR33 was a very popular model of teleprinter. It had a built in paper tape reader and tape punch (8 hole ASCII). It could print and read or punch tape at the speed of 10 characters per second. The ASR33 tape reader was purely mechanical; 8 spring loaded fingers would be thrust into the tape (one character at a time) and an assortment of rods and levers would sense how high the finger rose, which told it if there was a hole in the tape at that position. More expensive systems used photo readers that used light sensors to detect the presence or absence of punched holes in the tape. These could work at much higher speeds (hundreds of characters per second). More sophisticated punches were also available that could run at somewhat higher speeds; Teletype's BRPE punch could run at 60 characters per second. Events January-February January 11 - The Whisky A Go-Go night club in Los Angeles, the first disco in the USA, is opened. ... A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is a now largely obsolete electro-mechanical typewriter which can be used to communicate typed messages from point to point through a simple electrical communications channel, often just a pair of wires. ... A roll of punched tape Punched tape is an old-fashioned form of data storage, consisting of a long strip of paper in which holes are punched to store data. ... There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ...

The ASR32 was a similar device, but used five hole Baudot code. The Baudot code, named after its inventor Émile Baudot, is a character set predating EBCDIC and ASCII and used originally and primarily on teleprinters. ...

External link

• Photo of an ASR33 (http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/teletype.jpg)