A teletype was an electromechanical typewriter that sent and received typed messages over telegraph and phone lines.
Strip away the romance and a teletype is a remarkably clever piece of engineering: a typewriter wired to a communication line.
Teletypes took off in the early 1900s, and the first big adopters were newspapers.
Here's the part that surprises people: when room-sized mainframe computers arrived in the 1950s and 60s, they had no screens.
For all their importance, teletypes had hard limits that newer technology blew past.
Read the complete breakdown, fixes and what happens next.