"Dick Carroll" wrote in message
...
It meant something, in those... years, to be a telegraph operator. They
were looked upon with wonder as possessing
knowledge which separated them from the rest of the crowd.

So? I am equally in awe of many had/motor skills that I have
no need nor desire to master.

There are some surprising parallels between the experiences of
nineteenth century women telegraphers and the
twentieth-century story of women in the field of computer programming.
Some of these similarities are technically based; the
telegrapher's work, like that of a modern computer programmer, consisted
of translating English-language instructions into
machine-readable codes. Morse Code is, in fact, a direct ancestor of the
ASCII codes used by software programmers. The
computer itself is the direct descendant of the telegraph; as Carolyn
Marvin observed in "When Old Technologies Were New",

In a historical sense, the computer is no more than an instantaneous
telegraph with a prodigious memory, and all the
communications inventions in between have simply been elaborations on
the telegraph's original work.

Your point? Should all computer users learn
ASCII now to understand computer basics?

Cheers,
Bill K2UNK