Will still use them in certain situations. Overall a good move but a bit bittersweet.
Brian
< Notes OP’s user name / post content combo 
>
The linked article says that NWS has continued using caps-only until now because some users are still using Teletypes, which only print upper case. That strikes me as kind of :dubious:
First of all, those old Teletypes that only print upper-case are really really really old. We’re talking antique museum pieces here. Where are these users who are still using these archaelogical treasures? 7-bit TTYs that could send and print upper and lower case were already popular by the early 1970’s.
Furthermore, if I’m not mistaken, those old upper-case-only TTYs actually could receive lower-case letters, but they just printed them as upper-case.
(ETA: To be sure, those TTYs for weather reporting were very specialized – they had very special character sets for all those special weather symbols, of which there were very many.)
Back in the 90’s I worked Master Control in a small television station and we had an old teletype machine connected to the weather wire. I have no idea if it only printed caps or not but I have memories of being alone at night showing the late film when the machine would burst into frantic warning beeps. Certain that the world was about to end (and wanting to hit the button to cancel the alarm), I’d get up to see what dire event was being predicted and be greeted with:
*** ALERT: THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE HAS ISSUED A FROST ADVISORY FOR THE FOLLOWING COUNTIES...
:rolleyes:
I always thought maybe that one didn’t deserve the same machine response as tornado and severe hail warnings.
The weather Teletypes are (were) 5-level (5-bit) Baudot code. There’s no such thing as lower case in that code, only LTRS shift and FIGS shift, 32 character slots each (of which two are LTRS and FIGS and four more are CR LF SP and NUL, leaving 26 unique characters in each “shift”)
8-level (bit) ASCII Teletypes had the capability of printing upper and lower case, but there were only a couple of models (37 and 38, IIRC) which actually did. Almost all 8-level Teletypes printed only upper case. The upper case characters overlap the lower case ones in ASCII, so yes, lower case prints as upper case on upper case only 8-level machines.
So if you’re transmitting weather information in 5-level code, there is no option for lower case. But, if you’re transmitting in 8-level (8-bit) ASCII, well, you have to convert the 128 possible ASCII characters (only 7 of the 8 bits are normally used, the 8th being reserved for use as an optional parity bit) to the 64 possible Baudot characters. Meaning, lower case translates to upper case, some characters don’t have any equivalents and it’s your call as to what they get translated to. Some electronics or microprocessors are involved here.
And yes, the old Model 28 (Baudot) and 35 (ASCII) Teletypes were built to last. It would not surprise me in the least to hear that there are some still in operation.
Source: I repaired model 33 Teletypes as a part time job in college and went on to design data communication boards for Data General computers. I have a 5-level TT-253/UG printing reperforator in my basement…just because I can.
Teletype 5-level code assignment: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/5f/9a/e5/5f9ae5a3ae92b574ed7e6c8504e569ff.jpg
(FIGS1 is the weather character set)
I dunno, how else can we warn of the dangers of a Killing Frost, like the one that did in Wildfire?
Some weather sites use something the try to fix the capitalization problem. Lower cases most things except first word of a sentence, proper nouns, etc.
So it’s funny to see “Hall” county rendered as “hall”. Which looks like “hail” and is there really a snow and hail watch?
WARNING: IF YOUR EQUIPMENT CAN’T HANDLE LOWER CASE, YOU ARE STUCK IN THE WRONG CENTURY.
Over at Jeff Masters’* Wunderblog at Weather Underground, they covers this switchover in a recent post.
Near the end, they also covers WU’s method of de-capitalizing the NWS reports and the problems they encounter.
They mislead a bit about the origins of the old style rules (which included banning parentheses and such), showing a Model 33 Teletype. But the 33 did have parentheses. (And was ASCII.) It was older Teletypes that were more limited. (And were Baudot.)
- The blog is now a joint effort by Masters and Bob Henson. They are looking to rename it.
Wonder if they will upgrade the scratchy tinny weather broadcasts that sound like they were transmitted on a cheap transmitter from someone’s basement in 1942?
I don’t mean to disparage the NWS, they generally do a great job IME. But I don’t know how or why they make their audio so bad.