The Dead Media Notebook

by Bruce Sterling

  This is mighty considerate of those Germans, considering that for most of us, telex remains about as obscure and cumbersome a means of communication as, say, the ham radio. But just as the ham radio is kept alive through the enthusiasm of its aficionados, so the telex keeps on telecommunicating—thanks to a combination of convenience, economy, protocol and just plain inertia that may keep it going into the next century.

  Sometimes it can be awfully hard to kill off an old medium. Not so long ago telex was the very epitome of the up-to-date, the ruthlessly new. The wonderfully crisp, minimal black-on-white Reuters logo of decades of yore (simply the word Reuters written in the black holes of the punched tape some teleprinters use) perfectly echoed the utilitarian authority of the machine that delivered no-frills, up-to-the-second information.

  Then, suddenly, telex started to look square, and, in the mid-‘90s, Reuters made an awkward shift to today’s hesitant, tinted version of its logo, with more dots and a fussy little bi-colored disc. The new Reuters logo hints at the unspoken fear that news agencies may soon look as outmoded as punched tape.

  We should relax. Though telex use may not be quite as robust as it was in the days of yore, it still holds a place among the ways we communicate with each other. Viva telex.

  Next page | Is Telex the French of communication technologies? 1, 2, 3

  If a fax is like two photocopiers connected via phone line, telex is like two typewriters. Type in your message on one end, and the person at the other end reads just that, printed out from the teleprinter on their end.

  Telex is not, by and large, about packet-switching—the process by which little chunks of labeled data, as in e-mails, make their way across the network to reassemble at the other end. Like telephones in their plainest form, telex opens a line, two machines at each end greet each other and text is transferred.

  The popularity of telex predates that of the fax machine. Fax technology became prominent in the ‘70s, when Japanese manufacturers began using it for their domestic market.

  Speakers of Japanese and Chinese aren’t the world’s most ardent typewriter users. You wouldn’t be either if you had a written language with 5,000 word symbols. You’d want to be able to scribble a quick note by hand and send a photocopy of it down the phone. So the Japanese made fax technology happen.

  But outside Japan, telex just kept on working. Why? People liked it. Or they were just used to it. Or, maybe, there are a few things about telex that other technologies just don’t offer.

  Like telephones, telex is capable of a few clever tricks. Just as some lines can support 60 phone conversations at once (where each sweet nothing is chopped up into little slices, squashed smaller to fit down the line in real time and then separated and unsquashed in numbered order at the other end), similar things can be done to make telex waste less network capacity. As most of it is more one-way than phone talking, telex is even easier to shoehorn into spare blips of bandwidth than telephone chat in the same way.

  And there’s the answerback code. Telex machines give senders confirmation—with rather more certainty than fax machines—that they got your message at the other end.

  But why even bother with telex when we have e-mail?

  1) Lots of companies do not have a computer or a modem. The world is bigger than we thought.

  2) Telex is easy and familiar. Most companies have a computer with a modem, but that doesn’t mean employees are comfortable with them.

  3) Telex is the status quo. Some business sectors are still grouped around networks of firms with established routines of sending and receiving telexes each day. This penalizes any individual firm that tries to upgrade ahead of whatever ponderous association decides things by consensus for that industry.

  Last year at Manchester Airport in Britain, I missed the last train home to my mother’s village because of flight delays. Air France agreed to pay for my taxi across the north of England, but before I could be sure of its reimbursement, the handling agent and I had to sit two hours in the airport until 1 a.m. waiting for Air France in Paris to send him ... a telex.

  Last month an American building consultant friend in Budapest was baffled to get a fax from DHL asking him to send a telex to Hungarian Customs to release a package. He had to go to a hotel to send one.

  4) Inertia. Could telex be to electronic media what the French language is to international diplomacy?

  Look at how long people have continued to take French seriously as an international language, almost two centuries after France lost North America and Egypt. No one really knows why French is still on the list. It just stays there, wasting the time of generation after generation of English-speaking schoolchildren who could instead be learning Chinese, Arabic or Japanese.

  French clings on, popping up on your postage coupons, at the Olympics, in the United Nations.

  And so it is with telex. Having been red-taped into some of those very same international protocols, telex may have inherited the survival skills of French.

  But does telex have any actual advantages? Does it deserve, for any technical reasons, to have survived this long?

  1) No one sends junk mail to telex addresses.

  2) Telex is rarely hacked. It could be, but most hackers don’t find doing so particularly interesting. Telex viruses? Nope.

  3) Once installed, telexes are robust and simple. Telex takes up less bandwidth and breaks down less frequently than fax, for example.

  4) On the same principle, since most telexes in use have been in use for eons, they’re cheap to use, and were paid down years ago.

  5) In the kinds of places where the telex machine still looks new (think Mongolia, Chad, Paraguay), it may be the simplest, most direct means of communication.

