This is a few months old, but here it is anyway:
A race to the wire as old hand at Morse code beats txt msgrs
By Mark Henderson
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The race to transmit a simple message, staged by an Australian museum, was won — at a dash — by a 93-year-old telegraph operator who tapped it out using the simple system which was devised by Samuel Morse in 1832 and was the mainstay of maritime communication up until 1997.
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In the competition, at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Mr Hill and his rivals were asked to transmit a line selected at random from an advertisement in a teenage magazine.
It read: “Hey, girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them where you are going and what you are wearing.” While the telegraphist tapped out the line in full, to be deciphered by Mr Gibson, Miss Devlin employed text slang to save time. She keyed: “hey gf u can txt ur best pals 2 tel them wot u r doing, where ur going and wot u r wearing.”
Just 90 seconds after Mr Hill began transmitting, Mr Gibson announced that he had the message received and written down correctly. It took another 18 seconds for Miss Devlin’s message to reach the mobile phone belonging to her friend. Mr Hill said that he was impressed by modern technology, even though his clunky telegraph machine emerged on top in three further contests. Text messaging, he said, had even been predicted by one of his colleagues in 1961.
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