A Few Words About the Telex (2017) | Hacker News Reader

A Few Words About the Telex (2017)

vulcanhammer.info

38 pointstodsacerdoti16 comments

I was intrigued as to what evidence could possibly exist for the argument that Telex "Ring back" codes are the "direct ancestor to the national internet domain identifier" and it turns out to just be a PDF of RFC 1394 which in turn is just a table of country codes from different electronic systems.

So I guess it's a "direct ancestor" only if you squint very hard indeed and conclude that since Telex had country codes and the ccTLDs are newer that makes the Telex codes a "direct ancestor". The ccTLDs are in fact almost exactly the ISO 3166 alpha-2 list, thereby leaving both the hard problems of deciding what a "country" is and what its code should be to ISO and thus in turn its members (who are of course national standards organisations). This sort of buck passing should be a model to us all on fraught political questions.

> This sort of buck passing should be a model to us all on fraught political questions.

Yes, offloading that is a good idea in general ... till you have to interact with people from an affected region. A citizen from Taiwan wants to say they are from Taiwan, however Chinese government won't like you if you provide the option.

The world looks differently depending to whom you talk and you can't always avoid.

But here buck passing gets you, as expected, an acceptable solution. ISO coded "Taiwan (Province of China)" with the two letter code TW.

I'm not too deep in Taiwan as a subject, but I think the Taiwanese government (or rather the government of the Republic of China) isn't too happy with that qualification and wants to stand in their own right, not as a mere province.

In many cases this can be circumvented in an even simpler way: Don't ask, if you don't have to. If you have to ask and can use a free text field do that. If you can't use free text due to dependency on a different provider kick the can down to them and give them responsibility ... and in some cases be flexible (Google Maps shows different borders depending on where a user comes from ... lots of effort of course)

"When the telex was sent, once the connection was made, the paper tape was played back to the receiving telex. In this way the message would not be hindered by slow typing with mistakes."

The purpose of using paper tape was to keep both machines in synchronization, something difficult to achieve using a human typist.

"An introduction to Creed Teleprinters and Punched Tape Equipment"

http://www.samhallas.co.uk/repository/telegraph/

In the early 80s, I worked for an offshore drilling contractor and the vast bulk of our international communications in particular were via Telex. We'd get a message typed up by an admin (no PCs/typewriters for engineers), it would go by inter-office mail to the communications room, and telexed to the rig office. (If communications with the rig itself was needed, they was usually via radio from the base office.)

Great article, and the bit at the end is also very informative.

> In many nations, the total minutes of international Telex still today exceeds that of international telephone traffic.

I have a feeling this write-up is a little bit older than 2017 ;)

It's fascinating though! I was only young when telex was around. Never had hands-on experience with it. When I worked for the local phone company in the late 90s we still had a telex exchange for a handful of customers but it's long gone now.

Here is a list of the availability of telegram services around the world, with no usage numbers though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_use_of_telegrams_by_...

List says that telegram service existed in Poland till 2018 (160 characters message delivered in 6hrs for a price of 43,05PLN - almost 9,50€ and 11,50USD by today's rates [1] - it simply couldn't compete with SMS services anymore which become really cheap or in some service provider cases free) but telex was shut down by Polish Post in 2007, acc to Polish wiki [2]. I still have some telegram wedding invitations somewhere in the attic on something that looks like stationery (bit more fancy than standard form).

[1] - https://www.radiozet.pl/Technologia/Poczta-Polska-rezygnuje-... [2] - https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleks

I think telegram is not equal to telex. From what I’m reading, telegram messages were initially sent between offices by telegraph. In later years, the word has come to simply mean a message that is delivered by the post quickly, regardless of their internal transfer method between offices (which could be telex or later the internet). The list may not be wrong, but it is not on topic.

> I think telegram is not equal to telex

I tried to point out that; at least here in Poland these services were running independently since one was terminated earlier and other one much later - thus, these of course weren't same but the technology used to deliver messages could be. Polish wikipedia mentions telex for telegrams and later WAN network run by Polish Post; smaller offices in the past would receive messages by phone and then manually fill out form that would be delivered to the recipient.

Yeah but stating that the amount of telegrams being higher than the number of international calls... I just doubt it in this day and age of mobile phones.

Telegram and telex are different things.

As recently as 2012 I was involved in a commercial aviation project where one of the external system interfaces was a telex system for meal orders. We had to format the outgoing requests accordingly and accept responses, but actual transmission was handled by a IP2Telex bridge elsewhere on the network.

I have no idea how things looked at the other end. Perhaps it was all a sequence of bridges, with no real telex anywhere on the path.

That's highly possible actually, we also have some virtual fax stuff in our environment, because "fax" is a legal thing (on the level of a registered letter) in some countries - similar to Telex as mentioned in the article. EDI orders don't qualify for this protection in these countries but "faxes" do.

However IP lines don't officially support fax anymore, and it's hard to get analog lines these days. So virtual fax became a thing.

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