In India, the Dot Dash Is Done 86
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."'"
Chat rooms? (Score:5, Funny)
I'd like to know how a chat room worked on a telegraph.
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like this. STOP
Probably poetry was possible (Score:5, Funny)
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
Re:Probably poetry was possible (Score:5, Funny)
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash, Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash, Bang splat equal at dollar under-score, Percent splat waka waka tilde number four, Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash, Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.
Strange . . . that sounds like my upper management, talking about how we need to "tap into the power of social networks with modeling and visualization".
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I'd like to see Shakira give a rendition of that. Maybe call it Waka Waka [youtube.com] This Time for India.
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Yes.
Damn that idiot Columbus (Score:3)
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Those curly brackets don't lie.
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Re:Chat rooms? (Score:5, Interesting)
> I'd like to know how a chat room worked on a telegraph.
On most Telegraph lines there were many operators spaced at intervals along the line and its branch lines.
So when there was no traffic to send, the bored operators would chat.
And of course there were many amateur telegraph circuits, some connecting dozens of enthusiasts in a town or suburb.
And then of course Amateur Radio came along.
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And now we have IRC. And twitter. And facebook.
And suddenly, it starts to look like we've regressed :D
Re:Chat rooms? (Score:5, Informative)
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I believe dashdot.og was very big in the 1890's. Although the "ADELINA PATTI NAKED AND PETRIFIED STOP" troll posts were rather tiresome.
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Yes, but hot grits never went out of style, surviving to the modern age. Of course of late they both seem to be challenged by mycleanpc, the modern equivalent of the old mycleanbuggy.
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Have you a hosts file to prove that?
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Have you a hosts file to prove that?
Last one I had set us up the bomb.
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For Great Justice?
Re:Chat rooms? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like to know how a chat room worked on a telegraph.
I'd like to know what the flame wars were about.
Re:Chat rooms? (Score:5, Interesting)
For an interesting take on why the telegraph led in part to the modern computer and how both work, read Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" [amazon.com] by Charles Petzold. He argues all the ideas needed to build a modern computer were known around the time telegraph use took off, and he uses those ideas to describe logic gates and put them together into a working computer.
In short, the relay was invented in 1835 as a way to extend telegraph runs further without requiring operators. Morse code, as the primary way to communicate, happened to also be a binary code that mapped letters to the equivalent of ones and zeros, dots and dashes. In 1854, George Boole published “An Investigation of the Laws of Thought”. Petzold stops there and essentially uses only those ideas to build his modern computer. It wasn’t recognized formally by anyone until 1937 when Claude Shannon published “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits”. Even Charles Babbage had known of Boole’s work and the telegraph but did not see how it could have been better used to build his Difference Engine.
Cellphones killed the Telegram (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Cell phone penetration (Score:2, Funny)
Cellphone penetration in India, I meant - cellphones themselves are not so massive except for the Samsung phablets
Re:Cellphones killed the Telegram (Score:4, Informative)
"the charges for mobile service were 36rs(~1$ back in 1998)"
And now you have to call to in Africa and a few other places to see high rates close to that:
5321,Cuba - Guantanamo,0.7696$/minute
22176,Senegal - Tigo Mobile,0.6748$/minute
24105,Gabon - Moov Mobile,0.5238$/minute
252225,Somalia - Soltelco,0.5500$/minute
25778,Burundi - Africel Mobile,0.4460$/minute
56322100,Chile - Easter Island,0.4600$/minute
2207,Gambia - Africell Mobile,0.4164$/minute
22469,Guinea - Areeba Mobile,0.4028$/minute
India indeed got a lot cheaper:
917579,India - Bsnl Mobile,0.0134$/minute
9182310,India - Mobile,0.0122$/minute
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Not that they (the ex government monopolies) are doing a good job even now, with competition. BSNL has privatized, but dealing with them is still like pulling teeth. Their 'unlimited DSL plans' actually had limits of 4GB, with DSL getting disabled every 1GB. Dealing with their customer service and doing simple things like paying bills is still a nightmare - standing in long queues, and to do online payment, the registration site was something one could not get to without going to their office and getting
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Re:Cellphones killed the Telegram (Score:4, Informative)
In India and most countries outside of the USA, landline numbers and mobile numbers have a different format
Landline numbers = Area Code + Number
Cell Numbers = one long 10 digit number (there is no area code)
Because of this, there cannot be portability between landline and Cell numbers.
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In India and most countries outside of the USA, landline numbers and mobile numbers have a different format
Landline numbers = Area Code + Number Cell Numbers = one long 10 digit number (there is no area code)
Because of this, there cannot be portability between landline and Cell numbers.
One of the big reasons for this is that outside the USA, generally people do not pay to receive calls on mobile phones; the caller pays a higher cost to call a mobile number than a landline instead (at least in theory, although inclusive minutes deals make this increasingly not the case for either the USA or rest of world). One of the principles that seems to be broadly applied in the numbering systems used in most countries is that you should be able to tell whether a number is an "expensive" one or not by
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Yea, this also was a problem for a short while after the government of my country decided that people should be able to take their cell phone number to another provider (to encourage competition). You could no longer tell whether the number you are calling belongs to "your" provider (cheaper) or not. This was solved - now when you call a number that does not belong to "your" provider, you hear two short beeps before the waiting signal.
