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Telex to Internet

(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-11-24 10:58

It's all a matter of perspective. If Marco Polo had had the ability to send a message and had it instantly received on the other side of the world, he would have made a fortune. The notion that one could do this would have seemed unbelievable at the time, bordering on magic.

But in these days of VOIP, voice over Internet protocol, and instant e-mails on a Blackberry, the telex system we used to use in China seems positively antediluvian. Incredible new technologies have become commercially available during the past thirty years and have had a direct impact on business in China.

The fact that China's growth has been in near lockstep with the phenomenal efficiency improvements of the communications industry is so remarkable that it calls for a cause-and-effect analysis. But not now: such a study exceeds the scope of this piece.

Our ability to communicate, rapidly, clearly, inexpensively and efficiently, is directly affected by the tools that are available to us. In the 1970s and early 1980s we used the telex. Later on in the 1980s, the personal computer surfaced and the fax machine became available, and communications improved and expanded.

Communications explosion

When the Internet gave us e-mail in the late 1990s, the combination of a dramatic increase in both the quality and scope of communications, accompanied by a large decrease in costs, led to an explosion in the volume of communications to and from China.

The telephone, which was available from the very beginning of my China experience, was not a major factor for us in international communications because it was expensive and left no records. But it was an important tool for communicating within China with FTCs (foreign trade corporations) and factories.

The fact that we located our main office in Beijing was partially driven by the fact that the capital was linked by phone with all major towns in China. The country benefited from the Fourth Five-Year Program (1971-1975), which had emphasized the development of communications.

Progress continued rapidly over time, especially after the mid-1980s, mostly with the installation of optical lines and the advent of mobile phones, which became both an efficient tool and a status symbol.

During my formative years, the only way to communicate was by telex. It was also known as the teletype machine, and first started to be used in a global network back in the 1920s.

The technology improved through the 1950s and 1960s, and the new machines in the late seventies were quite slick. But the old telex machines we used in China were owned by the State and were only available for rent.

They reminded you of the ancestor of motor cars, the Model T Ford. I figured that the Chinese must have acquired the earliest models because they actually looked like they were from the 1920s. They were robust, heavy and clunky, and available in any color as long as it was black.

The machines worked on a system of perforated paper tape and were slow and cumbersome to use. If you made a mistake and realized it, you could correct it by typing back-space, back-space, back-space, crossing it out with a row of XXXXs and then laboriously typing in your correction.

However, the recipient on the other side of the world would see all that - messy at best. And if you noticed a serious mistake after the whole text was finished, you had to re-type it all from scratch; word processing was not available then. Sometimes errors got through despite your vigilance. See what happens when you drop the 'r' from the main subject in the phrase '100,000 dozen shirts'.

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