[Yak] Trivia corner: The meaning of 73

[Doug Faunt N6TQS +1-510-655-8604]

Apparently the rhythm is so right it gets used for chants at UK
sporting events.

30 has been around much longer then ASCII, probably as far back as
1879.  See "Wire Signals" well down in this page:
http://www.qsl.net/ae0q/phillip3.htm

It was apparently used on wire 5-bit teletype systems, too, which with
the smaller set of characters. But it fulfilled much the same
function.

This is way OT for the Yak list.

73, doug

   Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2008 16:07:19 -0500
   From: "John S. Allen" <jsallen at bikexprt.com>


   73 also has a nice rhythm to it in Morse -- dah dah di di di   di di 
   di dah dah like marching-bnand drumming, each has 4 beats as a di 
   with the following space, or the space between characters,  is half 
   as long as a dah.

   I wonder whether 30 as the newspaper end of story is the "record 
   separator" in the ASCII character set, which is an extension of the 
   original teletype character set --

   See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#ASCII_control_characters

   I've been around computers long enough to remember when we used these 
   directly to control printer and screen displays. Actually we still 
   use a few of them, entered automatically -- TAB, ESC and ENTER on the 
   computer keyboard ...

   73s, John S. Allen, AA1EP
     ^
ABOMINATION!!!