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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
If a fax is like two photocopiers connected via phone line, telex is like two typewriters. Type in your message on one end, and the person at the other end reads just that, printed out from the teleprinter on their end.
Telex is not, by and large, about packet-switching -- the process by which little chunks of labeled data, as in e-mails, make their way across the network to reassemble at the other end. Like telephones in their plainest form, telex opens a line, two machines at each end greet each other and text is transferred.
The popularity of telex predates that of the fax machine. Fax technology became prominent in the '70s, when Japanese manufacturers began using it for their domestic market.
Speakers of Japanese and Chinese aren't the world's most ardent typewriter users. You wouldn't be either if you had a written language with 5,000 word symbols. You'd want to be able to scribble a quick note by hand and send a photocopy of it down the phone. So the Japanese made fax technology happen.
But outside Japan, telex just kept on working. Why? People liked it. Or they were just used to it. Or, maybe, there are a few things about telex that other technologies just don't offer.
Like telephones, telex is capable of a few clever tricks. Just as some lines can support 60 phone conversations at once (where each sweet nothing is chopped up into little slices, squashed smaller to fit down the line in real time and then separated and unsquashed in numbered order at the other end), similar things can be done to make telex waste less network capacity. As most of it is more one-way than phone talking, telex is even easier to shoehorn into spare blips of bandwidth than telephone chat in the same way.
And there's the answerback code. Telex machines give senders confirmation -- with rather more certainty than fax machines -- that they got your message at the other end.
But why even bother with telex when we have e-mail?
1) Lots of companies do not have a computer or a modem. The world is bigger than we thought.
2) Telex is easy and familiar. Most companies have a computer with a modem, but that doesn't mean employees are comfortable with them.
3) Telex is the status quo. Some business sectors are still grouped around networks of firms with established routines of sending and receiving telexes each day. This penalizes any individual firm that tries to upgrade ahead of whatever ponderous association decides things by consensus for that industry.
Last year at Manchester Airport in Britain, I missed the last train home to my mother's village because of flight delays. Air France agreed to pay for my taxi across the north of England, but before I could be sure of its reimbursement, the handling agent and I had to sit two hours in the airport until 1 a.m. waiting for Air France in Paris to send him ... a telex.
Last month an American building consultant friend in Budapest was baffled to get a fax from DHL asking him to send a telex to Hungarian Customs to release a package. He had to go to a hotel to send one.
4) Inertia. Could telex be to electronic media what the French language is to international diplomacy?
Look at how long people have continued to take French seriously as an international language, almost two centuries after France lost North America and Egypt. No one really knows why French is still on the list. It just stays there, wasting the time of generation after generation of English-speaking schoolchildren who could instead be learning Chinese, Arabic or Japanese.
French clings on, popping up on your postage coupons, at the Olympics, in the United Nations.
And so it is with telex. Having been red-taped into some of those very same international protocols, telex may have inherited the survival skills of French.
But does telex have any actual advantages? Does it deserve, for any technical reasons, to have survived this long?
1) No one sends junk mail to telex addresses.
2) Telex is rarely hacked. It could be, but most hackers don't find doing so particularly interesting. Telex viruses? Nope.
3) Once installed, telexes are robust and simple. Telex takes up less bandwidth and breaks down less frequently than fax, for example.
4) On the same principle, since most telexes in use have been in use for eons, they're cheap to use, and were paid down years ago.
5) In the kinds of places where the telex machine still looks new (think Mongolia, Chad, Paraguay), it may be the simplest, most direct means of communication.
(Note to international business people: When trying to reach an exotic location -- a nickel mine in Siberia, a ministry in Morocco -- always try sending a telex. That office may only get two telexes a week, and if your telex machine helps justify someone's job, you've done a good thing. Plus, as a Westerner, you probably stand alone in using telex. Most of your competition won't bother.)
6) Telex messages are concise and to the point -- not unlike text messages between mobile phones, known as SMS, for "Short Message Service."
In Europe in 1999, 12 billion SMS messages were sent between mobile phones. SMS is primarily a cellphone capability, but why not broaden our technological horizons a bit? Telex and SMS would be natural friends if they only got to know each other.
Both are for very basic, short, functional text messages. They both use an austere, even spartan, character set. Both carry messages like:
MEET ME AT 12 EST ANDY
And in neither medium does anyone whine that the capital letters mean you are "shouting" or showing inadequate "netiquette."
So it would be bundles of fun if people started to send SMSs to telex machines (what some people in the poor world have instead of mobile phones) and telex messages to mobile phones (what some people in the rich world have instead of telex machines).
As long as you know the callback code and the telex address, it is certainly possible to send an e-mail to a telex terminal on some systems. Since people already use mobile phones to contact e-mail addresses, it's just a step away from sending SMSs to the only other place where no one blinks at getting single-line messages with bad grammar -- telex machines.
