ON THE END OF AN ERA. STOP.

LONG LIVE THE INTERNET.  STOP.

END OF AN ERA...not often you can TRULY use that phrase, but the subject of this post certainly qualifies.

Imagine if one day the Internet we know, depend on for so many things personal and professional, and love, ended with an announcement like this:

"Effective tomorrow, all Internet services will be discontinued globally. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative."

Well, that's what many of us old enough to have depended on TELEGRAMS may feel following the following REAL announcement by Western Union recently (via LiveScience.com and memeorandum):

'Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative."

It's bittersweet to read this of course, for many of us.  As the excellent article explains:

"The world's first telegram was sent on May 24, 1844 by inventor Samuel Morse. The message, "What hath God wrought," was transmitted from Washington to Baltimore. In a crude way, the telegraph was a precursor to the Internet in that it allowed rapid communication, for the first time, across great distances."

The service was a core element of how the world's business worked for the latter part of the 1800s and most of the 1900s (see adjacent JFK telegram from 1949). 

It was mission-critical technology, along with it's cousin the TELEX, which is still used today in businesses globally.  Both did well despite the advent of the OTHER world-changing communication service, the telephone.

It had it's own language which derived partly from the fact that users were charged by the character.  As a result, businesses and consumers developed really short ways to write words, and codes to represent entire sentences. 

This of course continued into the world of communicating via pagers (remember them too?), and carried on into texting via SMS today, but for reasons of convenient typing on cell phone keypads rather than cost.

In another article on the subject, Daniel Terdiman of CNET wonders why

"...every single person who ever sent me one was directing me to "stop" so much."

Well, as this terrific article in BusinessWeek explains this time-honored convention of the Telegram, it of course has to do with money:

"Telegrams reached their peak popularity in the 1920s and 1930s when it was cheaper to send a telegram than to place a long distance telephone call. People would save money by using the word "stop" instead of periods to end sentences because punctuation was extra while the four character word was free."

See, even then communications companies had wacky ways to charge for their services.

The use of Telegrams continued to erode for the past quarter of a century as the LiveScience article elaborates:

"The decline of telegram use goes back at least to the 1980s, when long-distance telephone service became cheap enough to offer a viable alternative in many if not most cases. Faxes didn't help. Email could be counted as the final nail in the coffin."

I still remember critically relying on Telexes for most of the eighties to communicate equity research and day-to-day transactions with clients in Europe and the Middle East.  Fax technology was just beginning to come on strong, but not quite there and as prevalent, especially overseas.

For you historical buffs, the article by LiveScience.com is a must-read on the history of Western Union and the telegraph, especially the happy-ending story of how the country escaped death by changing it's business to money transfers and becoming a thriving part of First Data Corporation.

In fact when I read this last part of the article:

"On Jan. 26, the last day you could send a telegram, First Data announced it would spin Western Union off as an independent, publicly traded company."

the question that occurred to me was "Who sent and who received that very last telegram?"  It's going to be worth a lot on eBay some day, perhaps even more at Sotheby's or Chistie's.

With the commercial Internet we know now (post Tim Berners-Lee's major contribution), still only in it's second decade, we've got a long way to go for the Internet era to turn the baton over to something else. 

In fact most of us will likely never know anything else in our lifetimes.  Most of the innovations to come will just continue to build on the existing foundation on both the wired and wireless front.

But moments like the end of the Telegram era, do provide an opportunity to pause for a bit and think: 

"What exactly would and could truly replace the Internet in a 150 years or so?"

Comments

[SV]

Your post reminded me of an article I read a few months back: If... TV Goes Down The Tube

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/if/4350927.stm

Which ended with questions: But who will own television in 2016? And will they also own democracy?