I would like to express my thanks and appreciation to those who made the Western Union Technical Review available on this newsgroup. It has a lot of interesting material.
I had a pre-conceinved notion that Western Union was somehow a "backward" company due to its financial, labor, and government problems over the years. However, the Tech Rev demonstrates they were certainly state of the art.
The earliest issues (1948) describe among other things:
1) Automated switching of messages -- sophisticated automated equipment to route messages throughout their national network. The new switching offices pictured were very modern.2) Increasing transmission capacity on ocean cables: These challenges weren't much different than those today of squeezing more bandwidth. To my surprise, they had synchronous protocols as well as asynchronous (start-stop) back then.
3) Attempts to develop fibre optic transmission.4) Development of microwave transmission.
Issues of the 1960s dealt with computerization and those challenges were the same as today.
Much of the stuff was overhead my head technically. But the terms and concepts were similar to what is used in Bell System histories.
I would love to find rate cards for the cost of telegrams in the post war era as well as long distance telephone calls. I'm curious to find the 'tipping point' when the cost of toll calls dropped and the cost of telegrams went up so that it became cheaper to phone than wire. My guess is that occured in the early 1960s. I'm also curious as to the volume of telegrams and toll calls, such as when Western Union's peak year of messages occured.
My local newspaper today had an article on the decline of the Howard Johnson's restaurant chain -- the very few remaining sites are declining. Chains such as HoJo and Horn & Hardart suffered from both changes in consumer taste as well as poor management. It's hard to say which came first.
Oslin's book is not complementary to most Western Union management teams, the FCC, or the AT&T. He blamed high AT&T rates and their TWX competition for hurting WU.
By the way, Oslin noted that WU received a big discount from AT&T. But when MCI came on the scene, it demanded the same discount for interconnections. AT&T responded by eliminaing WU's discount, and that hurt WU a lot.
I know many old-time chain restaurants could survive on low rent, but when their leases expired and rent shot up they were forced to close.
Who knows, maybe 50 years from now our kids will be remincising about the 'once powerful' Microsoft or IBM.
[public replies please] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Or, the 'once powerful Bell System and AT&T'. Or maybe they will recall the days when Usenet group moderators actually had news groups virtually free of spam and were not threatened with having _their_ mail service shut off because of efforts _they_ made to fight against spam. Or maybe they will recall when there used to be a powerful entity on the net called 'ICANN' whose leaders were all so rotten to the core that spam was allowed to flourish unhindered, and how when the day finally arrived that spam and scam consumed about 90 percent of the resources and bandwidth that moderators finally did what ICANN had hoped for all along, threw up their hands in disgust and walked away, abandoning all the remaining newsgroups, giving ICANN the 'perfect excuse' to hand it all over to commercial sites. PAT]