### A good answer might be:

Yes. The better ones smelled of fresh machine oil and chattered pleasantly as they worked.

# Teletype Machines

`Teletype machines were used from 1910 until 1980 (?) to send and receive characters over telegraph lines. They were made of electrical and mechanical parts. They printed characters on a roll of paper. Various mechanical actions of the machine were requested from a distance by sending control characters over the line. A common control sequence was "carriage return" followed by "linefeed".`

`In the early days of small computers (1972-1982) teletypes were often the sole means of input and output to the computer. These tty (teletype) machines printed with fixed-size characters (like their electric typewritter cousins). The tag used in HTML for fixed-size (non-proportional) font is <tt> -- which stands for "TeleType". This paragraph is set inside <tt> ... </tt> tags.`

Some models of tty's could be used off-line (not connected to anything). The user could slowly and carefully type a message (or program) and have it recorded as holes punched on a paper tape. The device on the left of the machine in the photo is the paper tape reader/puncher. Once the paper tape was correct, the tty was put on-line and the paper tape was quickly read in. In those days, paper tape was mass storage.

The web pages of the North American Communications Museum Off-site link have more information on teletypes.

### QUESTION 3:

Can the bit patterns that are used to represent characters represent other things in other contexts?