The encoding for this cache location was used in telex machines going back as far as 1910. The original Baudot code was invented by Emile Baudot in 1870, this was modified by Donald Murray at around 1900. The modified code is still referred to in a lot of places as Baudot. It's amazing to think how long the fundamental system of serial communications has been around. To this day, your PC's COM ports work on the same principles as those old mechanical telex machines. The only difference is that an 8 bit ASCII code is used, and the baud rate is probably a little faster than the 50 baud used back then! Oh and I guess you can see where "baud" came from now. As well as on landlines, the telegraph system was used - and still is - on various radio frequencies, including short waves. This would be the source of a lot of those funny warbling sounds you may have heard when tuning around the short wave bands. When the transmissions were about to start, they would often start with an "RYRY" pattern. This was like a lead-in which could be used to verify that the teleprinter properly synced up to the data stream. The significance of those two letters were that they produced alternate 1 and 0 codes. interestingly, the coding doesn't follow a logical pattern like ASCII where the codes for letters and numbers go up in order. The code was in fact chosen so that the more commonly used letters were allocated codes that corresponded to the least number of mechanical movements in the teleprinter in order to minimise wear.
The only other thing you have to work out is how the alphabet of 26 letters, 10 numbers, and a few punctuation marks were fitted into a 5 bit code which only has 32 combinations. Here is the code:
01010 10101 01010 10101 10000 10100 00001 00100 01110 00011 01110 10100 00001 00100 00110 00101 00100 10010 11000 01110 00011 10000 00001 01001 00100 00011 10000 00100 01100 00100 11011 10000 10111 00100 11111 01001 00001 11010 01010 00001 00001 00101 00100 11011 10111 11000 11100 10101 10110 10011 00100 11111 11100 00110 01100 00111 10000 00001 00101 00100 10011 00100 11011 10110 10110 10111 00100 11111 01001 00001 11010 01010 00001 00001 00101 00100 11011 10011 01010 11100 00001 10000 00001 00100 11111 11100 00110 01100 00111 10000 00001 00101 00100 01010 10101 01010 10101
The cache is a large ammo box. If the weather has been wet, wellies are strongly advised!
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