Bear with me... It has been decades... But I used to work for Western Union repairing TWX, Telex, and similar beasties.
I remember those boxes, if a bit vaguely. I seem to recall that they were built for the specific purpose of testing and exercising the Bell data sets (the low-speed 110-baud modems) that were built into every TWX machine. I believe they have some character or pattern-generation capability.
Beyond that, I'm pretty much lost. Been too long since I've used one. I'd be curious to know what you find out about them, as I know WU dumped their field service division years ago.
Oh, I think INS means 'INSERT.' Happy hunting.
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********
On 02-Oct-04 at 19:16 Joe R. wrote:
>Anyone know what this is? I bought two of them today. They're aluminium
>boxes about 9" tall, 4" wide and 1 1/2" thick. They have a four digit LED
>display and a hex keypad on the front. On the LH side is a rotory switch to
>set the BAUD rate (110 to 9600). Also a pushbutton labeled INS and a jack
<snip>
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Bruce Lane, Owner & Head Hardware Heavy,
Blue Feather Technologies --
http://www.bluefeathertech.com
kyrrin (at) bluefeathertech do/t c=o=m
"If Salvador Dali had owned a computer, would it have been equipped with surreal ports?"
Received on Sun Oct 03 2004 - 10:57:28 BST