In all honesty, until I did a bit of research around this I had no clue what a Telex Machine was! Have you ever seen or used one of these fascinating technological relics? I thought not...
So what was it all about? What was it used for? Why don't we need them in this day and age? What has replaced them?
I'll do my best to answer these questions one at a time below...
According to my source, these machines used radio and/or microwaves to transmit information over the airwaves. Variations of them are still in use today for communications by the hearing impaired.
The telex network was a public switched network of teleprinters similar to a telephone network, for the purposes of sending text-based messages. Telex was a major method of sending written messages electronically between businesses in the post World War II period. Its usage went into decline as the fax machine grew in popularity in the 1980s.
The roots of the Telex movement began in Germany as a research and development program in 1926. It quickly became an operational teleprinter service in 1933. The service, operated by the Reichspost (Reich postal service)[1] had a speed of 50 baud — approximately 66 words per minute! This also seems to be the beginning of a system to measure the speed of early stage modems!
Telex service spread within Europe and (particularly after 1945) around the world.[2] By 1978, West Germany, including West Berlin, had 123,298 telex connections. Long before automatic telephony became available, most countries, even in central Africa and Asia, had at least a few high-frequency (shortwave) telex links. Often, government postal and telegraph services (PTTs) initiated these radio links. The most common radio standard, CCITT R.44 had error-corrected retransmitting time-division multiplexing of radio channels. Most impoverished PTTs operated their telex-on-radio (TOR) channels non-stop, to get the maximum value from them.
Essentially the modern fax machine seems to have been born from this fascinating technology! To this day I still find myself needing to send faxes from time to time! Thanks to Telex this has been made possible.
Source:
Wikipedia