You’ve probably already read that Western Union has terminated its telegram business. In this day and age email and telephones, who knew that there was still a telegram business to terminate? I certainly didn’t.

I would have thought that the fax or telex machines would have killed the telegram several decades ago let alone the telephone even before that. Yet somehow enough people were still uncomfortable with technologies developed in the past 100 years that they preferred communicating via the safer and more established combination of telegraph/messenger. These are people that probably still miss the Pony Express and pneumatic tubes and are unlikely to switch to Instant Messenger, SMS or Skype.

The fact that Western Union’s telegram business survived into 2006 is a testament to how long it can take to completely put an outdated technology to bed and foretells long we should expect dying yet entrenched technologies like dial-up Internet service to be around STOP

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 11th, 2006 at 8:36 am by Insider and is filed under Not the conventional wisdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.