Teletex

Teletex was a text communication standard popular in Europe, particularly in Germany, during the 1980s and early 1990s. It was designed as a successor to Telex, offering significantly improved speed, character set, and formatting capabilities.

Teletex transmitted data digitally over telephone lines, achieving speeds much faster than Telex's electromechanical technology. It utilized a more extensive character set based on ISO 6937, allowing for the inclusion of accented characters and some basic graphical symbols absent in the more limited Telex character set. This enabled the transmission of documents in various European languages.

Key features of Teletex included:

• Faster Transmission Speed: Significantly quicker than Telex, leading to reduced communication costs.
• Extended Character Set: Enabled the use of more characters and symbols.
• Enhanced Formatting: Allowed for basic formatting such as underlining and bolding.
• Memory Storage: Teletex terminals often included memory to store incoming and outgoing messages.
• Page-Oriented Transmission: Unlike Telex, which transmitted line by line, Teletex transmitted entire pages at a time.

Although Teletex offered advantages over Telex, it was eventually superseded by the rise of fax machines and, later, email. While Teletex was widely adopted in some European countries, its global adoption was limited. The emergence of more versatile and cost-effective technologies led to its decline and eventual obsolescence. Teletex terminals and services are no longer widely available.