TELEX - Has anyone still got a number, and would it still work ?

Question

Hi,

I communicate from a far distant era when many businesses had a chattering telex machine somewhere, eating rolls of punch-tape, and spewing forth rolls of paper.

The big mighty item duly sent and received text items world-wide at a rate of about 300 characters per MINUTE,
Wow !

I found my big books of business cards dating up to about 1990, for companies in mainly India, the Mid-East, and parts of Africa. Someone said that it could well be that these offices still have an active telex service.

Yup, I could telephone them and ask, but to no avail, as I not suprisingly no longer have a chundering machine at this end of things.

I ponder, for all you comms. wizards, even if I were to locate a distant working telex machine, what sort of coding / format might be understood by it.
How do I slow transmission down to an intelligible level of transfer.
I assume we are talking ASCII coding ?

Any advice ?
Bob
Old telex no 935072

Answer 1

Hi Bob, No, I haven't got a Telex, although I have loads of memories of working with them. If ever you get hold of one, my advice would be to keep it as it could be worth a fair bit, notably for TV crews who look out for these items when preparing "period piece" dramas etc.

But I think that the internet with e-mails has overtaken all of the previous forms of written communication, Telex, Fax, etc.