Do it by the numbers—digital shorthand

Abstract

Present communications systems transmit single characters in groups of coded pulses between simple terminal equipments. Since English words form only a sparse set of all possible alphabetic combinations, present methods are inefficient when computer systems are substituted for these terminals. Using numeric representations of entire words or common phrases (rather than character-by-character representations) requires approximately one-third of present transmission time. This saving is reflected in overall costs. Other benefits accrue in code and language translation schemes. Provision is made for transmission of purely numeric and/or binary streams, and for single character-transmission of non-dictionary words such as the names of people of places.

Text compression techniques

“…Bemer [2] assigned variable code lengths to words, and represented them by an integral number of bytes ( and thus not optimum as in a Huffman code), the length of any code being indicated by the first bits of the code. This increased the coding speed by sacrificing some coding efficiency.…”