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Western Union Ends Telegram Services
Snap E Tom writes "As of this past Friday, Western Union has stopped sending telegrams. The article cites factors such as long distance telephone and faxes that contributed to its demise, but email was the final nail. My hunch is that modern USPS and overnight delivery services did the most damage, though."
It was Newton who first said that, and he meant it as a cruel joke against a short man.
Western union may have ended thier telegram service, but radio telegrams are still alive and well. Amateur radio service still uses RTs in emergency communications. The art of "traffic handling" as it's called is still encouraged by the ARRL. Here's a document that explains proper formatting of a radio telgram.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
and switched to Telemessages, which were Telex based with overnight delivery. Business telemessage services are still in the hands of BT Accurate but the personal service was sold off in 2003. What now for Telex though?
Retro-Gram provides the style and class of vintage telegrams with the speed and convenience of e-mail. Their free service will format your message as PDF in any of a half dozen vintage telegram formats and send it by email. For a fee, they will print your Retro-Gram and send it by snail mail.
as well, presumably due to competition by PayPal. Too bad, as it was a good way to accept international eBay auction payments without PayPal fees or having to go to a Western Union outlet to collect the money...
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That would be "Candygram for Mongo"!
Today most people have cell phones. Text messaging directly to people would replace telegrams.
I don't know if the network still exists, but the last time I looked into it, there was still a lot of infrastructure set up to handle telexes, especially internationally.
I just did a quick Google and it seems that International Telex (that's Telex with a capital T, as opposed to 'telex' as the generic term) has either changed its or been bought out by somebody else called Citycomm.
They claim that "Telex is still the only legally recognized method of sending an electronic message. Facsimile (Fax) and electronic mail (E-mail), contrary to popular belief, do not constitute a legal document. Telex messages are used in the banking and brokerage industry to electronically confirm billions of dollars in financial transactions daily."
So I guess the market is pretty safe, for now anyway.
What I can't figure out is whether the telex networks that used to exist are still around anymore. It seems easy to believe that they just got absorbed into the Internet, but they were pretty interesting when they were operating. I don't pretend to understand it completely, but it was a separate system from regular voice phone lines, and Telex numbers (I think) had a different number of digits. I still have business cards of my father's that list a Telex number, although not with me to look at right now.
It seems like the telex systems used now are just operating on the regular PSTN network, similar to fax machines.
If anybody here uses telex services today and wants to comment on how they work, I'd be interested in what the situation is like.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
i find Xoom to be cheaper than WU for the transfers i have to do, and they seem pretty reliable though i don't think they have as big a network of agents as WU.
They are still widely used at weddings where it is customary to send a telegram if you can't make it to the reception. They are never used for business purposes anymore, as the motifs available are all roses, wedding couples etc.
He said it as a put-down to his rival Hooke, who was of little physical height and notable shortness.
> First, the telegraph was the first binary "digital" device. It communicated information using dots and dashes.
.... could be "eeee" or "h", for example.
Wrong. It uses dots, dashes, and pauses. If you don't pause between letters, they blur together and the meaning becomes ambiguous.
So it's not binary, it's tri-nary.
My other car is first.
Actually, he said 'binary "digital" device', so it's unclear if he knew the difference between the terms. In common parlance binary and digital are used almost interchangeably.
Let's review:
Digital: Having only a finite set of symbols to choose from (as opposed to analog, which can have an infinite set of permissible values/signal levels/pulse shapes). By this definition, Morse code is clearly digital, even though the opportunities for doing fancy signal processing are limited.
Binary: A subset of digital, in which only two symbols are permitted. These symbols can be almost anything, really: a dot versus a dash, a 1 versus a 0, a higher frequency versus a lower one, etc.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
Here's the page for the IAU: Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams which explains how to submit discoveries. (IAU = International Astronomical Union.) They seem to have gone to email mainly, and yes, spam is a problem. Text only messages please! (Submit CCD images seperately.) And you probably want to stick to the format developed for telegrams.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.