Interesting Objects From the Smithsonian's Collection

 By Bruce Shawkey


Teleprinters were used in a variety of applications, from wartime communications to monitoring the stock market. But my primary interest was their use by newspapers to monitor national and international news. When I worked for the Wisconsin State Journal in the 1980s, Teleprinters were already obsolete. News and photos came to the copy desk via "dumb terminals" where we had to "code" the headline size, column width of the story, and so forth. We would then "send" the story to a large photographic printer. Pasteup personnel would then wax the printouts, cut them with X-Acto knives and place them into page mock-ups.

Here is a sample image of the type of dumb terminal I used:



 I'm sure the whole procedure is very different from the way we did it back in the '80s.

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