Good stuff this morning, a quick story about a 93 year old telegraph operator who tapped out a message in Morse code and beat 4 different teenagers in sequence. The teenagers were using “txtspk” which is their whole world it would seem. The general idea of sending text messages on your cell phone (which as an old fart I never understood) is to use short forms and never use a vowel if you can help it. The main reason for this is the interface is the crappiest ever designed my mankind for mankind’s own use. It’s really not that surprising the telegraph operator beat the teenagers when you think of it; he has a one button interface and the button only has two functions (short and long), while the teenagers have something like 12 buttons each with 3 functions each. So in terms of bandwidth Morse code easily trumps the text messagers because he sent each and every letter, without abbreviations. He was almost 20 seconds faster than the txters.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty interesting, but I’m a geek.