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The 'absolute magic' of Morse code that still connects people globally

bbc.com

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Re: The 'absolute magic' of Morse code that still connects people globally

#71

Post by klaff »

numinos1 wrote: post #58
zikduruqe wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Learning Morse code is like learning a new language. It is not. Cat is still spelled cat. I passed my 20 wpm morse code license 30+ years ago, and when I hear code to this day, it sounds just as natural as someone spelling cat as "See Aye Tee".

I just spent the past five years learning Morse code, and for me it was significantly more difficult than learning a foreign language. Perhaps I'm just getting old and my brain isn't as pliable as it used to be, but it's been a very long and difficult journey. Here is what I've learned: - You can memorize the letters and decode up to around 20 WPM. But this is using the low-bandwidth, logical part of the brain which…

I don't remember this much pain, but I was about 10 years old when I learned. On the other hand I've been learning guitar late in life and am wondering how much easier that would be if my brain had seen a few less orbits.

Re: The 'absolute magic' of Morse code that still connects people globally

#72

Post by amatecha »

alexpotato wrote: post #28

One of my favorite stories about Morse Code: Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone) [0] went deaf later in life. He would go to meetings with his assistant and when some asked Bell a question, he would pause, say let me think about that, pause again, and then give a response What was actually happening was that his assistant was using Morse Code + Phillips Code [1] to tap out the question on Bell's leg und…

Amazon URL contains "tag=aphackernews-20" query param after following the shortened URL... does Hacker News rewrite Amazon links to include a Hacker News referral tag?! Here's the URL without all the extraneous stuff added (though maybe it will just get auto-rewritten, time to find out I guess) https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...

No, now I understand what "aphackernews" is, it's "ap" short for "alexpotato".

Re: The 'absolute magic' of Morse code that still connects people globally

#73

Post by 7402 »

wolvoleo wrote: post #62

In ham radio it's still used a lot for shortwave stuff too. It's not really something used for real communication though. Most people I've seen just swap call signs and give a bogus "5 9" signal report. I've never really understood the fun of making long distance connections and then not actually communicating but ok.. The "contest" scene never was for me.

I hear relatively long conversations going on at higher speeds, e.g. 25-30 wpm. I think those short exchanges you mentioned only dominate at times when there's a popular contest going on.

Re: The 'absolute magic' of Morse code that still connects people globally

#74

Post by kweks »

don-code wrote: post #2

Morse code has some interesting properties that make it an ideal way to communicate when all else fails: 1. It can be transmitted by simple means through many mediums - radio waves (amateur radio, as in the article), light (turning a light on and off), sound (I once used a boat horn to communicate with another boat)... technically I could even tap it on someone's shoulder. 2. It's self-clocking; you don't need a way…

For what it's worth, Morse doesn't actually work via tapping (unless you add scraping as the dash component). Tapping makes no distinction between dots and dashes; what you intend as a dash is technically a dot and a pause.

There's a parallel code specifically for tapping, called "Tap Code" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code

Re: The 'absolute magic' of Morse code that still connects people globally

#75

Post by joshmoody24 »

alexpotato wrote: post #28

One of my favorite stories about Morse Code: Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone) [0] went deaf later in life. He would go to meetings with his assistant and when some asked Bell a question, he would pause, say let me think about that, pause again, and then give a response What was actually happening was that his assistant was using Morse Code + Phillips Code [1] to tap out the question on Bell's leg und…

I second the Victorian Internet recommendation!

The book makes a good argument that if you plucked someone from the late 1800s and brought them into the modern day, the internet might be the invention they are least impressed by, since they basically already had one.

The similarities between the telegraph network and the internet go way deeper than I expected. Both at the technology level, like domain names, encryption, data compression, routing tables, etc., and also at the social level like hackers, online dating, insane levels of hype like predicting world peace, and government regulation unable to keep up with the technology. Sometimes I forget how insanely smart people have always been. Awesome book. More timeless than the average book about technology

Re: The 'absolute magic' of Morse code that still connects people globally

#76

Post by vgx-dev »

lioeters wrote: post #6
ryanmcbride wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect you not linking the website to farm clicks. That said, drop the website link please.

Found it: https://morse.halb.it/ Source: https://github.com/robalb/morsechat

This site is great. I've bookmarked it.

Re: The 'absolute magic' of Morse code that still connects people globally

#77

Post by vrighter »

hinkley wrote: post #40
ventana wrote: post #32

I never practiced Morse code, but I read enough about it to quickly realize that the nice sound a friend's cool new Nokia phone made on incoming SMS messages is actually ... -- ..., literally "SMS". The year was 2002 or so. I'm still amazed that someone in Nokia really thought about it back then.

Just before arduino became a thing I had an idea to create a device that could read your your text messages by tapping out morse code on your skin somewhere, like your hip or arm. It would never be able to keep up with modern levels of connectivity, but at the time I thought the bit rate might be high enough to be interesting. But by the time arduino landed I was more interested in visual information radiators. I sou…

When I was making an EEPROM programmer with an arduino, I decided to pick up the datasheet, ditch the arduino builtin stuff (I made a separate "board" which stripped the serial code out, and the time functions, because I didn't need them and they fired an interrupt needlessly wasting resources for me), and write your own interrupts for serial. It's obviously more work, but you get to implement whatever you want. You can set up an interrupt for the flow control line. The arduino libraries are shockingly inefficient and limited sometimes.

Or you could do software flow control and use XON and XOFF for a simpler but, imo, clunkier solution

Re: The 'absolute magic' of Morse code that still connects people globally

#79

Post by linzhangrun »

steve1977 wrote: post #31
amenhotep wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh! I'd always accepted the backronym without even thinking about it, but it makes so much more sense as arbitrary letters associated with sequences that are very easy to remember and distinguish than as a real weird acronym that just happens to have that property. You have reorganised my world in a slightly more reasonable way.

Interestingly there were competing distress signals at the time, but I guess SOS won because of its usefulness outside of morse code. As you mentioned, it's easy to remember, the letters are distinguishable and it also works upside down when written.

Titanic sent CQD first, then tried the new SOS

Re: The 'absolute magic' of Morse code that still connects people globally

#80

Post by kstrauser »

alexpotato wrote: post #28

One of my favorite stories about Morse Code: Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone) [0] went deaf later in life. He would go to meetings with his assistant and when some asked Bell a question, he would pause, say let me think about that, pause again, and then give a response What was actually happening was that his assistant was using Morse Code + Phillips Code [1] to tap out the question on Bell's leg und…

I just this moment realized I need a fidget toy that’s a CW key I can use for taking notes in meetings, just short things like “ask boss about thing he mentioned”.
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