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Belgium Ends 19th-Century Telegram Service (bbc.com)

Belgium's telegram service is about to stop. From a report: One hundred and seventy-one years after the first electrical message was transmitted down a line running alongside the railway between Brussels and Antwerp the final dispatch will be sent and received on 29 December. The fact that this 19th-Century technology is still up and running in the age of Instagram and Snapchat may seem rather odd -- especially when you consider that the UK, which invented the telegram in the 1830s, abandoned it as long ago as 1982. The United States followed suit in 2006 and even India, which had been by far the world's biggest market for the telegram, finally closed its system down in 2013.

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  1. Re:Stop by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You know this sounds like a fun project for kids with a Raspberry PI. Program the PI to receive Morse code, translate it to the actual text. Send it over the internet via SSH to an end point, where it would decode the message, and play the Morse Code back onto a ticker tape writer. All the nostalgia without having dedicated cable.

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    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.