Today, for the first time in my life, I received a telex message.
Our office does not have a teletypewriter connected to a circuit switched network. We do not even have a local loop terminating from the exchange to our office - all we have now is packet switched optical fiber.
The only time I've seen an actual teletypewriter was as a schoolchild, while visiting the Times of India office on Bahadur Shah Zafar Road in Delhi. I don't remember if it had ticker tape hanging out of it, with a message punched in 5 bit binary (ITA2 or Baudot-Murray code).
International shipping law requires electronic bills of lading to be sent by telex. So a shipper digitally stamped the word "telex" onto a computer generated document and emailed us the PDF.
Although I've never used a teletypewriter, I use descendants of it every day. It is bad day when I must exclusively use digital devices that do not have a tty compatible text terminal (Android, and the forsaken cmd in Windows).
Teletype highlights how incremental human technological progress is. Nothing we invent really ever goes away - we just keep bolting on newer features as the edifice grows. ITA2 lives on in ASCII and serial communication. Baudot lives on in baud rates. Sholes' typewriter lives on in the Qwerty keyboard I am using to type this message. And teletypes live on in the text and graphical terminal consoles that we simply refer to as "my computer's display and keyboard" in everyday parlance.
(It's always interesting when a bit of history comes along and makes you pause and reflect in the middle of a busy work day.)
Our office does not have a teletypewriter connected to a circuit switched network. We do not even have a local loop terminating from the exchange to our office - all we have now is packet switched optical fiber.
The only time I've seen an actual teletypewriter was as a schoolchild, while visiting the Times of India office on Bahadur Shah Zafar Road in Delhi. I don't remember if it had ticker tape hanging out of it, with a message punched in 5 bit binary (ITA2 or Baudot-Murray code).
International shipping law requires electronic bills of lading to be sent by telex. So a shipper digitally stamped the word "telex" onto a computer generated document and emailed us the PDF.
Although I've never used a teletypewriter, I use descendants of it every day. It is bad day when I must exclusively use digital devices that do not have a tty compatible text terminal (Android, and the forsaken cmd in Windows).
Teletype highlights how incremental human technological progress is. Nothing we invent really ever goes away - we just keep bolting on newer features as the edifice grows. ITA2 lives on in ASCII and serial communication. Baudot lives on in baud rates. Sholes' typewriter lives on in the Qwerty keyboard I am using to type this message. And teletypes live on in the text and graphical terminal consoles that we simply refer to as "my computer's display and keyboard" in everyday parlance.
(It's always interesting when a bit of history comes along and makes you pause and reflect in the middle of a busy work day.)