Technology You Didn't Know Still Existed: The Telegram | Hacker News Reader

Technology You Didn't Know Still Existed: The Telegram

atlasobscura.com

32 pointsadrianhoward16 comments

The present Western Union Money Transfer is not really a descendant of the the Western Union Telegraph Company. It's more of a successor of First Data, the payment systems company. Through a confusing series of mergers and selloffs in the 1980s, involving about five companies, the money transfer business ended up with the Western Union name.

The telegram business was incredibly low-volume by modern standards. In the 1970s, I visited Western Union's international message gateway in Mawah, NJ. Most Atlantic international message traffic passed through a pair of UNIVAC computers. One woman at a CRT terminal handled all mail bounces for transatlantic traffic. About once a minute, she had a message to deal with. The computers were not heavily loaded. The tape drive logging traffic for NSA wrote a block every few seconds.

Post-Telegram, Western Union also had a business into the 1980s with the Mailgram. Mailgrams used satellite transmission to send messages to local centers, where it would be printed out and sent via US Mail.

Let's also not forget FedEx's failed ZapMail system, which was faxed documents delivered locally by Federal Express trucks.

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

Oh! That's what caused 60 Hudson St to be, err, 60 Hudson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Hudson_Street

A ridiculously high percentage of the Internet flows through that building, which was once Western Union's HQ.

The part about Oscar Wilde reminds me of another story of attribution, relayed by Dr Jerry Pournelle: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view24...

> Someone recently asked about the origin of the description of DC/X as "landing on a tail of fire the way God and Robert Heinlein intended rockets should land."

> Although I've used that often, it's a case similar to the time when someone at dinner said something clever, Oscar Wilde said "I wish I'd said that," and someone else said "Don't worry, Oscar, by tomorrow you will have." The origin is Dr. Arlan Andrews...

I would assume Oscar Wilde never said that either. :)

India officially shut its Telegram service 2 years ago [0]. I was nostalgic and used the last day to send a few telegrams to my family and dear ones [1,2].

[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/1018046...

[1] http://i.imgur.com/7GDi8oN.jpg

[2] http://i.imgur.com/OmAhXoB.jpg

I lamented on Facebook that I regretted never receiving a telegram in my life. Having grown up watching people in movies and TV getting telegrams, by the time I hit adulthood, the age of telegrams was largely gone.

A few weeks later, I received a telegram - a friend on Facebook found a service that still does telegrams, and I got it. I think it was rather expensive, but the gesture was still appreciated :)

You can print your own fake telegram as a gift. This is an editable PDF of a classic 1930s Western Union telegraph form. http://www.cthulhulives.org/toybox/propdocs/PropTelegram3.ht... -also- http://www.cthulhulives.org/toybox/propdocs/PropTelegram1.ht...

While not the same thing, you may enjoy testing the NTS (National Traffic System)[0][1] for sending ARRL Radiograms[3].

  [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Traffic_System
  [1] http://www.arrl.org/nts-manual
  [3] http://www.arrl.org/files/file/Public%20Service/RADIOGRAM-2011.pdf

I've never received or sent a telegram. However, in my first full-time job in the early 80s, telex was our primary communications mechanism between our global operations offices (offshore drilling). You (typically) hand-wrote a transmission sheet and sent it up to the communications center which sent it out.

I remember my dad taking me to send a telegram when I was a kid in the 1980s. He told me it was paid by the word, so since he was writing in Vietnamese he'd just join them up and nobody would know any better. Can this be true?

People used to use telegraph ciphers that abbreviated common phrases with unusual words to pay less. The real words was a feature as the telegraph company was suspicious about balderdash, and there was no reason to optimize for character count as it was paid per word (or rather a fixed fee + word fee so it never got cheap).

An example: http://archive.org/stream/unicodeuniversa00unkngoog#page/n3/...

where "Acceptance paid into bank, cannot be withdrawn" becomes abjectio in an early example.

More tragic (under Births): "Confined yesterday, Twins, one alive, a girl, Mother not expected to to live" becomes annexus.

Poignant example. Life use to be much, much less easy.

Excellent link as well, thanks.

It's called Unicode! That's fantastic.

If you can find somebody to deliver a telegram, chances are that you can get in contact with just about anybody other than the president by sending them a telegram.

Think about it - if you receive a telegram would you throw it away or read it?

Towards the end telegrams in the USA were for classy messages. I got an admission acceptance to Stanford grad school via telegram. A couple of job offers too. Ironically the deliver was usually the post office.

` Gosh, I hope hipsters do not discover this.

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