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Show bell telephone Announces new device Bell Telephone Laboratories announced a new experimental device which will enable business busi-ness machines to "talk" directly with one another at a speed of about 1,000 words a minute. Printed material could thus be sent over lines like those used for telephone purposes, tout at a speed sixteen times that of conventional con-ventional teletypewriter systems. Information is placed on magnetic mag-netic tape by an electronic computer, com-puter, electric typewriter or other oth-er machine. In contrast to holes punched in paper tape used in many other automatic machines, letters, numbers or symbols are placed on the magnetic tape In the form of magnetized spots. The chief advantage of magnetic tape is that its speed is easily adapted to match the speed with which the signals can be sent over telephone wires. It also has the advantage of quiet operation. After its preparation, the tape is then inserted into the machine. The person on the "sending" -end talks by telephone with the person per-son on the "receiving" end to notify him that the message is to be transmitted. The recipient turns on a receiver mechanism and the sender then starts transmission. trans-mission. An automatic signal indicates in-dicates when the taped message is completed. The person on the receiving end removes the tape from the machine and inserts it in the office machine for decoding. decod-ing. On an electric typewriter, for example, the mechanism could be arranged to type out the message automatically from the magnetic tape. This would be set for the speed of the typewriter type-writer and could be at a faster speed than a typist could attain. In the event of a disturbance in transmission, the receiving equipment will reject the portion of the transmission affected and automatically cause it to be retransmitted. re-transmitted. The present laboratory models are about the size of office typewriters. type-writers. If they were engineered for maximum compactness, by using transistors they could be made considerably smaller. By the use of transistors, the machine can be one-twentieth the size required if vacuum tubes tub-es are used. The use of transistors reduces power requirements to about 5 per cent of that necessary neces-sary to operate a like machine built with vacuum tubes. Because of its great speed, the equipment uses the information-handling information-handling capacity of telephone circuits with high efficiency. In many instances, there is no urgency ur-gency requiring that a message be sent at 1000 instead of 100 words per minute. But, for a given giv-en amount of information, the machine reduces drastically the amount of time the telephone line would need to be used. The efficiency of many business busi-ness machines is limited toy the relatively slow methods of sending send-ing the information from one machine to another. With the data subset this transportation hurdle is overcome and a transmission trans-mission system will be available to meet the rapid pace set by electronic data processing. Most present-day 'business machines ma-chines could be modified to produce pro-duce the required magnetic tape. Tests and careful laboratory studies stu-dies must continue, 'before this system can 'be made available for commercial use. |
