The Telegraph Regulations and Email
What is a telegram? According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/telegram), a telegram is "a telegraphic dispatch."
Telegrams are meant to be "dispatched" by electrical or electronic means. Morse code is electrical in nature since it is represented by simple on-and-off switches of electrical current, symbolized by dots for short "on periods," and dashes for longer periods of the telegraph key being held down.
Émile Baudot of France took this simple means of telegraphic transmission and converted it to a code that could be sent via a typewriter-like keyboard, called the Baudot code, and Telex was born.
What is Telex? According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/telex), Telex is "a communication service involving teletypewriters connected by wire through automatic exchanges."
As a "phone phreak," I found the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) early, and found that many of the Bell System Practices that made up American telephone service were translated into the "recommendations" of the ITU. As an international standards body, the ITU cannot require anything of a sovereign government. While phones are operated by "recognized private operating agencies" like AT&T in the United States and Bell Canada in Canada, they are run by government-operated post offices in many other countries. So the ITU can only make "recommendations" to those governments, which are what the ITU standards are called, yet tend to have the force of law in most countries.
As I became more interested in the data circuits of the telephone network, I found myself in the realm of the Telegraph Regulations, since the ones-and-zeroes of the data world were translations of the dits-and-dahs of the Morse code world of the telegraph. It was how the world transitioned into data from "what they already had," and old Emile was there waiting for them with his Baudot code working the Telex circuits. So while Baudot was institutionalized as International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2 (ITA2) - ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, was established at ITAS (ITA3 and ITA4 were Forward Error Correcting (FEC) versions of Baudot for radio transmission).
By the way, the equals sign (=) character) in Morse code is made up of the run together letters B (-...) and T (-), so (-...-), and is used to mean "break text" between paragraphs in long Telex messages, and also between the text of a telegram and the signature of the sender.
The Telegraph Regulations state: "The signature shall be indented five or more spaces," which is why I indent my signature in emails, though the software many times removes excess spaces. I consider emails, and even SMS text messages, to be the direct linear descendant of telegrams.
When I "sign" SMS messages, I use an "= character before my "signature."
(This is how I send a text: = Cheshire)
In my email messages, I use two "new line" (line feed) characters between the last line of my message and the start of my "signature tag."
Again, the ITU Telegraph Regulations state that in a telegram, "The signature shall be indented five or more spaces," and for those of us who follow Internet regulations, we know the difference between may and shall. ("May" means optional, and "shall" means must!) Some email systems take multiple spaces as wasted space, and deletes most of it, so I use a sequence of "<space><dot><space>" and then another eight spaces, so that my signature gets indented a bit, if not completely to ITU standards.
Richard Cheshire is known in phreak and hacker circles as The Cheshire Catalyst, a pseudonym he's used since publishing in the TAP newsletter of the 1970s and 1980s. He is currently retired, and is a volunteer at space museums near the Canaveral Spaceport, and hosts rocket launch viewings at Space View Park in Titusville, Florida. You are invited to join him for a launch any time.