ITA2 Telegraph Emulator
This ITA2 emulator serves as a practical teaching aid by making abstract encoding concepts visible and interactive. When students type text and see the immediate conversion into hole patterns, they’re learning several key concepts in computing and telecommunications.
Educational Benefits
First, it demonstrates binary representation - how text becomes patterns of 1s and 0s. While we often teach this abstractly, seeing the actual holes appear helps students grasp how physical systems can represent digital information.
ITA2 (Baudot-Murray) Telegraph Type Emulator
Type a word in the input below to see its representation on the ITA2 tape.
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The LETTERS/FIGURES shift mechanism introduces state machines naturally. Students discover through experimentation that the same pattern can represent different characters depending on the current mode. This hands-on experience with state-based encoding prepares them for more complex computing concepts.
Implementation Details
The emulator is implemented in JavaScript and HTML/CSS, making it easily embeddable in any web page. The code is modular and can be adapted for different educational contexts.
You can find the source code and try the emulator yourself at the GitHub Repository.
Clément Godbarge
Lecturer in Digital Humanities
My research interests include early modern history, European literature and the digital humanities.