I worked in a NATO HQ in the early 1980s. Part of my job was to deploy to an alternate war HQ location for exercises. My team had its own miniature signals comcen, where our handwritten “signals” would be passed through to our operators. They would key them in and take the feed through a crypto and output to 5-unit punch paper tape, which they would hand in to the main comcen for transmission in the main network. I was really impressed when a US officer came on a liaison visit and brought with him an Osborne micro. He composed his “signals” with a keyboard on the Osborne, there was onboard encryption and the output went to a punch paper tape printer. Then he would walk his signals round to the main comcen with an addressing sheet and they would dispatch. Cutting out the middleman!
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What a great mix of the new and the old, an Osborne and a paper tape punch!