After graduating college in the late ’60s with a degree in electrical engineering, my dad went to work for the Teletype Corporation. Teletype had been a subsidiary of AT&T since 1930, with roots dating back to 1906.

Teletype made teleprinters, a technology which had its roots dating back to 1887. The telegraph had been around since 1835, but its use was dependent on having trained operators on both ends to send and receive the Morse code and convert it back into text. Errors were common. If there was no one on the receiving end, the message didn’t get sent at all. But even the earliest telegraph equipment was designed to make marks on a paper tape on the receiving end, and this proof-of-concept was eventually developed into a machine which could take a code sent down a wire and convert it directly to plain text on the receiving end which anyone could read.

The same year that AT&T acquired Teletype, the company introduced the Model 15. While other models were developed along the way, the combination of the Great Depression followed by WWII led to the Model 15 being in continuous production from 1930 until 1963. Nearly every newsroom in the country had, at minimum, two Model 15s set to receive-only (no keyboard) to receive breaking news from the two major wire services (AP and UPI.)

Here’s a brief video of a Model 15 with its cover removed so that the internal components can be seen in action:

In one of the stranger filmmaking choices in history, the final 90 seconds of All The President’s Men are given over to a soliloquy for a Teletype machine.

By the time my dad was working for Teletype, they were branching out into making keyboards which could be used to send inputs into computers, and then display the results on a monitor screen. Printing text onto paper was still necessary, of course, just not all the time. In fact, the ASCII code still in use today was first introduced in 1963, initially for use in the Teletype Model 33. Future Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates (standing) can be seen using a Model 33 c. 1968 here: