Slashdot Mirror
India To Send World's Last Telegram
New submitter afarhan writes "India will pull the plug on its 160-year-old telegram service on 14 July, this year. This will probably be the last telegram ever sent in the world. However, telegrams are still relevant in this vast country. More than 500 million people are still without access to a phone or Internet. For these people, telegram still remains the only digital communication available. 'At their peak in 1985, 60 million telegrams were being sent and received a year in India from 45,000 offices. Today, only 75 offices exist, though they are located in each of India's 671 districts through franchises. And an industry that once employed 12,500 people, today has only 998 workers.' In India, telegram is also considered a legal correspondence."
Reports say that as India pulls the plug on the system the last telegram in its buffers will be Ambassador Zimmerman asking Mexico if it would like to join Germany in attacking America. India reported to be indifferent on the subject.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
When Western Union discontinued its telegraph service in 2006, it sold off the network to iTelegram, which inexplicably still seems to be in business.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Well sorry for the Article but it's actually false :) Telegram is still alive and kicking in Europe ... for instance in Belgium where you can still send Telegrams right now !
Here is the national telecommunication operator page about it :
www.belgacom.be/en/private/products-and-services/fixed-telephony/options-and-services/other-services?page=p_other_services_available
Telegram
There are several formulas to choose from:
Comfort Telegram
A telegram ordered via the post.
With an illustration for offering condolences or congratulations.
Without an illustration.
The Standard National Telegram
The "conventional", revised and corrected telegram delivered by Taxipost, our courier service. Telegrams sent before midday are delivered the same day; those sent after midday are delivered the next working day at the latest.
The Flash Telegram
The quickest method. As soon as our telegraph operators receive your telegram, our courier service makes a special delivery as quickly as possible. It is also possible to send a Flash Telegram and add a gift.
For international messages, your telegram will be sent by our telegraphists to the country of destination. It is delivered in accordance with the terms and conditions of express delivery in the country concerned.
Is appears the article is wrong about telegram services ending over all, and they actually won't Stop
TELEGRAPH SERVICE SHUTTING DOWN TELL MOTHER RAJESH MUST LEARN TWITTER FOLLOW ME AT ANAND UNDERSCORE BANDYOPADHYAY STOP
(Silly filter, telegrams *are* printed in all caps). Lorem ipsum something something dies irae dies illa solvet seclum in favilla.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Morse code does not necessarily a binary system. If sent by a machine, I could buy that, but it was designed to be sent by humans using a key. Later a two paddle bug was often used to speed up the code. One paddle sent a stream of dits, and the other keyed the dahs. you could vary the speed of the dits using a dial, but you varied the dahs using the paddle itself. Good operators would shorten the dahs, and use the fastest dits they could manage. So, you might use a dit from 40 wpm, but a dah from 45 wpm. The end result was code that was fairly easy to decode by a human operator, but difficult to decode by a machine. The best machines that I saw had an accuracy of about 85%, which was not good enough.
Later electronic bugs had two paddles that shaped both the dits and the dahs, but because the operator varied the space in between the elements you ended up with the same issues
A digital replacement for morse code was the Baudot Code
.This used machine generated and read code. Early systems used a punch tape as storage medium.
I was a trained and certified Wireless Station Operator, when I first qualified I could send and receive 20> wpm using a stick (pencil) and hand key
The end of the article gave me a chuckle. A guy is threatening to go on a hunger strike to keep the service going, insisting that it's a vital tool for fighting corruption ( presumably gov't corruption ) He sent his demands to the PM and others, via telegram of course. But someone at the telegraph office viewed the telegram as "objectionable" and have chosen not to deliver it.
So while India might still accept telegrams as legal documents, having a communications medium that requires a man-in-the-middle to function seems to be one that is too easily thwarted by the man in the middle.
Hopefully the guy on the hunger strike backed up his telegram with an email.
> binary, by itself, doesn't (I'm pretty sure but may be mistaken) confer "digital" status.
The defining distinction between digital and analog is that analog can represent a continuous range, whereas digital can only represent specific values. A phonograph, for example, can represent an infinite range of values between silence and full volume. A CD, on the other hand, can only encode certain volumes, not any in between. That's what makes a phonograph analog and a CD digital. Therefore, binary is BY DEFINITION digital - it uses just two values, not an infinite range
That's good and bad for both. With digital, you get back EXACTLY what you debt, with no degradation. With analog, you can receive a signal even if it can't be received perfectly, because it can receive 0.46 when its not possible to distinguish between 0 and 1.
Since traditional telegraphs consist of only dots and dashes, they are digital, and binary.
Actually no. Silences are meaningful in morse, so it's ternary, not binary.
You even have short and long silences, thus we are talking base 4.