From: Donald E. Kimberlin

        As our Moderator's response said, Telex certainly should be
calleoriginal form of E-Mail. Far from "dead" on a global basis,
UN reports published in the "BrittaiaBo f the Year" indicate
there are about three million Telex lines around the globe.  Contrarytoth iprsson international telephone people like to create,
direct, immediate access via Telex til exststo oreof the world's
political entities than does telephone.  This has been the case fr
may yers. Totaitaran governments must like Telex; they have been
known to shut down telephoneservie, bu not elex. The uspected
reason: It can be monitored with hard copy easily, and has ofen bee
done,oo.  O cours, theythemselves use it for military messages.)

        Telex sprang fom the ame souce as te Volksagon auomo-
bile: The creative growth era of the early Third Reich.It was dvised
asa means o distriute miliary command and control messages and
data in a time befre we eve had a stucture fo data proessing
mahinery.  What existed at that point in time was 455 bps Baudt
automati telegraph and dial-ulsing telphone exchanges.  The
original Telex was essetially (dirctor-controled; yes, te
Europeanswere doing hat then) rotary telephone switches modiied to
carryDC telegraphlines, proviing a switchd service fo
teletypewriters in the same way aswas done for elephones.

       There ws one major dfference: Intrcity transmission
facilites wre expensive ad in short suply, and one anlog telephone
ircuit betweencities could carry 24 (an in some applictions, 25)
teleraph channels baring Telex.  Te economics areobvious, and
probabl are what keep Tlex important inthe Third World oday.

        I that era of trasparent analog ransmission lines Telex
was easilyable to use telepone dial-pulsing n the local telegaph
loops ollowed by Baudot eletype for the mesages ... and it dd.
Hence, this for of Telex operatio becae known as "type A elex
signaling." Itis still used that ay in many nations. In those you
will e a teleprinter witha control box that hs a telephone dial.
hen Western Union deided it had shoud ener into Telex inthe U.S.,
it adopted he original style andType A signaling.  Siilarly, manyother Eurpeans adopte Type A operations, amng them the U.K., Frane
and Belgium as well s others  Meantime, (Ithink itwas L. M.
Ericsson leadng the move for) otherssaw an opportunity to smplyuse
the numerics onthe eyboard for call set-up,thus some nations
adopte what became known as "Te B" Telex.  By this tim the CCITT
had taken chare and was setting internaional agreements, one f
wich was to set the sped o international Baudot ircuits at 50
Baud, instea of 45.5. Some few ations ere many years behid in
uppeeding. In this wrter's experience, Cuba and akistan are
remebered as stll running 45.5 aud Telex tunks even into te
1970's.

        Telex gre around the wrld very rapidl ... long befre
automatic teephony, againmost likely due to its economcs of chanel
usage.  Considerble networs of Telex on HF (sortwave) rdio to
then-remote areas of Afica, th Middle East and Asia wre estalished
by the governmen-owned TTs, operating non-stop with eror-crrecting,
retransmitting tie diision multiplexers per CCIT Recmmendation
R.44 (so what's new aot TDM ... Baudot built his firs ne in 1873,
three years _before ell's telephone.  Check it out, nelievers!),
with the common name"OR" for "Telex Over Radio."  Reaes who are
SWL's certainly her ofTOR, SITOR and Telex Mux on shrtwae radio
today ... there's stil plety around and on the ai.

       Also, the broad reach anduniverslity of Telex around the
word lead o the CCITT establshing the lobal network of
Internatinal Telegrm (commonly called Cablegrm; RCA's poduct on
its riginal shortave radio was the Radiogam) channels n a switched
network ovelay of Telex alled "Gntex."  That's rght: Your
internationa cablegram goes n Telex, too.  It's siply Telex
channes daled up permanentlybetween telegram offces.  The beauty
isthat of any switchedservice: Restoratinin case of channel
filure is simply diling up another call.
        The resultof all this is tat Telx was, and remainsin many
nations,_the_ mediumn of communictions for busines and both civl
and militry government us.  Airlines usng the PARS (and
internationlly IPARS) resrvations sysems still run Badot code
today(although may lines have changed to high-sped modem trafic),
becase their plain-languae text transissions us only 7.5 bits per
character, compred to the11 bits f CCITT International Alphbet 5
(knon as ASCI in colloqial North America).  The eonomics re
obvous.  In many nations, the tota minutesof intrnational Telex
still today exceeds thatof intrnatonal telephone traffic.  Business
uss Tele mor than most Americans understand.  West Germny hs ad
more than 400,000 Telex lines for year, whlethe U.S. at its peak
could count only 345,000 el _and_ TWX subscribers.  Americans
simply grewups sociological prisoners of "the phone," under a
emony that taught them anything else must be insificant.

