WI: Teleprinters instead of telephones?

[Hendryk]

A couple of decades ago, when cell phones began taking off in a big way, few predicted that as a result live audio communication would decline and be largely superseded by texting. So what if the telephone had remained an also-ran technology such as, say, pneumatic tubes, and the dominant method of point-to-point telecommunication from the turn of the 20th century had instead remained text-based, relying on personal teleprinters?

Those that existed in OTL were a bit bulky, but I'm assuming that more compact models would be developed for private use.

 

[Thande]

It's an interesting question. One can argue that one reason why the phone became popular in the first place was the sheer novelty and perhaps the slight improvement in speed. One can imagine situations where phones remain a more specialised setup after the initial novelty wears off, e.g. just used in military commands and so forth. But a potential issue is that gramophones and the wireless were normalising the idea of hearing other people's voices in your home, whereas nobody was printing out the scripts of radio dramas or whatever.

 

[Creekmench]

Assuming technology develops on a similar route as in OTL, could we see the first portable teleprinters be like a quasi-laptop or pager type thing?

 

[Hendryk]

Assuming technology develops on a similar route as in OTL, could we see the first portable teleprinters be like a quasi-laptop or pager type thing?

I assume that once cathode ray tubes become a thing, text will shift to screen displays rather than paper printouts. Or perhaps this prompts an earlier maturation of LCD technology, which in OTL hit the mass market in the early 1970s.

 

[Hendryk]

I came across the following post and was reminded of this old thread. Perhaps one reason for voice call not catching on might be the feeling that, absent an emergency, it's just plain rude.

 

[Incognitia]

Mass adoption and cost: once you've done all the logistics of the phone lines and exchanges and so on, the phones themselves are simple and cheap. The sheer amount of mechanical complexity and thus costs and maintenance &c for even a simplified teleprinter is vast by comparison, so if it is the norm it won't reach as many people.

 

[JesterBL]

Mass adoption and cost: once you've done all the logistics of the phone lines and exchanges and so on, the phones themselves are simple and cheap. The sheer amount of mechanical complexity and thus costs and maintenance &c for even a simplified teleprinter is vast by comparison, so if it is the norm it won't reach as many people.

I think storage is exactly what is missing from this comparison- telephones weren't printing out an acetate of every voice message, unlike the teleprinters here.

 

[GBW]

The big problem initially is all the paper that'll be used in printing out all of these messages. If not seen as a drawback of the teleprinter technology and rather businesses look for solutions, it could lead to hemp becoming a cash crop to produce more paper cheaply, and could even lead to an earlier systematized paper recycling in the 1920s and 30s. Up until the advent of cheaper cathode-ray tubes in, say, the late 1950s or 60s that would instead display the text instead of printing it out, providing massive savings in paper and ink and providing a much earlier form of e-mail or texting. Audio transmission would remain the province of radios, movies and television, as well as that of the world's militaries. When a form of home telephone does develop, the already existing CRT displays might lead to it instead being a full videophone instead of just a telephone, perhaps around the 1980s. That, in turn, could lead the eventual advent of the internet being more video conference based, as text will be seen as archaic by that point, which would mean wider and earlier adoption of broadband infrastructure to handle that much data transmission.

 

[Hendryk]

I wonder if some kind of art form might develop from people saving the message printouts, and, say, Beat Generation authors figuring out that you can write prose that way.

When a form of home telephone does develop, the already existing CRT displays might lead to it instead being a full videophone instead of just a telephone, perhaps around the 1980s. That, in turn, could lead the eventual advent of the internet being more video conference based, as text will be seen as archaic by that point, which would mean wider and earlier adoption of broadband infrastructure to handle that much data transmission.

I like this idea of text display CRTs evolving into videophones, though wouldn't that have to wait until the development of optic fiber?

 

[GBW]

I like this idea of text display CRTs evolving into videophones, though wouldn't that have to wait until the development of optic fiber?

In OTL, fiber optic cables started to be utilized by the US military in the mid 1970s to link their computers together in NORAD headquarters, and telephone companies were already using them to rebuild their infrastructure. With wider spread CRT displays transmitting text between each other, there could be an earlier development and adoption of fiber optic cables as a base for the introduction of these videophones - multiple patents for the technology were around for quite a while before that. This ATL would definitely have more advanced data infrastructure than OTL.