Hijacking this post for some history trivia. The first patent on a rotary dial was granted to a guy named Almon Brown Strowger, a mortician who had become convinced that the wife of one of his rival morticians was using her position as a telephone switch operator to reroute calls intended for Strowger's funeral home to her own husband's, thus causing the loss to Strowger's business of several valuable cadavers. Early ad copy for his device bragged that it was a "girl-less, cuss-less, out-of-order-less, wait-less telephone."
Nothing new! The rotary phone was the very first interactive computer input device. Alexander S. Douglas programmed the EDSAC to play tic-tac-toe back in 1952 with a rotary phone for its input and a Williams Tube hacked for a display.
The user's input didn't seem to have any relationship with the text output? Obviously there's no simple one to one mapping but it would have been much more fun to use the actual letters from the phone with some kind of software to guess the intended word.
I'm guessing it works out how many digits to expect for each codepoint by looking at the first digit (i.e. if it starts with a 1 then it has to be 3 digits, otherwise it is only 2).
Does this mean it's impossible to type a newline character, or a backspace, for example?
No idea, I didn't build the thing, just suggesting how it could work. If you want to cover [extended] ASCII, then every first digit could indicate a one or two digit code, one and two also a three digit code. So one possibility would be to have three digits for first digits zero, one, and two and otherwise two digits. All single digit ASCII codes require two leading zeros and all two digits ASCII codes starting with one or two require one leading zero. You could of course also make everything three digits with leading zeros as needed, would be easier at the cost of more dialing. Or use a timeout, if no new digits arrives within a specific time, then a new character starts.
You both are 100% correct! Originally I was going to have a wait (say, no new digits after 3 seconds, mark the ascii character), but I figured just scrapping everything after 20 as an immediate character and anything under as a 3 digit one, it made typing a lot faster.
A few decades ago, you could make ASR-33 teletype printer with an acoustic modem print…something…by whistling into the modem. Why go mechanical when you can be artisanal/organic?
Why not: you can count the letters A=01, Z=26 and use that, use 2 digits each time, numbers start w/ 3 (e.g. 0=30, 9=39)
That's inefficient but trivial to understand, then there is the T9 which use to be the very standard for the first mobile phones. It's language dependent obviously for prediction but pretty cool, too.
Then there is Morse code which would be implement as well. Overall I'd not call the 'demo' impressive at any form.
Is this in any relation to a video I saw where someone made a binary keyboard and then made an adapter to make a normal keyboard actuate the binary keys instead?
I hope this trend continues of doing the “creative volume input” but for keyboards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strowger_switch