[GreenKeys] Fw: BBC enquiry - telegraph machine

[Jones, Douglas W]

________________________________________
From: GreenKeys [greenkeys-bounces at mailman.qth.net] on behalf of Don Robert House [62.5milliamps at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2014 4:55 PM
To: Jim Haynes
Cc: Greenkeys; Sam Hallas
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] Fw: BBC enquiry - telegraph machine

In the Bell System we called them "Pen Recorders"  They were used with
old alarm circuits for fire and police.
________________________________________

See Wikipedia, under the heading "pen register".  Morse's marker
(pencil, pen, whatever) on moving paper tape was the original --
the standard term was originally "telegraph register".  By the late
19th century, they were commonly used to record alarm events and
many other things as well as recording telegraph signals.  So, people
called them pen registers.

In the 20th century, as dial telephone systems came on line, the pen
register was the obvious diagnostic instrument to use for recording
dial pulses -- and law enforcement caught on to that usage, so
much so that today, any tool that records dialed telephone
numbers is called a pen register by folks in law enforcement and
criminal law.

But, I think it is still appropriate to call a mechanism that records
telegraph pulses by the trace of a pen on a moving paper tape a
pen register.

                          Doug Jones
                          jones at cs.uiowa.edu

PS:  Full disclosure.  I wrote the part of the Wikipedia article that gives
the history of the term.  When I found it, the term was purely cited as
a law enforcement term, and nobody seemed to know where it came
from.