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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Like the pneumatic tube, messenger pigeons and French, this aging medium is here to stay.
Dec 5, 2000 | The first time I knew for sure I was looking at a telex machine, a magnificent cabinet-sized workstation of a beast, was in the early '70s sci-fi film "The Andromeda Strain" I watched on my mother's black-and-white television.
"The Andromeda Strain" was a bit like the Dustin Hoffman film "Virus," only 20 years earlier and much more fun. This was back before the grunge and clutter of "Bladerunner" or "Alien" -- back when the future was still futuristic.
They had all the great equipment. There were secret underground government laboratories with squeaky white curving corridors, flashing lights, a big impressive computer that never went down and, of course, a telex machine.
In a crucial plot development, a telex to Washington goes unnoticed because a loose scrap of paper jams the telex machine's ... bell.
A rather puritanical little boy at the time, I was seriously offended by this. What was a mechanical bicycle bell doing in the middle of all this gleaming high-tech stuff? And why didn't those white-coated ones simply link their big, impressive computer up to Washington's big, impressive computer with -- you know, a wire?
Of course, in reality, the white-coated ones were linking up computers with wires -- the phone system -- back at this time in the '70s. They were creating the Internet; they just weren't telling Hollywood (or me) about it.
Somewhere between "The Andromeda Strain" and my adulthood, the telex lost its place in the gleaming futurism of the popular imagination. Which is to say: People forgot about it. And that's why I had a sense of vertigo -- of traveling through time -- when people at the fringes of Europe started giving me business cards with telex numbers on them.
And not just the fringes of Europe, either. A quick perusal of German commercial Web sites, for example, reveals a surprising number of telex addresses, right up there alongside the phone number, e-mail and street address. That's right, Web sites that give out telex numbers. This, of course, is pure German thoroughness: Fax if you have fax, phone if you have phone, and if you have telex, then, telex. Naturlich.
This is mighty considerate of those Germans, considering that for most of us, telex remains about as obscure and cumbersome a means of communication as, say, the ham radio. But just as the ham radio is kept alive through the enthusiasm of its aficionados, so the telex keeps on telecommunicating -- thanks to a combination of convenience, economy, protocol and just plain inertia that may keep it going into the next century.
Sometimes it can be awfully hard to kill off an old medium. Not so long ago telex was the very epitome of the up-to-date, the ruthlessly new. The wonderfully crisp, minimal black-on-white Reuters logo of decades of yore (simply the word Reuters written in the black holes of the punched tape some teleprinters use) perfectly echoed the utilitarian authority of the machine that delivered no-frills, up-to-the-second information.
Then, suddenly, telex started to look square, and, in the mid-'90s, Reuters made an awkward shift to today's hesitant, tinted version of its logo, with more dots and a fussy little bi-colored disc. The new Reuters logo hints at the unspoken fear that news agencies may soon look as outmoded as punched tape.
We should relax. Though telex use may not be quite as robust as it was in the days of yore, it still holds a place among the ways we communicate with each other. Viva telex.