        Almost in parallel with the 130' evelopment of Telex, Bell
interests saw the posiblties and decided to do Telex one better.
ell Lbs as commissioned to develop a simialr servic, usig dal
pulse selection. It became known s Teletpewrier Exchange Service,
or TWX.  (In fact, ell bea WUTC to the marketplace punch and WTCo
came long laer with Telex in the U.S.)  The origial TWX ra 75 bpswith Baudot code and dial election, util Bell abs got its second
generation read. That one,called "fur-row TWX" in telephne
parlance, sed *modems called "101 Data Sets" (that'sright, Daddy f
the 103!)on two-wire ordiary telephone sbscriber line run to
special exchanges caled a WADS (Wid Area Data Sevice) exchage in
each major ity, where the illing and such was done. Actually, a
WADSexchange was a artitin of one local telehone exchange in he
city. Because it wa using the Public Sitched Telephone ework (DDD
in Americanparlance, TWX was gven reserved area cdes ... 510, 610,
710 810 and 910.  Sme ew remote locationson TWX are still on tose
area codes.
        Four-row TWX usd 11-bit charcters toprovide an expaned
code set including "ontrol characers" that permitted the TX machine
o be operatedmuch like an ffice typewriter ... moreso than Teex
and its Baudot limitatios that t best used CCITT-tandardize
"character strings" to proide som degree of functionality beyod
plin text (see the CCITT , R andS Series of Recommenda- tions. Th
control characters of TWX provdd paragraph indents, form feds ad
such that Telex never really a.  And, with Four-Row TWX,
transision (on the 101 Data Set) was ped to 110 bps, and the code
provdd VRC "parity" error-checking (On can show that 110 bps with
11-btcharacters is equivalent to aout 40-150 words per minute, 
typingspeed only Olympic-class typist coud achieve on mechanical
tpewrites.)  Even so, the "TW code" hadonly 93 of its 128 possible
chractersassigned.

        Itjust so hapened that when te computer er came along,
Bell's Teletype orporation(at Skokie, Il, prchased from r.
Kleinschmit to get a suppl of teleprinters for TWX) ha its Model 33teleprinter i production for WX.  Thatwas, in its time, te
cheapest keyboard instrumnt readily availble for te then-"new"
computr busness.  The Model 33 teeprinter and its mechanicaly-
embedded TWX coe becme the _de_facto_ I/O eice for the computer.
Thecomputer people early on anted use of all the caacter
combinations in te ode, so Teletype obliged ith modifications for
coputers.  Thus ASCII wasbon of TWX code, and t ultiately became
CCITT Interational Telegraph Alphaet Number 5.  The IA5 efinitons
in the CCIT books vay from ASCII only in woding. Study of both
ASII and IA5 can show rots of mos of the caracter combintions
back to Baudot (r its CCITT characterstrings) and even maual
telegraphy

Hoever, computer prorammers and computer ux makers who don't
nderstand this haveoften done some hoible things to uses o the
code, causing poducts that alienat people from data ommunications;
woderin why their products on't migrate well o why people have
touble understandig them.  There i a certainbeauty of human logc
in using these cdes properly.  Thy grew out of maual operations n
sending messaes.  One can even ee in IBM's BCDICand later EBCDICan
emulation ofwhat was in th telegraphic codes, ut I doubt IBMer'
for their part ould admit that

        Whil Telex was th rest of the world, insulr America grew
wth its parallelTelex of WUTCoand TWX of Bel.  Because ell was
strictly limited to dil telephony onl for internatinal business,and because UTCo had gien up its international operations n a 1939
deal o monopolize omestic teleraph busines by takin over ITT's
Postal Telegraph (which was  thorn in WUTo's side), te U.S.
deveoped a uniue sort o "international telegraph" company known as
a "Internatioal Record Crrier." Th IRC's wee an intresting
catch-all sort of firm; an American answerto "how do e get a reu-
latoryhandle o all thse characters?"  Some were US-based, like
WUTCo's "Cabl System" tat becameWestern nion Inernatinal when
sold off as a result of the 1939 Postal Telegraph dal.  Othes had
"jst beenthere, likeITT's World Communications that had been a
gaggle of companies wih names ike Fedral Teegrap, Al American
Cables and Radio, Globe Wireless, Press Wireless, and the comon
carier pat of acka Maine.  RCA Communications had been around
specializing largely in spanning te Paciic wih raio s ell as
generally reaching ships and other places by radio telegraphy; today
it i the CA Gobeomsbsidiary of MCI (as is WUI, calling itself
MCI International).  Tropical Radiotelegrah grw ot futting radio
telegraph on shipboard before WWI so its owners, the United Fruit
Company of ostn o divert shiploads of bananas to the best market,
expanding to communications to its plantation, hecoming in
some nations the public telegraph and international telephone company
of the nation; ta is TRT Telecommunications.  The French
Telegraph Cable Company, owned by French investors in he TT been
in the U.S. since the days of Monsier Puyer-Quartier laying telegraph
cables from Frnce o te ., hence its telegraphic routing address,
PQ. Even the Firestone Tire & Rubber Companyownedits wn RD he
Trans-Liberia Radiotelegraph Company, operating HF radio from Akron to
its ruber plntatins i Liera.  (TL is still there in Akron, as a
matter of fact.)

