Since the decade of the fifties the speed of technological advancements in the arena of communication is mind boggling. None would have thought then that handwritten communication will almost cease to exist.

Concurrently, therefore, the need to have good handwriting skills has more or less become obsolete; it’s now a thing of the past. People then would rely upon books, print media, Radio and then inadequately from Television all the information they needed.

The emergence of teleprinter in the early part of the twentieth-century replaced the need for highly trained operators who used to have specialised skills in using Morse code. Teleprinters revolutionised the speed of communications. Earlier, for long distance messages the need was to have in place two professional Morse code operators—one to send and the other to receive. Teleprinters eliminated human intervention in communication. Business and other needs for

Communication allowed for typing messages directly on teleprinters (with a type-writer kind of key board), thereby increasing the speed of transmission.

The life of teleprinters terminated with the development of ‘Telex’—this emerged in Germany in the 1930s and fast became the most used medium globally for communication. The advent of Facsimile machines (Fax, for short) led to the demise of telex and by the middle/ late 1980s Fax had become the most popular mode of instantaneous communications. Fax allowed for immediate sharing of physical document images; the speed of communications had moved from plain text to visual images. As against pure text based on characters/numbers, Fax allowed for instant replication of information far and wide. Fax machines were like remote photocopiers.

The traditional vehicles of communication were literally uprooted with the development of email, which essentially is an exchange between two computers. The first email was sent in 1971 by Ray........

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