* [TUHS] V7 Addendem @ 2017-12-06 0:33 Warner Losh 2017-12-06 1:07 ` Warren Toomey 0 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Warner Losh @ 2017-12-06 0:33 UTC (permalink / raw) From the tuhs web site: "This is a set of addenda to Seventh Edition Unix, possibly put out by the Labs." and "The identity of the person who donated them is unknown." Two questions: Was this put out by the Labs? Second: There was recently a discussion about a tape found at some public location during an early Unix user group meeting. Is this that tape? Warner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171205/9ef4ce03/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem 2017-12-06 0:33 [TUHS] V7 Addendem Warner Losh @ 2017-12-06 1:07 ` Warren Toomey 2017-12-06 16:11 ` Random832 0 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Warren Toomey @ 2017-12-06 1:07 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1817 bytes --] On Tue, Dec 05, 2017 at 05:33:02PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote: > From the tuhs web site: > "This is a set of addenda to Seventh Edition Unix, possibly put out by > the Labs." > and > "The identity of the person who donated them is unknown." > Two questions: Was this put out by the Labs? > Second: There was recently a discussion about a tape found at some > public location during an early Unix user group meeting. Is this that > tape? > Warner No. I had to search my own archives. From this list in 2002: The mythical `50 bugs' tape, described in Peter Salus' book `A Quarter Century of UNIX' has been found lurking in the Unix Archive. You can find it in Applications/Spencer_Tapes/unsw3.tar.gz as the file usr/sys/v6unix/unix_changes. And here is the relevant paragraphs from QCU: Lou Katz’s version is a bit different: A large number of bug fixes was collected, and rather than issue them one at a time, a collection tape (”The 50 fixes”) was put together by Ken. Some of the fixes were quite important, though I don't remember any in particular. I suspect that a significant fraction of the fixes were actually done by non-Bell people. Ken tried to send it out, but the lawyers kept stalling and stalling and stalling. Finally, in complete disgust, someone "found a tape on Mountain Avenue” which had the fixes. [The address of Bell Labs is 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ.] When the lawyers found out about it, they called every licensee and threatened them with dire consequences if they didn’t destroy the tape, after trying to find out how they got the tape. I would guess that no one would actually tell them how they came by the tape (I didn’t). Cheers, Warren ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem 2017-12-06 1:07 ` Warren Toomey @ 2017-12-06 16:11 ` Random832 2017-12-06 16:15 ` Jon Steinhart 0 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Random832 @ 2017-12-06 16:11 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1085 bytes --] On Tue, Dec 5, 2017, at 20:07, Warren Toomey wrote: > Ken tried to send it out, but the lawyers kept > stalling and stalling and stalling. > > When the lawyers found out about it, they called every > licensee and threatened them with dire consequences if they > didn’t destroy the tape, after trying to find out how they got > the tape. I would guess that no one would actually tell them > how they came by the tape (I didn’t). I have a question, if anyone has any idea... is there any recorded knowledge about *who was driving*? That is, beyond "the lawyers", who on the business side of AT&T was making the policy decisions that led to the various sometimes bizarre legal actions that caused problems for the Unix world, and to what end (was there some way they expected to profit? liability concerns?) In other words, what was the basis of the legal department's mandate to try to shut these things down? (This question is also something I've wondered for some non-Unix stuff like the E911 document, but that's not relevant to this list) ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem 2017-12-06 16:11 ` Random832 @ 2017-12-06 16:15 ` Jon Steinhart 2017-12-06 18:39 ` Clem Cole 0 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Jon Steinhart @ 2017-12-06 16:15 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1430 bytes --] Random832 writes: > On Tue, Dec 5, 2017, at 20:07, Warren Toomey wrote: > > Ken tried to send it out, but the lawyers kept > > stalling and stalling and stalling. > > > > When the lawyers found out about it, they called every > > licensee and threatened them with dire consequences if they > > didn’t destroy the tape, after trying to find out how they got > > the tape. I would guess that no one would actually tell them > > how they came by the tape (I didn’t). > > I have a question, if anyone has any idea... is there any recorded > knowledge about *who was driving*? That is, beyond "the lawyers", who on > the business side of AT&T was making the policy decisions that led to > the various sometimes bizarre legal actions that caused problems for the > Unix world, and to what end (was there some way they expected to profit? > liability concerns?) > > In other words, what was the basis of the legal department's mandate to > try to shut these things down? (This question is also something I've > wondered for some non-Unix stuff like the E911 document, but that's not > relevant to this list) Can't answer your question directly, but I think that some of this was the result of the prior consent decree banning them from being in the data business. I seem to recall that it was technically illegal for them to sell SW and don't know how giving it away would have been viewed. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem 2017-12-06 16:15 ` Jon Steinhart @ 2017-12-06 18:39 ` Clem Cole 2017-12-06 18:49 ` [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] Jon Steinhart 0 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2017-12-06 18:39 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2767 bytes --] On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:15 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote: > Random832 writes: > > On Tue, Dec 5, 2017, at 20:07, Warren Toomey wrote: > > > Ken tried to send it out, but the lawyers kept > > > stalling and stalling and stalling. > > > > > > When the lawyers found out about it, they called every > > > licensee and threatened them with dire consequences if they > > > didn’t destroy the tape, after trying to find out how they got > > > the tape. I would guess that no one would actually tell them > > > how they came by the tape (I didn’t). > > > > I have a question, if anyone has any idea... is there any recorded > > knowledge about *who was driving*? That is, beyond "the lawyers", who on > > the business side of AT&T was making the policy decisions that led to > > the various sometimes bizarre legal actions that caused problems for the > > Unix world, and to what end (was there some way they expected to profit? > > liability concerns?) > > > > In other words, what was the basis of the legal department's mandate to > > try to shut these things down? (This question is also something I've > > wondered for some non-Unix stuff like the E911 document, but that's not > > relevant to this list) > > Can't answer your question directly, but I think that some of this was > the result of the prior consent decree banning them from being in the > data business. I seem to recall that it was technically illegal for > them to sell SW and don't know how giving it away would have been viewed. > I really think Jon is correct here. The behavior was all left over from the 1956 consent decree, which settled the 1949 anti-trust case against AT&T. As the recipients of the AT&T IP, we used to refer the behavior as "UNIX was abandoned on your doorstep." Throughout the 60s and 70s, the AT&T sr management from the CEO on down, were terrified of another anti-trust case. And of course they got one and we all know what judge Green did to resolve that in 1980. I described the activities/actions in detail in my paper: *"**UNIX: A View from the Field as We Played the Game" *which I gave last fall in Paris. The proceeding are supposed to go on line at some point. Send me email if you want the details and I'll send you a PDF. I'm holding off cutting and pasting here for reasons of brevity. For an legal analysis I also recommend: *“AT&T Divestiture & the Telecommunications Market”,* John Pinheiro, Berkeley Technical Law Journal, 303, September 1987, Volume 2, Issue 2, Article 5 which I cite in my paper. Clem -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171206/6623bbac/attachment-0001.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-06 18:39 ` Clem Cole @ 2017-12-06 18:49 ` Jon Steinhart 2017-12-06 18:53 ` Warner Losh ` (3 more replies) 0 siblings, 4 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Jon Steinhart @ 2017-12-06 18:49 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2494 bytes --] Clem Cole writes: > On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:15 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote: > > Can't answer your question directly, but I think that some of this was > > the result of the prior consent decree banning them from being in the > > data business. I seem to recall that it was technically illegal for > > them to sell SW and don't know how giving it away would have been viewed. > > I really think Jon is correct here. The behavior was all left over from the > 1956 consent decree, which settled the 1949 anti-trust case against AT&T. > > As the recipients of the AT&T IP, we used to refer the behavior as "UNIX was > abandoned on your doorstep." Throughout the 60s and 70s, the AT&T sr > management from the CEO on down, were terrified of another anti-trust case. > And of course they got one and we all know what judge Green did to resolve that > in 1980. > > I described the activities/actions in detail in my paper: "UNIX: A View from > the Field as We Played the Game" which I gave last fall in Paris. The > proceeding are supposed to go on line at some point. Send me email if you want > the details and I'll send you a PDF. I'm holding off cutting and pasting here > for reasons of brevity. For an legal analysis I also recommend: “AT&T > Divestiture & the Telecommunications Market”, John Pinheiro, Berkeley Technical > Law Journal, 303, September 1987, Volume 2, Issue 2, Article 5 which I cite in > my paper. > > Clem There's another aspect of this that I think that many people misunderstand which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the rest of us, not so good. Some of us remember the days in which phones were reliable and you could understand the person on the other end. Or when your phone lasted 60+ years. Or the current debate about whether it's ok to eliminate exchange powered phones that work in an emergency. During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought "Yeah, give me more of that. It's 60 years old, still works better than what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split." Not to mention it ended one of the best research labs in history. Jon ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-06 18:49 ` [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] Jon Steinhart @ 2017-12-06 18:53 ` Warner Losh 2017-12-06 18:58 ` Jon Steinhart 2017-12-06 18:54 ` Clem