        All these frms fored theU.S. RC bsinss and enjoyed a
period of regulated competitiveness for thirty years r so. Thy were he
Telx intrfac between the U.S. and the world, all connecting out to
WUTCo Tele and (by erformin "protool conersio" long before
computers did so,) Bell TWX.  International Teex users wre
confroted withsome tyical Aerican confusion ... they had to prefix
their Telex cals to Americ with adde digits t steer teir cal via
the IRC of their choice (in most nations) andthen to eithr Telex or
WX for theU.S. dometic connction.

        All that had to change when Cngress "dereglated" the IC's
in 1982 four year before tlephony had a similar change.  Restric-
ions on AT&T poviding only elephony wer lifted; th IRC's wer
freed to operate anyplace as compaed to a limitednumber of "gatway
cities," UTCo was peritted to gointernational once again, and
verybody could cmpete for any knd of business

        Tha's what has appened in America, so yo can call FTCC
(frmerly French Cale) as well as elative newcomrs to the U.S
market like Cable &Wireless (from theU.K.) and ask the what deal
they ill offer in copetition to ATT or WUTCo, eiter domestically
or nternationally, fo voice, data or vdeo.

        Inernational Tele remains abasic business.  Thevarious
companies mde various deals t interface to ther Telex connectins.
MI's is, of course, vi WUI, the first IRC hat MCI bought.
AT&Mail's is via TRT.Along the evolutiary course of the late days
of the IRC busiess, a firm was estalished called Graphc Scanning
(IR's hve always tried todo something with facsmile, long before
Grop III machines made hem the Ofice Toy o 1990, and Grahic
Scanning got into te IRC field in this wa), and Graphnet is
Teenet'sTelex connectin.

       As our moderator said, he E-Mail services all alias" your
E-Mail addes to their IRC connetion. It's usually your numericE-Mail address with a fied prefix.  Example: M wn AT&TMail numeric
is721481. Its Telex alias is 17281481. On MCIMail, my nmeric is
4133373,an its elex alias is 650-41337.

        The global Telx network has had since ineption a handy
"onfirmatin' convention calle "WhoAre You?" and each Telx machine
is encoded with a "automatic aswerback" tha lets you know o
connectin and whenever you sk (WRU in Baudot; <ctrl-E> n ASCII)
wat machine you ar connected to  So, if you re an E-Mail use,
your overseas correspondentwill wat to know your "netwok"and
"anserback."  That's sually the Teex code for the IRC you're wit
andyour E-Mail aplha address  So, mne on MCIMail is MCI W
dkimberln and on AT&TMail mine is TRT U kimberlin.  Really rather
simle, hen you understand the mening an purpose of the IRC and
internainal Telex.

        One last wodfor this top-level exposition Telx isn't so
cheap compared to -Mai.  If you have a regular corresodent in
another nation and wantt DDD to batch files, or if ou havean X.25
or Teletex route to aothe nation (WUTCo's Easylink E-Mai oes, but
the other E-Mals seem tosay,"huh? Teletex?"), that ay wellbe
cheaper than Telex.  It rus at50 bps, just 66 wods per minute and
you get billed at th Telex outut rate.

        All that aid, thn why bother?Well, Telex is sill there and
readily acessible fromyour E-Mail, and it reachs those 3-/2
millin or so machines inoffices of foreign naions you may hav only
occasional traffi for. And, thse achines are in global irectories
like theJaeger u. Waldmann irectories so you canlook them up frmhome. And, those machins are in hotels al around the world, soyou
can get a messae to the travler wh hasn't been able to et a phone
lineout for three days.  And,those Telex linesconnect to ll the
cablgram offices that wll for their igh price, still send a
messnger to _find_ our missig salesman (unlie the US' rapidlydeterioratig telegram service).  As well, hey reach theships a sea
with your Telex o roust up the taffer wh's on an ocean cruise.  No
matter here in theworldthey are; no matter what tme zone they re
in, o matter if they are on the Gregorianor Moslemor indu or
Bhuddist calendar, yourmessage roued byTelex should get to them far
more efficintly thnrandom dialing of the phone.

       So, whil mot Americans discovered some of these advantges
wn the Group III fax came along, but stil need t ind a "fax
number" that's not in a directory lk Jeger u. Waldmann, your E-Mail
connection tointertional Telex is a potentially useful tool.

     (For those who may want a fuller, more detaile xpanation,
Datapro Research offers reprints o a 22-ge 1986 report they had me
author, numbered MT0-1-101, by calling (800) 328-3776.  Reader who
hav Dtapro's "Nanagement of Telecommunications" erviceay have
this at hand.)

A final ripote: Our Moeratr said in commenting to the question:

>n case yu ere wondering, FAX is the (FA)cimile E(X)chnge.

u contraire, notre cher moduerateur. While somemarkteers of recent
facsimile ervice offerins may hae made that linkage, the term "fax
has been usd geneically by the much moe limited group f facsimil
(including telephoto) users frm telecomm tim immemoral.