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Peter Wheen on the Op Con message handling system. (RNM)

Transcript: “The next system was a message handling system. Now, I’ve talked about Teletype from a teleprinter going out 100 words per minute, first over high frequency and then over satellite. Well we developed ashore a system called Op Con and it had two main features; one was that it was an automatic message-handling system. Got rid of the teleprinters and instead you typed a message on a screen, you could put on the top everybody you wanted to put it too, and instead of everybody typing the thing out again and sending it down every single line to every single addressee, you just pressed a button and it knew where it should be taken, And you could address one signal to 15 addressees at once, including to ships at sera, and automatically it would be routed to this system. Now this system was working at 2.4 khz, this is what? 24 times, more than that, 30 times as fast as a teleprinter. So here we are, we’ve got the capability of sending messages at this vast, or much increased speed.”

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