Slashdot Mirror
In India, the Dot Dash Is Done
cold fjord writes that, as promised last month, telegraph service in India is being honorably retired:
"Only 7 years behind the US. From Forbes: '... in India, where I'm now sojourning, telegraph service has survived as a basic means of communication since the British East India Company sent the first telegram from Calcutta to nearby Diamond Harbor in 1850... As of July 15, the state company that runs the telegraph service is shutting it down. ... "For long, the telegraph was eyed with suspicion as an emblem of imperial rule," editorialized The Indian Express ... "Yet it brought various parts of the country together and eventually entered the traffic of everyday life. When the telegraph winds up, one of the oldest markers of a modern India will be lost. Stop" — the word that typically ended brief telegraphic phrases rather than periods. Until fairly recently, several hundred thousand messages a day moved over the wires of the telegraph system ...' From NBC: 'When it was completed in 1856, the Indian telegraph stretched over 4,000 miles ... Tom Standage, author of "The Victorian Internet" writes, the early telegraph networks were responsible for "hype, skepticism, hackers, on-line romances and weddings, chat-rooms, flame wars, information overload, predictions of imminent world peace."'"
I'd like to know how a chat room worked on a telegraph.
< > ! * ' ' #
. /
, , SYSTEM HALTED
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
^ " ` $ $ -
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
! * = @ $ _
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
% * < > ~ # 4
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
& [ ] .
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
| {
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.
http://poetry.about.com/od/poetryplay/l/blwakawaka.htm
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
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Landline penetration was never good in India.
Hence telegrams were used by people who wanted to contact people without telephones urgently.
Also telegrams were common during weddings even upto 10 years ago. People who were in cities other than were the couple were getting married typically sent their best wishes to the address given in the wedding card because people won't be at home on that day to pick up the telephone. And telegrams had 20-25 numeric codes for standard messages which made it cheap to send telegrams. If the message you wanted to send was one of the standard 20-25 messages you just send the number as the telegram rather than the message. The receiving telegram office would convert it back to the full message before delivering.
Cell phones essentially killed both of the above scenarios. And cell phone in India is massive as compared to land lines ever were.
This wasn't using Morse, in fact outside amateur radio, Morse hasn't really been used for several decades now. Until 2010 this would have been using teletype printers, likely using baudot or Murray code, neither of which use a dash even if one-off keyed. In 2010 the. Company in India upgraded.to a 'web based system's, according to Wikipedia.
one way to catch dudes is Google
Your lifestyle is none of my business, but this isn't the place.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It is a period. This is like saying that people used a dash instead of a hyphen.
Though a stop and a period are the same, a dash is not a hyphen:
The hyphen () is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen should not be confused with dashes ( –, — ), which are longer and have different uses, or with the minus sign, which is also longer.
Telegrams were prefixed with a routing number (telex number), similar to a phone number, and name. The telex number was usually the number of the receiving office... Most telegram systems used worldwide employed a "store and forward" type of system where they would get the telegram from the originating office, wait for the the trunks to be open to the larger offices that consolidated multiple regions together, and then sometimes sent it to the larger office via other trunks. Then the process would reverse sending the message down trunks as they opened up to the smaller offices.
Of course, most of this became moot when the old copper lines were decommissioned in most countries in the late 1990's and early 2000's. The US and most of Europe switched to routing the telex messages over the internet. Many countries quickly moved to the same platform after. I don't think anything lives in Western's telecommunication office on 60 Hudson in NYC anymore..
one way to catch dudes is Google
Your lifestyle is none of my business, but this isn't the place.
Darn! Got the P 180 degrees off.
The es was meant, I had to really look at it till I saw the error, I LOL myself.
But out side business most common people got telegrams bearing death notices. India is a very hot country and usually bodies are cremated within 24 hours. Certain religious ritual need a certain relatives to be present at the cremation. Usually the wife's family (whether the husband dies or the wife) plays an important roles in the rites and the property settlements that follows soon after. Husband's brothers would usually be in the same village, but again sometimes they need to be sent for. Sons/daughters also need to be sent out for urgently. It is not uncommon to actually send messengers out for very important relatives. So for most common people only death notices are important enough to use the expensive, so many rupees per word, messages.
Middle class folks would also send congratulatory telegrams for weddings they could not attend. The custom again requires certain relatives must be present for weddings, but if they could not be, spending money to send telegrams carries the subtext, "sorry I could not attend, see I am spending expensive telegram, so it shows that I value the relationship a lot, I beg forgiveness for being able to attend". I have heard of people sending double telegrams.
In a PGWodehouse novel Betram Wooster and his aunt Dhalia exchange some 10 telegrams or so in one afternoon. I found that to be a lot more hilarious than most other people because my prior notions about what a telegram signifies.
Once the commercial messages went to SMS basically the market disappeared for telegrams.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
one way to catch dudes is Google
Your lifestyle is none of my business, but this isn't the place.
Are you kidding? What could be more of a sausage party than slashdot? Gay-sausage-party dot com?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Kindly do the needful. STOP. Warmest regards. STOP
is this dot Indian or dash Indian we're talking about?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
There is still telegraph service in India. It's just the state run provider shutting down.
Source
A century ago telegrams were sent using morse, but in the last 80 years or so, a 'telegram' doesn't / didn't mean 'morse code.'
...same deal in India. Telex, not morse
When Roger O. Thornhill sends a telegram in North by Northwest it would have gone by telex machine. The 'Congratulations!' telegrams we sent and received in my youth were sent by telex.
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/800px-Telex_machine_ASR-32-640x426.jpg
Hundreds of people thronged the 75 telegraph offices remaining in the country to send their last telegrams to friends or family as a keepsake.
Some BSNL employees suggested that had the activity throughout the year been that high, the service would probably not have been ended.
There's one guy at the NSA that just got his world crushed... because this was his job. Spying on telegraph systems. Poor guy.