  (Note to international business people: When trying to reach an exotic location—a nickel mine in Siberia, a ministry in Morocco—always try sending a telex. That office may only get two telexes a week, and if your telex machine helps justify someone’s job, you’ve done a good thing. Plus, as a Westerner, you probably stand alone in using telex. Most of your competition won’t bother.)

  6) Telex messages are concise and to the point—not unlike text messages between mobile phones, known as SMS, for “Short Message Service.”

  In Europe in 1999, 12 billion SMS messages were sent between mobile phones. SMS is primarily a cellphone capability, but why not broaden our technological horizons a bit? Telex and SMS would be natural friends if they only got to know each other.

  Both are for very basic, short, functional text messages. They both use an austere, even spartan, character set. Both carry messages like:

  MEET ME AT 12 EST ANDY

  And in neither medium does anyone whine that the capital letters mean you are “shouting” or showing inadequate “netiquette.”

  So it would be bundles of fun if people started to send SMSs to telex machines (what some people in the poor world have instead of mobile phones) and telex messages to mobile phones (what some people in the rich world have instead of telex machines).

  As long as you know the callback code and the telex address, it is certainly possible to send an e-mail to a telex terminal on some systems. Since people already use mobile phones to contact e-mail addresses, it’s just a step away from sending SMSs to the only other place where no one blinks at getting single-line messages with bad grammar—telex machines.

  When’s the last time you received telex spam? 1, 2, 3

  And who would ignore such a thing? On the same principle that Western Union followed when it placed a picture of a telegram in a newspaper and challenged readers to ignore the message, a telex or an SMS rarely goes unread.

  So telex has a rich world role too: It’s a good way of getting through the incoming-mail filters that more and more busy people need to employ.

  Spam, sent laboriously, in a way inconvenient to the sender, is not spam.

  An e-mail from someone unknown? Virtual trash can. A fax from someone un
known? Real-world trash can. A telex from someone unknown? Someone sent me a telex? People still use those? I have to see this.

  Recently, I sent a telex to a colleague at a German publishing firm. Later, he described his amazement upon receiving the telex sent down to his floor from some forgotten technical backroom in a dusty corner of his building.

  “I thought our office got rid of telexes years ago!” he told me in wonderment.

  Of course, gateways linking clunky teleprinters to trendy mobile phones will eventually soil this spam-free Eden of messaging innocence. But all devices have the right to speak to each other, if only for the sake of symmetry and neatness.

  But perhaps the real explanation for telex’s tenacity is a dusty old protocol in the rulebooks of the International Telecommunication Union.

  According to Telexnet, a supplier of e-mail-to-telex software, “Telex still remains the only legally recognised form of data transmission.”

  What makes telex the only legitimate mode of communication for thousands of diplomats, lawyers and other international paper pushers? The answerback code. When it comes to official business, people need to know for sure that messages reached their destination. Like the equally underutilized registered letter, the telex may have a firm place among our growing media options.

  Technologies only a little deader than telex have a powerful appeal for aficionados of the poignantly obsolete, the Dead Media List.

  They’ve been nibbling round the edges of telex for a long time. Pictures-by-telex, home telegraphs, the telegram boy—media bygones like these are arcane enough to have received a proper goodbye from information technology’s museumologists. But telex hasn’t joined the ranks of the obsolete yet.

  But one does have to wonder if a Dead Media obituary for this predecessor to the Internet is imminent.

  Dead Media’s founding necronaut, Bruce Sterling, is careful not to sound the death knell too soon, highlighting quaint survivals: the French Army’s still-functional messenger-pigeon unit, or Prague’s fully operating citywide network of pneumatic postal tubes. We may not need telex as much as we used to, but that doesn’t stop us from taking it out of the closet every now and then. If the Dead Media hearse hasn’t yet come to take telex away, perhaps we ought to give it another chance at greatness.

  http://www.salon.com/2000/12/05/telex/ [2015 note: Still alive]

  Old music recordings, effects on music

  From Sally Shelton

  How music went on the record

  As a new history of recording shows, the artistic implications of the process are vast and disturbing. Has it changed our musical universe for better or worse?

  When the celebrated 19th century pianist and conductor, Hans von Blow, first heard himself playing a Chopin mazurka on one of Edison’s primitive cylinder phonographs, he is said to have fainted. As well he might, for the advent of sound recording was arguably the most radical development in the history of music since the invention of music printing, if not since the evolution of notation itself. For the first time ever, it was possible to hear again a specific performance of a specific work, its every exact nuance (not to say, every mistake), a potentially unlimited number of times, and to reproduce it in a potentially unlimited number of copies. As at least a few musicians dimly realised from the start, the artistic, social, economic and even philosophical implications of the new technology were likely to prove vast, and not a little disturbing. And so it has turned out.

  “A century of recording has changed the way we listen to music and the way music is performed as well as what we listen to to an extent we are only just beginning to grasp,” remarks Timothy Day, curator of Western art music at the sound archive of the British Library, in his engrossing new survey, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History. Yet, as he ruefully adds, “music historians, classically trained musicologists studying the concert traditions and opera and liturgical music of Western Europe, are reluctant to investigate discs and tapes and to study these phenomena.”

