The Internet and computers made that nothing is lost, everything is transformed. Technologies that are being forgotten replaced by more modern ones have a second incarnation in digital format allowing those who did not know them can experiment through software and web pages, something similar to their use in the real world.
For a long time, the telegraph was the main means of long-distance communicationIt was only in the first decade of this century, with email and text messages fully installed, that the main operators stopped offering the service.
The Morse code
In 1837 Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail began the development of a system that allowed to send and receive messages quickly by means of an electric telegraph that they were developing.. They opted for a system of electrical signals of different intensity that in turn could be represented graphically by dots and lines. Each letter of the alphabet and punctuation marks corresponds to a combination of dots and dashes.
For example:
In every right triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the legs.
It would look like:
. -. / - --- -.. --- / - .-. .. .--.- -. --. ..- .-.. --- / .-. . -.-. - .--.- -. --. ..- .-.. --- / . .-.. / -.-. ..- .- -.. .-. .- -.. --- / -.. . / .-.. .- / .... .. .--. --- - . -. ..- ... .- / . ... / .. --. ..- .- .-.. / .- / .-.. .- / ... ..- -- .- / -.. . / .-.. --- ... / -.-. ..- .- -.. .-. .- -.. --- ... / -.. . / .-.. --- ... / -.-. .- - . - --- ... .-.-.-The Morse code corresponding to each letter of the alphabet was assigned taking into account the frequency with which the English language is used.. Later the original code was modified to take into account the frequency of other languages. Hence, the e is represented by. while Z is represented by - ..
Today Morse code is kept alive by ham radio community that has an active participation in the assistance in moments of crisis. Also, as we said at the beginning, on multiple websites and open source projects
Morse code software
This article was born as a result of a joke. Yesterday I proposed on Twitter:
Idea for programmers with free time. A program that converts text to Morse code, saves it to mp3, streams it over the Internet to another program that downloads the audio, and converts the Morse code to text. I just invented the telegraph.
To my surprise, not only did they take me seriously, there was even someone who set out to implement it and upload the code to GitHub when they have time.
That piqued my curiosity to see what software was available, and there seems to be quite a lot on offer.
aldo
This program is only available in the Snap store and seems not to be updated since 2017. The only way to contact its creator is by sending him an email.
It is a morse code learning tool that provides four types of training methods:
- Classic exercise Identify random characters reproduced in morse code.
- Koch method Two morse characters will be played at full speed (20wpm) until the user is able to identify at least 90% of them. Then one more character will be added, and so on.
- File reading: The user must identify the morse code generated from a file.
- Callsign exercise: The student must identify random callsigns reproduced in morse code.
qrq
qrq is an open source Morse telegraphy trainer available for various operating systems (Linux, Unix, OS X, and Windows),
The strength of the program is the training in how quickly the received signal is identified. For this it sends 50 random calls from a database. After each call, the program waits for the user to enter what he has heard and compares the callsign entered with the one sent. If the signal is copied correctly, the speed increases, if there were errors in the input the speed decreases.
The program is in the repositories of Debian-derived distributions and in Snap format. Installers are also available for Windows, Mac, and FreeBSD.
morse-encode-and-decode
It's in the Debian repositories and you can compile the source code by downloading it from GitHub ..
It is a command line tool that converts text to Morse code and vice versa. It has 3 basic commands:
morse-encode-and-decode {-e|-d} {}–List (-l) Displays the morse code.
–encode (-e) Convert text to Morse code. e.g.: morse-encode-and-decode -e «LinuxAdictos! "
–Decode (-d) Convert Morse to text. ex: morse-encode-and-decode -d «..- .. .. -. ..- -..- .- - .. .. -.-. - -… «