TELEX & FAX

A History of Telex

Telex is an abbreviation of "Telegraph Exchange”. It refers to an international communication network connecting teletypes, which are devices that can send and receive messages via electrical signals.

The arrival of the Telex network was made possible by progress in improving the telegraph in the mid-1930s.

This service was then the most reliable and least expensive means of long-distance communication. It offered transmission rates of 45·5 bits per second.

The recipient could confirm receipt of a message with a high degree of accuracy thanks to an automatic response mechanism. The first major Telex network was established in Germany in the 1930s. The French network was inaugurated on June 18th, 1946.

The telex in Morocco

Telexes were first set up in Morocco in the first half of 1950. Initially, manual switching was used. However, in 1962 the service began to be automated. In 1993, the Moroccan telex subscriber base had reached 7,676.

For reasons mentioned earlier, the telex network was long used for transmission over long distances. However, in the late 1990s, demand for this service began to decline. This was due to massive use of fax machines and the appearance of the Internet.

Consequently, Morocco terminated this service in December 2008.

The fax

In the 1960s, the process of producing copies over distance went through great improvements. Documents could now be received using thermal paper; then, later, plain paper copies could be made on a simple printer. This gave birth to the Fax (an abbreviation for Telefacsimile) a system that produced exact copies over a phone line.

Fax machines convert an image of the document to be transmitted into electrical impulses. The data is passed along a telephone line, or a specialised link, and is then retrieved by another fax machine, a computer or a mobile phone. These receptors, in turn, transform the electrical impulses into visual images by transcribing them into memory, or onto paper.

The fax in Morocco

Facsimile copying, more commonly known as faxing, was introduced into Morocco in July 1983. After the use of telex was phased out, fax services have been very successful; it is especially used for transmitting copies of documents.