[GreenKeys] A Little More TWX History

[Jim Haynes]

On Tue, 26 Nov 2019, Harold Hallikainen wrote:

> While looking for something else, I, of course, ran across this, which I
> thought would be interesting to the group.
>
> Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1993 14:26:39 -0800
> From: haynes at cats.UCSC.EDU (Jim Haynes)
> Subject: A Little More TWX History
> [W.U. introduced Telex to the U.S. which was]
> probably a bad mistake for them. [reasons listed]
>
I have since been informed that W.U. actually made quite a bit of money
in Telex.  Maybe this was because Telex was international while TWX
was US only.  Or maybe their rates were more attractive - my source
didn't say.

Why was Telex a dial-up system from the get-go while TWX used manual
switchboards for such a long time?  I believe the reason has to do with
customer billing arrangements.

In long-distance telephony in the U.S., and also in TWX, customers
expected to get a bill telling where they had called and how many
minutes they were being charged for.  It was a manual operation for
switchboard operators to fill out paper toll tickets and time stamp
them.  Then the accounting department had to sort out the tickets by
customer and calculate the charges for each call.

The practice in Europe (maybe for telephone service also? and certainly
in Telex) did not involve recording the place called and the number of
minutes.  Rather, when a call was put through there was also a connection
to a pulse generator, with the number of pulses per minute related to
the distance between calling and called numbers.  So the customer paid
by the pulse, not by the minute.  And this was easy to automate, just
have a pulse counter connected with each station that could place calls.