From mendicott@igc.org Mon Nov 4 09:38:03 1991 From: mendicott@igc.org (Marcus L. Endicott) Newsgroups: talk.politics.soviet Subject: Telex helped during coup Date: 2 Nov 91 01:05:00 GMT Topic 45 Telex and the USSR tcora comp.dcom.tele 11:26 am Aug 23, 1991 (at pica.army.mil) (From News system) From the Newark, NJ {Star-Ledger}, Friday August 23, 1991 ACCESSING THE TRUTH Jersey Telex Bases Kept Soviets Abreast of Ongoing Event By JOHN T. HARDING Photo, with caption: "MCI technician Rocco Berardi, center, inspects the company's major switching center for international telex calls with engineer Susan Tobey and staff specialist John Rodin." Citizens in the Soviet Union kept informed of coup events and world reaction by tapping into information databases in New Jersey this week. MCI International, which operates its Insight database in Piscataway, got a "thank you" message from the citizens of Togliatti City in the U.S.S.R. "This was the only channel which we were able to get during the coup," the message from Togliatti said. Using Associated Press news reports in events in Moscow, officials said they decided to support Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic, and oppose the leaders of the coup that ousted Mikhail Gorbachev. Local authorities in Togliatti "had the ability to obtain the full, true information via your agency immediately," the Soviet citizens said. "We thank you for the possibility to obtain the truth about the information of events," the city said, and "our position supporting elected government" of Yeltsin "was based on information obtained from MCI Insight." "Your information was the weapon which today is the cause that legal government returned its power," the message said. Togliatti, named after the Italian communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, is on maps with the spelling Tolyatti. It is an industrial city on the Volga River, about 500 miles east of Moscow. The Soviet customers called in to the Piscataway computer using telex, the station-to-station printing telegraph system introduced in 1950 but surpassed by computers and facsimile machines in America, Western Europe and other industrialized countries around the world. Telephone traffic during the crisis was running much as 100 times the normal level, according to American Telephone and Telegraph Co. And this clogged the lines not only for voice traffic but for computers and fax machines as well, since they use same lines, said AT&T spokesman Monty Hoyt. "Telex lines are independent," Hoyt said, and while traffic was heavier on the telex system, it was not delayed. AT&T acquired its Update international information service and its FYI domestic information service from Western Union early this year. Nina Scozzari, global telex programming director at AT&T Easylink, based in Upper Saddle River, said that "whenever there is any kind of major world issue, good or bad, we have increased traffic." In the Soviet Union last week, radio and television stations were shut down, she noted. And with telephone lines jammed, telex remained a major information source, accessible to 1.7 million users in 160 countries worldwide through MCI International and AT&T Easylink, the two major telex operators. There are 1,627 telex users in the Soviet Union. The central computers in Piscataway and Upper Saddle River are programmed to relay messages from telex senders to computer receivers and vice versa, officials said, enabling two-way communications. "Normally, Soviet citizens have so many sources of news they don't have to use American sources," according to Hoyt. But during the first two days of the coup, "There were as many inquiries to our Update news service in those two days as there was all year," Hoyt said. On Wednesday, the MCI Insight news file "accounted for 80 percent of all calls from the Soviet Union," according to MCI spokesman Alan Garratt, compared to as little as three percent a week before. Don Casey, director of inbound telex: traffic at AT&T pointed out that telex "is central to communications worldwide because it is reliable, and you know who you're talking to." An "answerback" code on the printing telegraph machines prevents phony messages, he said. Garratt said, "You can almost judge world crises by the number of inquiries we get." When people in Third World nations "want unbiased reports," Garratt said, they connect to the database "and go right to the news section." Whenever local news access breaks down, telex users dial back to the U.S. for information contained in the databases, industry spokesmen said. MCI provides news reports from the Associated Press, while AT&T feeds UPI news reports. In worldwide communications, Garratt pointed out, "You have to use a system that works at both ends," and in many parts of the world, that means telex. "In the U.S. and Europe, we have combined everything -- telephone, fax machines and computers," Garratt said. But less-developed areas only have telex machines, which operate separately from the telephone system. In America, customers use computer terminals, which are much faster and display and store the information electronically. Telex machines operate at 66 words per minute, and can print information only on paper. "Any telex terminal, in the world can access this data base," Garratt noted.