The backing technology would probably have been telex. This seems to have superseded morse-telegraphs some time in the 1960s, and the US telegram office (Wester

The backing technology would probably have been telex. This seems to have superseded morse-telegraphs some time in the 1960s, and the US telegram office (Western Union), if they had a connection, should have been able to telex directly to your local Norwegian post office. Completely wild and unqualified guess: Western Union probably did not run their US operations over telex in 1993, they probably had some 80s-era green-screen mainframe system, which did not connect to the world wide telex network (because telegrams, especially international ones, were a microscopic part of traffic -- anyone with any kind of significant international traffic would have their own telex-links, or be on the phone, fax and/or email by then). So the operator would have typed the message (from a hand-written form, the customer would probably not have had hands-on-keyboard) into this system (first transcription), addressed to some central office in charge of sending world wide telegrams. The office would have telex, but not integrated, so they'd print out the message and re-type it on the telex (second transcription), sent directly to your local post office. There, they would take the message directly from the telex and deliver it to you (so no transcription on the Norwegian end, at which point the spacing would have been fixed).