On Nov 9, 11:12 am, wrote:
On Nov 9, 6:57 am, "Jeff" wrote:

I thought that was the punch tape reader

BWAAHAAHAAA - good one!

--

Another neat RTTY trick involved paper tape.

By using certain sequences of letters, the holes in
the paper tape could be made to form letters and numbers.
What was printed on the page looked like gibberish-with-a-pattern
but if you looked at the tape the message was clear.

Of course since it took several characters to make one letter, the
effective speed on a 60 wpm machine was about 15-20 wpm. And
there was no going back if you made a mistake. But the effect could
be impressive to the uninitiated.

73 de Jim, N2EY

...remembering the smell of hot machine oil in the W3ABT room...

I remember back-spacing and nulling out the mistake, then continuing.
But I wasn't 10 years old, either.