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Landline penetration was low because it is expensive to run cables. In the 1990s I visited a company who were making fixed phones for houses in Chile. These were big analogue mobiles and dirt cheap compared to stringing cables through the mountains.
Re:Cellphones killed the Telegram (Score:5, Interesting)
Landline penetration was low because it is expensive to run cables. In the 1990s I visited a company who were making fixed phones for houses in Chile. These were big analogue mobiles and dirt cheap compared to stringing cables through the mountains.
It's not just for the sticks and/or brutal terrain anymore: Verizon [verizon.com] is looking to move a bunch of Hurricane Sandy-damaged landline customers to 'Verizon Voicelink', essentially a tethered cellular-to-copper bridge. Whether this is a statement on the economics of copper/fiber buildout, or an end-run around the regulations affecting wireline POTS service is a matter of some contention...
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Re:Cellphones killed the Telegram (Score:4, Interesting)
That is the root of the suspicion that Verizon has reasons other than repair costs to not re-run the lines that were cut by the hurricane, to ensure that the area has no copper to any premises, and that whether your phone looks like a landline or not, you are at the tender mercy of Verizon Wireless.
Re:Cellphones killed the Telegram (Score:5, Informative)
It probably doesn't help(for the survival of telegraphs) that cellphones encheapen exactly the same part of the process that is most expensive with telegram service.
Unless you want telegram service to be about as useful as media mail, in terms of timeliness, you need a pretty aggressive short-haul postal service running out of the telegraph office. Technology presumably reduced the price of transmission links between offices(at least in places where it was worth upgrading, rather than just milking the legacy copper); but you still have to collect the text on one end, and have somebody run out and deliver it on the other. Even with arbitrarily cheap data transmission, you've still got a postal service hanging off all your endpoints.
With cellphones, the technology and bandwidth requirements are higher; but now the messages deliver themselves from the sender to the tower and from the tower to the recipient.
sort of a dupe.. (Score:1)
..and also, the telegram was pretty much just the name for a messaging service that transferred the messages electronically for some amount of distance and got delivered at the other end..
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..and also, the telegram was pretty much just the name for a messaging service that transferred the messages electronically for some amount of distance and got delivered at the other end..
..which is what telegram has always been about?, unless you're a stock exchange or government or military headquarter etc. and have a telegraph line running to your building.
DEAR TIMOTHY (Score:2)
one way to catch dudes is Google (Score:2)
like:
telegraph service site:slashdot.org
Re:one way to catch dudes is Google (Score:5, Funny)
one way to catch dudes is Google
Your lifestyle is none of my business, but this isn't the place.
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Telegraph, telephone, cell phone, internet, people's interests never really change, just the medium.
Almost had a typo. That last bit almost was: "just he medium." Oddly appropriate.
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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.
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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?
Is Slashdot (Score:2, Funny)
what you get when you telegraph while drunk?
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I think they called them drunkgrams. Sort of equivalent to the current practice of drunk blogging.
Hmmm... apropos the title (Score:2)
http:///.– looks quite tasty.
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Close, but I think what you really want is: http://-.
.
Or maybe, http://dashdot.org/ [dashdot.org]
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There is speculation in the press that many Indians will be doing the same.
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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.
Mish mash (Score:1)
Is slashdot reporting the dot-com-like flash crash of dot dash from lack of cash?
what dot dash (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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There is loads of misinformation going around on this topic.
It was also claimed that this was the world's last telegram service to shut down, and this is not true at all.
Many telegram services are still operating, also in India.
Poor research, I would say.
Re:what dot dash (Score:4, Insightful)
I haven't been able to figure out where the story got its legs. It is true that 'The' telegram service, the one with organizational continuity back to the original system set up to handle the logistical needs of Her Britannic Majesty's colonial occupation efforts, is shutting down. Game over, goodbye.
However, since virtually any data transmission mechanism will serve as a telegraph medium(they aren't exactly high-bandwidth or anything), there isn't much stopping other outfits from hanging out a shingle and offering telegram services, as some have.
Does anybody know if the state-run service that is shutting down had some sort of special status for legal purposes(the way the US Postal Service's offerings sometimes count for legal or procedural purposes where fedex or UPS might not)?
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Telegrams sent via the state-run service did count as legal correspondence.
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This wasn't using Morse, in fact outside amateur radio, Morse hasn't really been used for several decades now.
I am pretty sure it is still used in aviation to identify beacons.
Stop. (Score:1)
It is a period. This is like saying that people used a dash instead of a hyphen.
Re:Stop. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]:
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.
Re:Multiple hops in a telegram ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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..
My dad was a "combined" hand. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Typical message? (Score:2, Funny)
Kindly do the needful. STOP. Warmest regards. STOP
All of that AND world peace? (Score:2)
hype, skepticism, hackers, on-line romances and weddings, chat-rooms, flame wars, information overload, predictions of imminent world peace.
The internet is only capable of the first seven items in that list.
A telegraph service, not ALL telegraph service (Score:4, Informative)
There is still telegraph service in India. It's just the state run provider shutting down.
Source [arstechnica.com]
Telex Machines... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [arstechnica.net]
Re:Telex Machines... (Score:5, Interesting)
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did a web search on BSNL, the images suggest they went to networked PC for telegrams long ago, no more "Sparky working the key"
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as a corporation is it recent, however it used to be known as your Department of Telecommunications
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When was Morse code discontinued in India for telegrams? Once telephone networks
NSarse (Score:2)