About this library and the Baudot code ====================================== What is the Baudot code? ------------------------ The Baudot code was the first (or at least the first practical) fixed-length character encoding to be used widely in the telecommunications industry. This system, invented and patented by the French engineer Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot in 1870, was intended as a replacement for Morse code when sending telegraph messages. It allowed the use of a machine (also patented) to read the messages automatically. However the code still had to be composed manually; in 1901 the process was refined by the American engineer Donald Murray, so that it could be easily composed on a typewriter-like machine. The code was also modified to reduce and optimize the wear on the tape-punching mechanism. This system, known as the Baudot-Murray code or ITA2, was even more widely adopted and vastly used through World War II. This new standard was eventually one of the bases for the design of the ASCII encoding that we are now familiar with. In retrospective, the legacy of the Baudot and Murray codes is immense, though they are rarely used today. How did it work? ---------------- The Baudot code (and Baudot-Murray afterward) is a 5-bit stateful binary code. This is a modern description though, since at the time these "bits" would have just been holes in paper tapes. Because each line of tape can hold five holes/bits, that means that the code allows 32 possible combinations per character. This however is obviously not enough to hold the 26 letters of the alphabet plus ten digits, let alone other symbols. Baudot's solution was to use special "shift" characters, which would indicate whether the following codes (until the next shift) were letters or numbers (and symbols). Hence why it is called a "stateful" encoding. This is unlike ASCII and its successors, where each character has its unique code. The Baudot-Murray code extends on the idea of control characters, introducing codes such as "Carriage Return", "Line Feed", "Enquiry" and "Bell". There even exists a variant of ITA2 for Russian use, which introduces a third shift that exposes a table of cyrillic characters. So, why this library? --------------------- I got interested in 5-bit encoding while learning about the now famous code breaking efforts lead by the United Kingdom during WWII. Such tapes were even an essential component of `Colossus`_, the first electronic computer which was designed for decrypting the German Lorenz cipher. At first I thought decoding this could be a fun exercise, then discovered that I could not find any Python library on PyPi for doing that. So here I am, doing this for fun (and so that I could call dibs on the "baudot" name). Quite honestly, I cannot think of many good use cases for this library. Reportedly, ITA2 is still commonly used in the radio amateur community, so that could be a potential one. Or this could be used to make a simulation of the Colossus computer. More resources -------------- * `Baudot Code - Wikipedia`_ * `5 Hole Paper Tape - Computerphile`_ .. _`Baudot Code - Wikipedia`: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code .. _`5 Hole Paper Tape - Computerphile`: https://youtu.be/JafQYA7vV6s .. _`Colossus`: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer