A British Web developer has built his own steampunk ticker-tape machine which prints out tweets instead of stock prices.
Invented in the 1860s, stock tickers were widely used for around a century, printing out prices which had been sent via telegraph lines.
The tickers may be obsolete in the current super-fast, if temperamental, era of high-frequency trading, but Adam Vaughan says that he finds them fascinating.
He spent three months building his own 'Twittertape' machine from scratch using parts from an old brass clock with a thermal printer and micro-controller inside a wooden base.
An ethernet connection to the Internet lets the machine check Vaughaun's Twitter feed every 30 seconds, printing out messages.
On a dedicated Web site, the inventor says that he is now planning version two, with Wifi and an integrated user control panel to widen the machine beyond Twitter to other Web-based data feeds such as Facebook and RSS.
