[GreenKeys] Equipment Removal

[John Foust]

At 11:09 AM 1/20/2005, jsheetz at comcast.net wrote:
>My Father passed away January 2005, leaving us with a HOUSE FULL of
>equipment. One estimate is that among all the clutter there could be upwards
>of 20 teletype machines, boxes upon boxes of paper tape, rolls of paper,
>teletype pictures and an incomplete catalog of 1350 picture tapes. Many
>pieces must be "dug out" and are currently inaccessible due to the quantity
>of material impeding the movement of the equipment.
>We are located in New Jersey, about 20 miles from NY City
>If you are interested in picking up this equipment please reply to this
>email.

I hope we can find a good home for it all!

Below are a few of the first messages I received from John, several 
years ago when he described his RTTY art collection...

- John

From: FTMK71A at prodigy.com (MR JOHN I SHEETZ)
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 1998 21:28:51, -0500
To: jfoust at threedee.com
Subject: RTTY picture collection

Hello John
   You may have hit the jackpot! I am going to have to talk
to you on the phone. I would like your phone number and 
the best time to call you.
   I am quite certain that you are not an amateur radio operator or 
you would have probably known a lot more 
about RTTY pictures. 
   I have been collecting and producing these since about
1965. I have written articles on the subject which have been 
published in various places. I have about 1100 pix
all on punched paper tape and also in printed form. These
have been exchanged by amateur radio around the world for
many years. The Japanese were very good at it and also a 
fellow in England. I have written a bit about the history of all
of this and I just saw on the GREENKEYS reflector where 
some fellow is offering one of the books "Specialized Communication 
Techniques" for $9. This was an ARRL publication. There is just so 
much to talk about that I am 
going to have to get you on the phone. Since you are apparently not a 
ham (radio operator) I may have to clear up
the meaning of a lot of expressions I might use.
   There are two distinct types of the pictures you have
collected so far. The only ones that I have ever been
interested in are the ones which are strictly hand made
character by character on a teletype machine. Several of
the ones you have posted seem to have been done with
an optical scanner of some sort. Essentially all of the "real"
RTTY art was done on five-level Baudot machines. If you
are going to create anything historical on this I think you
should try to keep it as historically accurate as possible.
To me the scanned stuff is a different world.
   I can go on and on so I had better quit and get this thing
in the mail! I hope to talk to you soon.
   By the way, I am retired so I'm at home most of the time.
My phone number is 908-771-0196 and of course my e-mail
address is    ftmk71a at prodigy.com
   Hope to hear from you soon. Sorry I didn't spot your post
earlier.
   John Sheetz, K2AGI
p.s.
   That reminds me, we consider it very important to keep
the call letters or name of the author of each "work" associated with 
the picture. I am sure you have seen that
on a lot of your samples that came from ham radio.

From: FTMK71A at prodigy.com (MR JOHN I SHEETZ)
Date: Wed,  6 May 1998 21:54:07, -0500
To: jjf at viewpoint.com
Subject: Re: RTTY picture collection

                                        6 April 1998

Hi John

   I got your reply yesterday and have been awful busy
putting out our radio club monthly newsletter. Thanks much
for responding. I tried to find your telephone number and
address and as near as I can tell you are at 409 West Clark
St., Jefferson, WI 53549- 1008. Telephone 414-674-3661. I
wonder if I am right?  I'll wait to hear from you by phone.
Mine is 908-771-0196.

   I dug out some of the books I have on RTTY and RTTY art.
I have photocopied an article I wrote from one of them and I
want to send it to you. I'll put it in the mail as soon as I
know that I have your correct address.

   I didn't feel too comfortable with your title of "Ancient
ASCII Art". There are two things about that that I really
can't go along with. First of all I am 74 years old and have
been playing with Teletype stuff since about 1950 which still
doesn't seem "ancient" to me! I will admit that my computer
which is 9 years old is truly ancient. I guess it all
depends on how fast technology changes. The second thing is
that none of the "art" that we exchanged on RTTY was ASCII.
It was all done in Baudot code. We never used lower case
letters since there were not any on a standard 5-level
Teletype machine. As you know ASCII is really an 8-bit code
or 7 bits plus a parity bit. All of our stuff was
transmitted at 45 baud (60 words per minute). Of course this
is about as fast as most people can type so it was quite
adequate for us to converse with each other which is how and
why it all really started. The word ancient takes me back to
Greece or Egypt. I would probably prefer a title such as
Traditional or Classic or Old or maybe Early Teletype Art,
which just feels more natural about it to me.

   You mention the idea of trying to scan in the full
character set and then converting it to a bitmap PostScript
font. Well this is not really the way you get a PostScript
font. PostScript is not bitmapped. It is really a vector
description of a character. I know of no way to go from
bitmapped to PostScript. Teletype machines normally used
what is known as Murray Style pallets. These characters are
usually made with slightly curved lines for what would
normally be a straight line segment. For instance on the
letter M the two outside vertical segments are bowed
slightly' outward and the two upper v segments are bowed
inward. They are also serif type fonts. I don't recall ever
having seen such fonts in the many font libraries that are
out there but they might be somewhere. It should be possible
to design "Murray" fonts with the Adobe Type 1 Font Format.
I have the Adobe book on that but I have never really tried
to do it. At least this would create the fonts in PostScript
format and then a picture could be printed in virtually any
size. Of course overprinting is another part that has to be
solved.

   I really can't go along with the idea of trying to
"improve" on the appearance of RTTY art. This reminds me of
the stupid idea of "colorizing" classic black and white
movies for TV. The artists who made these movies optimized
them for black and white film. The point is that it is
impressive to see what an artist was able to do with what was
available. Obviously a camera will create a more "true to
life" image than any artist but it does not project the skill
of the artist. Making a good RTTY picture really took a lot
of work and time! I learned to recognize the work done by
many of the better RTTY artists just as a person might
recognize a Van Gogh or a Dali. I remember giving some
classic RTTY reproductions of famous paintings to a friend
whose wife decided to watercolor over them. This almost
completely destroyed the ability to see how close the RTTY
creator had come to creating the illusion of the original
picture. Your dog and cat pictures are no longer
recognizable in any way as having been "created on a
typewriter."

   By the way, before I forget, I might warn you to be
careful about using copyrighted figures. We had a case of
big trouble when a large corporation used a bunch of the
Snoopy characters on a calendar that was to be given to
employees at Christmas. I believe it is Schultz who owns the
copyright to all of that and they became highly upset and
nearly threatened to sue and insisted that all such material
be completely destroyed. I have heard that Disney has been
more lenient than that giving permission in some cases with
special conditions attached. As far as I know Playboy never
gave us any trouble with all of the gatefolds even though
many of them are identified as Miss July etc.

     I note that several of your reductions are cut in width.
Many of them were originally created to be printed in two or
three panels and then pasted together. This makes for a
rather difficult problem if you go to combine the original
code which of course runs sequentially panel by panel. You
have to go back and extract a line at a time from each panel
and concatenate them into a single line.

   I am still trying to figure out a good way to propagate
these pictures on current systems. First of all it is
obviously possible to go to a much smaller font such as say 4
point. Then most of the RTTY pictures would fit on a single
printer page. The main thing to watch for is that the aspect
ratio does not get changed. All RTTY pix are printed 10
characters to the inch and 6 lines to the inch. If you went
to 20 characters per inch you would have to go to 12 lines
per inch.

   Well, I could go on and on but I'll wait until I can talk
to you.

   John Sheetz, K2AGI,    ftmk71a at prodigy.com