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Lost technology

Something I was reading this morning triggered a memory from the 1980s.

This memory made me realise just how many forms of electronic communications have fallen by the wayside and effectively been replaced with just the internet.

I mean, does anyone still have a fax machine in their home or office these days?

Of course not -- after all, who even has a landline now?

Fortunately, we have left that awful, allegedly carcinogenic thermal paper behind and now we can simply email documents across the face of the planet in just a second or two.

However, faxes aren't the only tech that's gone the way of the dodo.

With bandwidth highly constrained by the technology of the day, any form of long-distance communications was horrifically expensive and also not particularly flexible.

The Telex machine was a great example of this.

Although few small businesses had a telex number, most larger corporations did.

You could "telex" a message from your machine to another even more easily than you could send a fax and at a lower cost, if the distance was significant. However, the telex machine was just a keyboard and printer, there was no graphics capability and it was also slow and clunky. In effect, it simply automated the telegram.

And speaking of telegrams -- yep, they're gone too.

I recall, as a lad of just seven or eight, being given a tour of the telegram room in our local Post Office.

There were a couple of people (a man and a woman as I recall) who were sitting at desks where the telegraph machines whirred away. They could type in the words (all upper-case) and also watch while a thin paper tape was spat out onto which were printed the text of incoming telegrams.

Looking back, it was so clunky. Those strips of paper tape would be cut with scissors and then run across a glue roller before being stuck to a "telegram" form that was then placed in an envelope. That envelope was placed in a tray and another man would come in every half hour or so (apparently), collect the envelopes and deliver them by hand to the recipients.

All that overhead, all those people -- just to move a few terse words from the sender to the adressee. No wonder sending a telegram was so expensive and charged for by the letter.

One upside of all this cost and complexity was that you knew you'd never receive spam by telegram.

The final bit of outmoded tech was also to be found in that telegram room.

Beside the clicking, clunking telegram machines was a morse key. Apparently that key was backup to the machines and was connected to the next town down the road. If the telegram machines failed for any reason, emergency communications could be relayed by a skilled operator using that key and the little box beside it -- which clicked in concert with the sender's key, all those miles away.

Wow.

And now we just pull out our phone, take a selfie or a video and within seconds it can be viewed by someone half a world away -- for just a few cents.

To be honest, when you consider how far electronic communications has come, I'm surprised that it hasn't changed the world even more than it has.

Carpe Diem folks!

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