Mark Griffith

Of course, in reality, the white-coated ones were linking up computers with wires — the phone system — back at this time in the ’70s. They were creating the Internet; they just weren’t telling Hollywood (or me) about it.

Somewhere between “The Andromeda Strain” and my adulthood, the telex lost its place in the gleaming futurism of the popular imagination. Which is to say: People forgot about it. And that’s why I had a sense of vertigo — of traveling through time — when people at the fringes of Europe started giving me business cards with telex numbers on them.

And not just the fringes of Europe, either. A quick perusal of German commercial Web sites, for example, reveals a surprising number of telex addresses, right up there alongside the phone number, e-mail and street address. That’s right, Web sites that give out telex numbers. This, of course, is pure German thoroughness: Fax if you have fax, phone if you have phone, and if you have telex, then, telex. Naturlich.

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.

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.

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 unknown? 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.

First of all, there is so much of it. Yes, I know, the volume of the stuff drives most people close to hysteria. But when the hash-smoking CEO of the dot-com I once worked for confided to me in mid-2000 that he was overwhelmed when he returned from his yoga retreat weekend and found his in box had 17 e-mails in it, I thought he was losing his grip. I was getting 50 to 60 e-mails every day and managing fine.

And now that I get more like 100 to 120 e-mails a day divided across three accounts, I’m no longer just managing fine. I’m exhilarated.

The sheer number of people out there trying to sell me ink cartridges, chain letters and bogus university degrees — on an hourly basis — is starting to give me a kind of strange high. Remember those books about prosperity thinking? How the world is overflowing with digitally encoded cash, brilliant ideas, truckloads of freshly baked bread, sports bags filled with emeralds, whatever? Well, what could give a better sense of abundance and vastness and plenitude than masses of desperate, corny sales pitches delivered right to the desktop? He has only to log on and his in box shall be filled until it brimmeth over.

The exciting muchness of spam is only part of the story, but what a wonderful part it is! All over the world, not thousands or tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of people are trying to do stuff, and do it with me! The approaches may be crude (well, downright moronic in most cases) and repetitive, but such energy! Only the most small-minded and self-satisfied of people could fail to be thrilled by these waves of fresh contacts from eager people, all trying to make something happen.

And then there are more practical benefits to spam.

Spam offers great lessons in what works and what doesn’t. When you spend time reviewing the pitches strangers are sending you every morning and afternoon, it becomes painfully evident why your own job applications and sales letters yield so few results. You never open an e-mail from someone you don’t know? Better make more contacts. You never open an e-mail with a vague subject line? Better start making your own subject lines clearer and simpler. You never read an e-mail longer than five lines? Better learn to say clearly what you want to offer in four lines, obviously.

This might strike some foes of spam as treasonous, but have you ever stopped to consider that you might actually want some of what the spammers are pushing? In the few seconds it takes to click through and delete your daily mound of spam, there’s a chance you might come across an agreeable offer.

What surprises me is the sheer unbelievability of all this spam hysteria. “It takes me hours to find my real e-mail,” squeak the pompous victims who demand that spammers should be sealed into concrete bridge supports. Hours? Well how is it that I am able to check and delete my daily spam in roughly two minutes each day? And if I am really in a hurry, less than 30 seconds? Do I have godlike spam-processing powers denied to other mortals?

And is it just me, or are the spammers beginning to learn? I think spam is getting better. The sheer ease of sending gazillions of pitches that recipients complain about so bitterly is matched by the wondrous simplicity of the “delete” button. Spammers are becoming more sophisticated and less rude by the month, I believe. Ten years hence, when spammers have learned from the ruthless Darwinian process of being clicked or filtered into oblivion, those who are left in business are going to be some of the most focused and sharp-minded salespeople the world has ever known. They’ll know so much about selling things, we prospects will actually be glad to hear from them. Millions of us, not just unhinged types like me.

In the meantime, you, the recipient, can enjoy, every day, the gorgeous rush of power that derives from the action of deleting dozens of imploring letters with one finger movement. This is not a small psychological benefit. For millions of years up until now, only a minority of humanity, namely very beautiful young females, have had daily access to this thrilling moment of casual refusal. But spam has democratized this! Now all of us can thwart hordes of pathetic courtiers with no more effort than the twitch of an exquisite eyebrow or a bored glance in a different direction. Glory in your newfound freedom to dismiss and erase other people’s futile hopes … thousands of times a month!

And what about beachcombing. If the Internet can be surfed, then should the surf not wash up daily detritus on the cyber coast? Spam is the flotsam and jetsam we find strewn on the beaches of our in boxes after the storms of the night. Grow to enjoy combing your beach in a few seconds a day to see the random signs of humanity left behind. Take the unforgettable day one spammer offered to enlarge my penis and another offered to enlarge my breasts. I never met anyone interested in ideas, knowledge or progress who was not necessarily interested in variety and new things, even at the price of clutter, junk and other odds and ends lying around.

Spam-haters grow bitter and lyrical about the absurd entreaties from spam business offers that want to give us all something for nothing — but they want something for nothing too: a free e-mail account no uncouth salesman is allowed to sully. “I would be more than happy to pay to have this nuisance removed,” respond the pursed-lipped prigs of spam regulation. But this translates as “I already have most of the things I need for my life to proceed as I wish and I am not interested in hearing from losers who want to waste my time, thank you very much.” Ask yourself one question, ladies and gentlemen. Would you really like to have a drink with this person? Frankly, I suspect that if I absolutely had to choose, an hour in the company of someone who thinks they can sell me herbal Viagra or put ancient curses on my enemies would be far more fun than an hour with an anti-spam bore.

Above all, think this through: Why is spam so annoying? Because you like the ease and convenience of e-mail, that’s why. So your in box matters to you. Over the last decade it has become hugely easier and quicker for you to contact others on a much bigger scale than photocopied letters or even fax machines ever let us dream of. And you resent the fact that hundreds of thousands of nobodies now find it correspondingly easier to contact you? This is worse than snobbery; this is “access greed”: wanting to have access to others for yourself but for them not to have access to you.

This is the dirty secret of the anti-spammers. You want free speech for yourselves, and perhaps for others sometimes — as long as you don’t have to listen too often. Even listening for the 30 seconds it takes to delete a bunch of uninvited petitions is apparently too much for these people. Free speech — as long as it has a nice, secure one-way valve attached?