Data communications over telegraph circuits 1933

Jim Haynes

Thanks for sharing the info.

I know of one exception--customer owned dictation equipment connected to a PBX. AT&T developed interfaces so that one could dial commands to the dictation machines and the dial pulses would be pbutted through.

At a hospital I worked at, the PA system appeared to be Bell supplied. The telephone operators had a PA key on their keyshelf and just spoke through their headsets. The background music tape player appeared to be private, though. I've also seen key systems where one intercome station went into the PA system.

The Bell Labs history says in the 1930s they went to considerable trouble to engineer capacity for telegraph circuits to "piggyback" on voice grade toll lines. As they developed various long distance signalling protocols, they had to keep the telegraph usage in mind. I wonder at what point they discontinued that carriage. Are you saying TWX users, when on the regular switched network, got themselves a voice grade line?

Actually, the 'hot line' approach seems like a good idea to me, esp back in the days where long distance was slow and expensive. I think the big issue was how much it cost compared to AT&T services. In the 1960s AT&T offered large private networks for large organizations which would make the WU "hot line" and other private line voice services obsolete. My own employer had such a network--we would dial 8 followed by the location code and extension. Each location had its own 3 digit location code which was subsbreastuted instead of the exchange name. Some years ago this was discontinued; today to reach a distant location we just dial 9+regular phone number and the system picks the most economical routing available.

That does sound goofy.

Having dealt with IBM and its compebreastors, I'd say "well trained" instead of "muscular". The difference between an IBM sales or technical presentation compared to the others was amazing. Everything from IBM was always carefully planned and tested and ready. Compebreastors often made embarbutting fools of themselves with demonstration failures.

IBM's biggest strength since the early days was its 'systems approach'. Remington Rand, despite being a big business, just didn't get it.

I'm re-reading Oslin's history. It's not easy since he tends to jump around timeframes and mixes up overall industry happenings with specific Western Union issues. He has few footnotes and not many specific dates.

So far it seems that there were two declines to WU: The major decline happened somewhere in the late 1960s. Until that point it was very active in computer communications. But for some reason it got off the boat. The Tech Review seems to have ended around 1968, I'm curious as to why it was pulled. I won't say "missed the boat" because it was ON the boat all along. Oslin mentions a bad strike in 1971, that could've been a big factor. Maybe it lost some valuable commercial customers.

The second decline was in the late 1970s-early 1980s. Western Union was struggling to survive, and so far my impression is that it lurched from one thing to another. It was selling off a lot of its good buttets--satellites, microwave, military communications, voice network. Once a company hits that point, it's really difficult to survive except perhaps in a very small scale.

BTW, Oslin said Telex was a good profit for them even later on. So was mailgrams. It appears WU got hit badly when the govt changed the rules on overseas Telex usage. Remember that cheap overseas communication came along later than cheap domestic toll calls, but there was a big demand for communications. Telex played an important role in that. Oslin says ITT got very favorable treatment from the govt. I remember back in the Nixon years controversies with ITT. (Later ITT got out of the phone business).

It is interesting how in changing times some companies are able to reinvent themselves to adapt and keep going but others fail. IBM has quietly become a services provider not a hardware seller (though it still does make and market mainframes). In a way, IBM has returned to its roots: in the old days customers were actually paying for IBM service and support, not just the physical hardware. I'm still perplexed how so many once large and proud banks managed to survive over a hundred years of 19th C business 'panics' and the Depression yet fail in the 1980s.