Morse Code Explorer 2.0f

A program that will enable you to explore the wonders of Morse Code
2
3


The Morse Code Explorer application was designed to be a program that will enable you to explore the wonders of Morse Code.

With this program, you can :
- Decode a Morse Code string.
Simply type in a series of DOTs (full stops) and DASHes (minus signs) and seperate each seperate morse code by a space, and the program will convert it to text for you.
- Encode text into Morse Code.
Simply type in text and the program will convert it to Morse Code for you. All characters not included in Morse's Code are ignored.
- Display all Morse Code codes for each letter in the alphabet.
i.e. a quick reference chart.

When Samuel Morse decided to use an alphabetical system of signals for his newly invented telegraph, he consulted a Philadelphia newspaper's typecase. Morse desired to assign the shorter dot-and-dash symbols used for telegraph transmission to the more commonly used letters of the alphabet, while some of the longer dot-and-dash symbols would be used for less frequently used characters.

In counting the type in each letter bin, he found 12,000 e's, 9,000 t's, 8,000 each of a, o, m, i, and s, 6,400 h's, and so on. With few exceptions, Morse followed this list in developing his teletype code, assigning the
shortest symbol, a dot, to the letter "e", the most common letter. The symbol dash, was assigned to the letter t, the next most common symbol.

Modern International Morse Code only differs slightly from Morse's original Morse Code. The duration of a dot equals one dot-unit, a dash equals three dot-units, the space between dots and dashes of a letter equals 1 dot-unit, and the space between letters equals three dot units.

The transmission of an English message consisting of 100 letters requires the transmission of approximately 940 dot-units. If, instead of assigning symbols logically, they had been assigned at random, then the same 100 letter message would take 1160 dot-units - an increase of about 23%.

This encoding technique represents the earliest application of Statistical Compression for data transmission, and permits almost 25% more messages on a telegraph line during a peak period, than if dot-and-dash symbols were assigned at random.