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Why use Omit instead of t56? Or better yet, write the values in a pre-defined order and just do 56 0.08 32 no 12. Why did they feel the need to use actual word
by INTPenis 3y ago
Why use Omit instead of t56? Or better yet, write the values in a pre-defined order and just do 56 0.08 32 no 12.
Why did they feel the need to use actual words?
- kevingadd 3y agoCan imagine this approach being less error-prone for laymen, in the same way that passphrases (word word word word word) can be friendlier than passwords (word12345678).
- renewiltord 3y agoPresumably has built in error-correction. You don't want to go from t56 "Cholera, family dead, stock market crash" to t66 "Buy farmland, rains predicted good" in one typo.
- Mogzol 3y agoThey meant t56 as in "temperature is 56", not as in every random phrase gets assigned a jumble of numbers and letters. Though I suppose error-correction could still apply.
- Symbiote 3y agoActual words were easier for the telegraph operator to send and receive so they were charged less than a scramble of letters or nonsense. Words were charged individually, but could be up to 10 letters long. It makes sense to avoid the shortest words to get some error correction, "— ." = "T E" could be misheard as "—." = "N". The international regulations limited the cheaper rate messages to only certain languages, of which one was Latin, so the codebooks used that to avoid confusion with modern languages. (See my other comment and read the introduction in the linked book.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- INTPenis 3y agoOh so words were charged indiviually. That's strange but ok. So that means if you could hypothetically serialize/compress the whole data set into one word you'd be most cost effective.
- ale42 3y agoBut as said before, it looks like words were limited to 10 letters. So you could encode/compress a bit, but not a long message into a single 243-letters word...
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> But as said before, it looks like words were limited to 10 letters. On average or individually? A cap of 10 letters doesn't really make sense if you're specifically allowing Latin to be charged by the word.
- lmm 3y agoYou get charged some multiple of sum([ceil(length(word) / 10) for word in words]), plus a flat base fee. At least that's how it was the last time I sent a telegram.
- hashtag-til 3y agoGood point to link to what3words. Have a look, it’s a geographic encoding system.
- stevage 3y agoBecause the telegram company charges more for non words.