neonzx wrote: ↑Mon May 17, 2021 12:43 pm
Maybenaut wrote: ↑Mon May 17, 2021 12:31 pm
I used to earn my living as a Morse Code operator.
Do you think youth don't have an awareness of what Morse Code is? I don't know-it know it. And it's still referenced and used in present-day movies that have a military premise. Is it still used today, or does Hollywood just throw it in as something that sounds cool?
The US military stopped using morse code as a means of communicating *among its own units* probably in the 1970s - 80s at the latest - when faster, more reliable, and more secure forms of communication became available. But it was still used for other purposes.
I was in the Coast Guard, and we used it to communicate with the merchant fleet for things like weather observations, position reports (which we collected and tracked in a database, because the nearest vessel to a vessel in distress was likely another merchant ship), and distress messages. Until the mid-90s the International Convention on the Safety of Life at Sea required that certain government organizations maintain the ability to receive and respond to distress messages over morse code (SOS doesn’t actually stand for anything, it’s just rhythmically attention-getting). But morse code is slow, and it takes a good two years of doing it every day to be any good at it, so it’s expensive in terms of man-power. So as soon as SOLAS no longer required it, the Coast Guard dropped it.
Other services used it (and may still use it - I don’t really know) to keep track of (ie spy on) other government’s armies.
"Hey! We left this England place because it was bogus, and if we don't get some cool rules ourselves, pronto, we'll just be bogus too!" -- Thomas Jefferson