ever discovered. Somehow, we never ran out of ribbons, never ran out of paper, and those workhorse machines, the size of a small refrigerator and as heavy as a large one, always seemed to pound away. If you were lucky, you would get the hear the bell ring.  In those days the bulletins seemed sparse, rationed and reserved for what was important rather than what was noteworthy. The more wire machines the better.  In Ottawa, we had five, each with different content, stuffed into a closet away from the main newsroom.  Heavy cartons with rolls of paper were stacked up beside them, each twice as large and twice as heavy as a case of beer. In Toronto we had six machines lined up right in the newsroom. Teletype keys pounding, other typewriters chiming in, tape being edited, audio feeds being recorded, tunes blasting, guys on the phone, two-way radio crackle, tape speeding across the heads of tape decks screeching through rewind or fast forward, conversations, all in a mix rising and falling with its own mysterious cadence, and none of it ever seeming like noise. That was how it was in Toronto, the soundtrack of a newsroom in perfect pitch, anchored by the reassuring rumble and clatter of those big old wire machines.