"In a crude way, the telegraph was a precursor to the Internet"
Back in the days of 300 baud modems, I often remarked how I could send and decode morse faster.
Remeber:
There are 10 kinds of people in the world,
those who understand binary,
and those who do not
And those who can type, "Remember" as fast as fast as they can think it.
Believe it or not, last year in Austraila a man made the claim that he could send a morse code message faster than a teenager could send an email, even using their abbreviations for nearly everything. So a teenager challenged him.
He beat her.
Dotty old message beats out teen texting
Thnk ur gr8 @ txt msgng? You may think you're saving time cutting out all those pesky vowels when sending text messages to your buddies, but Gordon Hill, a 93-year-old Morse code specialist, just might prove you wrong.
In a competition staged by an Australian museum, Hill, a telegraph operator since 1927, was pitted against 13-year-old Brittany Devlin in a battle of the messengers. Hill was armed with nearly a lifetime of experience using Morse code; Devlin, with two years of text messaging experience and a slew of slang popular with chronic texters. A sentence was chosen at random from a teen magazine, and both contestants had to transmit the message as quickly as possible.
The results might have some reconsidering the value of doing things the old way. Hill transmitted the complete message in 90 seconds, while Devlin used texting shorthand and finished sending her abbreviated message a full 18 seconds later. Hill then handedly defeated three other young foes armed with their mobile phones.
And what was the all-important message that was sent? "Hey, girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them where you are going and what you are wearing." That's enough to make anyone wish they could go back to pre-texting days.