Conversational Collaboration Platforms

Abstract

I vividly remember the first time I saw a Telex machine in action. It was the late 1980s on a visit to my dad’s office. The machine noisily disrupted a quiet office by spurting out paper, furiously printing text as it went along, with someone hovering on top of it in anticipation of what the message was about to say. “It’s a message from the office in Heidelberg,” that person shouted. This weird machine, in an office in the UK, was woken up by a machine hundreds of miles away because someone was typing in Germany. Once the entire message made it through, it was read out loud, the team had an impromptu meeting to plan the response, and then that was sent back using the keyboard attached to the machine itself. As this was the late 1980s, it was probably one of the last few Telex machines in use. Nevertheless, it was my first experience of such a form of communication and I thought it was the coolest thing ever! It mixed the instant nature of voice calling without requiring synchronization between the participants as a voice call does. For an “Internetless” kid of the 80s, this was as close to magic as I could imagine.