I guess some people thought it was a Big Deal, but there were lots of reasons why it didn't go anywhere.
I'd say the overriding one is that with 60 wpm Baudot RTTY the bit length is 22 milliseconds. With 100 wpm ASCII 110 baud the bit length is 9 milliseconds. That means 2.4 times the bandwidth, and correspondingly more noise sensitivity. Maybe for VHF local work it wouldn't matter; but for HF that's a big penalty. And we were already running 500 watts or so to get good copy on RTTY. Other reasons include the plentiful supply of old Baudot Teletype machines, versus having to buy a new one for ASCII, until CRT terminals came along. And so many guys can't even type 60 wpm that the ability to operate at 100 wpm wasn't interesting. And for rag chewing, contests, and DX, the upper case only Baudot character set is entirely sufficient. Of course the earlier ASCII Teletypes were also upper case only. And the lower cost ASCII Teletype, Model 33, had terrible keyboard touch compared with the older Baudot machines. ASCII was advantageous only for applications involving connection to computers, or for applications requiring upper and lower case characters. Teletype's original up/low machines, Model 37 and Model 38, were failures; so it was the CRT terminal business that really made ASCII practical. Jim W6JVE