  No doubt part of that reluctance initially sprang from the primitive quality of early cylinders and discs. The evolution of recording, from Edison’s first acoustic “talking machine” of 1877 to the arrival of electric recording in the mid-1920s, is pretty well-documented, but Day recounts it with many a vivid instance: tenors with heads plunged deep into recording horns; tiny studios heated to 90 degrees to keep wax discs soft and malleable; sublime masterpieces cut by two-thirds in order to fit on to three or four 78-rpm sides.

  No wonder the alternative medium of the reproducing piano with its punched paper rolls held its own against the gramophone until the late 1920s. The real wonder is that at least a few musicians such as Elgar and Rachmaninov actually seem to have enjoyed the early recording process.

  While electric recording allowed at last for more spacious orchestral and operatic acoustics, works still had to be registered in uneditable four-and-a-half minute chunks and put out on noisy-surfaced shellac discs, until the emergence of tape-editing and the vinyl LP around 1950, enhanced by stereophony from 1958 and by the cheaper alternative of audio tape from 1963 only to be sideswiped by the advent of digital recording and the virtually undegradable CD from the early 1980s.

  Yet Day’s main concern is not so much with the mechanics of recording as with the manifold ways in which the process has increasingly influenced the evolution, reception and understanding of music itself. Admittedly, this happened more gradually than in the early dissemination of jazz, or the way post-war pop was recording-driven from the start. No one imagined that the recording of operatic arias that comprised much of the early acoustic discography offered any real alternative, let alone threat, to the experience of live opera, while the first two decades of electric recording were largely devoted to catching up on the standard classical repertoire.

  Only since the emergence of the LP has recording come to play a more central role in musical developments in the rediscovery of early music, for instance, or the promotion of new music (electronic music, not least). And only with the vast expansion of the recorded repertoire over the last couple of decades has something approaching the entire history of Western music been restored to present consciousness a phenomenon which, interacting with comparable expansions in the availability of pop, world music, and so on, has so powerfully contributed to the relativistic, pick-and-mix culture of so-called post-modernism, which we are all now enjoying, or suffering from.

  The benefits of recording, as a means of preserving past greatness, of reaching vast new audiences, of restoring unjustly neglected music and promoting the new, are obvious enough.

  Yet Day quotes a Spectator editorial of as early as 1888, warning that the accumulating products of mechanical reproduction could threaten “the free growth of our posterity” and comparable doubts about recording have continued to surface ever since: the notion, for instance, that the edited perfection of discs has increasingly inhibited live performers from taking spontaneous risks, has become a critical commonplace.

  Though an inveterate record-maker himself, Benjamin Britten evidently felt that the gramophone somehow violated the “holy triangle” of composer, performer and listener, and lamented that records allowed great works to be misused as mere background music.

  Hans Keller went so far as to argue that our growing reliance on recordings as the primary source of musical experience, plus the ubiquitous curse of muzak, have tended to foster an “infinite postponement of concentration”, progressively degrading our powers of focused listening his own included.

  Since Day’s declared purpose is to stimulate and source further thought and research into the history and repercussions of recording, he is more concerned to raise such issues than to resolve them. In any case, he has his work cut out to reduce the vast array of evidence and commentary that the recording process has thrown up to something like an orderly plan. This he has partly contrived through a deft choice of case histories: the influence on taste of Walt
er Legge as a recording executive; the role of David Munrow in the early music discography; the shifts in performing style preserved in successive recordings of the works of Webern, and so on.

  Occasionally the sheer pressure of material reduces Day’s prose to portmanteau syntax and breathless lists. But it remains a lively and provoking read. As a historian, he is, of course, more concerned to understand the past than to speculate about the future. Yet it could be argued that at least one basic development in recording technology is long overdue and could go part of the way towards reconciling those who regard recording as a deadening substitute for live musical experience. Sound recording may have changed out of all recognition since Edison; what has not is the simple fact that, every time a disc is played, it remains exactly the same.

  Yet how easily one could imagine something called, say, the “variable disc” upon which an artist such as Alfred Brendel had recorded perhaps a half dozen slightly contrasting interpretations of a Beethoven sonata which the playback mechanism then crosscuts differently each time to provide the illusion of perpetual spontaneous performance.

  Or the “transformational disc”, enabling purchasers to modify the tempi, dynamics and nuances of a Bruckner symphony to create their own ideal performances. Or, maybe not. For however the rest of us might profit from such extravagancies of “interactive” recording technology, to the systematic archivist-historian they could well prove the ultimate nightmare.

  Source: A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History by Timothy Day

  Contoura portable non-xerographic photocopier

  From Andrew Reid

  The “contoura” is a remarkable example of the clever use of relatively straightforward technology.

  The machine is what you might call a “photographic copier”, if you wanted to distinguish it from the xerographic implications of the modern term “photocopier.”