ITA2 Telegraph Emulator

Feb 13, 2025 · 1 min read
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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.

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.

JavaScript Interactive Teaching
Clément Godbarge
Authors
Clément Godbarge
Lecturer in Digital Humanities
Clément Godbarge is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of St Andrews. His research revolves around science and statecraft in early modern Europe. In his forthcoming book, he examines how doctors embedded at the courts of sixteenth-century France and Italy promoted themselves as political experts of a new genre. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the Renaissance Society of America, and Harvard University.