It's all about communication

When I was young and blonde (now I am less young and blonde), I joined Ericsson 1985. 

Over all my Ericsson years, I have been in internal and external contact within Sweden as well as globally.  

When I started my journey at Ericsson, paper mail was the normal communication method. Especially for documents. Of course beside the landline phone, which was extensively used as well. A nice thing with paper mail is that after the envelope is posted, the task could I  rest for a while. 

For short and very urgent messages we had telex. We had a paper form to write in the text, and handed over the form to the secretary, who had access to transmit telex messages. 

Actually we had already when I started an internal global electronic mail system; Memo which was developed by Ericsson, Volvo and I think some more companies. My manager urged us to check e-mail (Memo) once a day. A routine he suggested was to check in the morning while changing from outdoor to indoor shoes. In those days the PC was not invented, we had a mainframe terminal, shared by 4-5 persons. Later a few other big companies were possbile to reach via Memo on the mainframe terminal. 

Several years later, the fax (facsimile, telefax) machine arrived. What a great invention! Now we could send messages we had used telex for by ourself, also when secretary was not available. And not at least, documents were possible to transmit. 

I come to think of the Ericsson slogan "It's all about communication. The rest is technology."

And indeed what an evolution, or revolution, we have had and still ongoing, with communication technologies!

This has happened over only a few decades. The fax machine is already outdated (at least in most business). The landline phone is also halfway outdated, and the mobile phone is a very common tool. E-mail is well established, not only at big companies like Ericsson who had Memo back in 1980's. We even can read the e-mails in the phone. And we have SMS and numerous chat programs in addition. We can share and colloborate with documents stored somewhere over internet, e.g. in the cloud. And the video conferences which recently required equipment in special rooms can now take place via laptop or mobile phone (although more professional video rooms still can be relevant for more advanced video conferences). 

It's all about communication. The rest is technology. 

#communication #technology #Ericsson #telex #fax