Company History
Telko was established 19. March 1974 by Knut M. Hansen. The company's first contract involved delivery of pay phone misuse blocking electronings for the then state owned phone company Televerket. In 1976, stock was issued and Telko AS was fully established.
Telko AS was present during the lauch of the very first micro processors in Norway and immediately made use of the new technology. The new microprocessors were well suited to industrial process control and management and many of our early products were oriented towards such markets. Throughout the first 10-15 years after our startup, electronics for such niche markets was our main focus and has remained as a secondary activity in later years.
Some examples of our products from this business area:
- Abbatoir cold storage robotics control
- Abbatoir weight registration stations
- Pressure sensor production PLS control
- Nitrocellulose production labelling software
- Foodstuffs production data collection and logging
- Firing range target control
- Dairy packing robotics PLS control
- Blank ammunition production control
When computers entered the norwegian market, they were also quickly put to use in our products. One of our early core products was a weighing and billing system for use in quarries, asphalt and concrete production.
Mid eighties, Hans Baksaas was employed in Telko AS and development on TelMax, one of our core products even today, was initiated. With this product, the company again focused on telephony, this time in the form of a support system for the Ericsson MD-110 business telephone exchange. These exchanges are used by a long range of major corporations and institutions in Norway, and benefit greatly from a PC based system for technical programming, billing, cataloging, switchboard, etc.
In 1990, Knut M. Hansen came back from a navy exercise with a fresh idea; It should be possible to display marine charts on a screen with automatic placement of the vessel position, based on data from newly available marine navigation instruments. Such a system would greatly benefit navigation. Shortly after and in cooperation with the Norwegian Marine Hydrographics offices, we entered the market with the marine electronic chart plotter TELchart.
In later years, TelMax and TELchart have remained our core products and have been in continual development thoughout the last 15 years. On the telephony side we have implemented integration with Telenor Proffnett, and on the marine charting side, several of our products have been certified to comply with stringent international standards by Det Norske Veritas (DNV).