The earliest Morse telegraphy systems were actually built around paper tape. Operators figured out that they could transcribe directly from the sound of the machine, obviating the need for the costly and difficult to deploy equipment. The skill developed from there with equipment evolving to accommodate human operators in real time.
"Someone whose timing is off might shorten the gap between characters enough that it might run dashes from the end of one character and the start of the next together."
Variations between operators exist and specific operators can be identified by their "fist" alone, but the variations are consistent for a given sender so receivers adapt relatively easily. Noise is the bigger problem. Energy from a lighting strike a thousand miles away ricocheting around the ionosphere can wipe out lots of dits and dahs and receivers either correct incoherent transmissions when they can or request something be repeated.
The earliest Morse telegraphy systems were actually built around paper tape. Operators figured out that they could transcribe directly from the sound of the machine, obviating the need for the costly and difficult to deploy equipment. The skill developed from there with equipment evolving to accommodate human operators in real time.
"Someone whose timing is off might shorten the gap between characters enough that it might run dashes from the end of one character and the start of the next together."
Variations between operators exist and specific operators can be identified by their "fist" alone, but the variations are consistent for a given sender so receivers adapt relatively easily. Noise is the bigger problem. Energy from a lighting strike a thousand miles away ricocheting around the ionosphere can wipe out lots of dits and dahs and receivers either correct incoherent transmissions when they can or request something be repeated.