Cole ` (2 subsequent siblings) 3 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Warner Losh @ 2017-12-06 18:53 UTC (permalink / raw) On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote: > > During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone > and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought > "Yeah, give me more of that. It's 60 years old, still works better than > what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still > work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split." > We traded reliability for cat videos and any kind of porn you'd ever want (and sever you wouldn't!) Warner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171206/902682e7/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-06 18:53 ` Warner Losh @ 2017-12-06 18:58 ` Jon Steinhart 0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Jon Steinhart @ 2017-12-06 18:58 UTC (permalink / raw) Warner Losh writes: > On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote: > > > > During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone > > and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought > > "Yeah, give me more of that. It's 60 years old, still works better than > > what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still > > work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split." > > > > We traded reliability for cat videos and any kind of porn you'd ever want > (and sever you wouldn't!) > > Warner Exactly. I remember Dick Hause (?) doing a nice graphical demo on the Glance G that showed how the phone system routed around faults and was able to because of the "there shall be a minimum of three paths out of any exchange" rule. A while back my long distance went out because someone hit a phone pole 40 miles away. Couldn't even call to report it because support was in Seattle and there was no path there from here; that was the only route. Something to keep in mind with the internet. While TCP/IP is great for routing around trouble it can only do so when there are alternate routes. Seem to be fewer and fewer of these. Jon ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-06 18:49 ` [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] Jon Steinhart 2017-12-06 18:53 ` Warner Losh @ 2017-12-06 18:54 ` Clem Cole 2017-12-06 19:20 ` William Pechter 2017-12-06 19:23 ` William Corcoran 2017-12-11 18:17 ` Paul Winalski 3 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2017-12-06 18:54 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1308 bytes --] On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 1:49 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote: > > There's another aspect of this that I think that many people misunderstand > which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew > that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their > monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the > rest of us, not so good. > > Some of us remember the days in which phones were reliable and you could > understand the person on the other end. Or when your phone lasted 60+ > years. Or the current debate about whether it's ok to eliminate exchange > powered phones that work in an emergency. > > During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone > and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought > "Yeah, give me more of that. It's 60 years old, still works better than > what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still > work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split." > > Not to mention it ended one of the best research labs in history. Amen brother Jon.... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171206/e056da0b/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-06 18:54 ` Clem Cole @ 2017-12-06 19:20 ` William Pechter 2017-12-07 14:26 ` Ron Natalie 0 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: William Pechter @ 2017-12-06 19:20 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4368 bytes --] Clem Cole wrote: > > > On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 1:49 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com > <mailto:jon at fourwinds.com>> wrote: > > > There's another aspect of this that I think that many people > misunderstand > which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. > AT&T knew > that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade > their > monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. > For the > rest of us, not so good. > For AT&T (which no longer is a company since the current AT&T is really AT&T in name only. SBC Communications bought AT&T Corp. on November 18, 2005, and changed its name to AT&T Inc. (The real AT&T is no longer...) > Some of us remember the days in which phones were reliable and you > could > understand the person on the other end. Or when your phone lasted 60+ > years. Or the current debate about whether it's ok to eliminate > exchange > powered phones that work in an emergency. > > During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial > phone > and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought > "Yeah, give me more of that. It's 60 years old, still works > better than > what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still > work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split." > > Not to mention it ended one of the best research labs in history. > > Amen brother Jon.... > > And it also helped cause the end of a number of computer companies, including NCR, DEC, Pyramid Technologies... The bad decisions AT&T made once they got into the computer hardware business were legendary. They had product support problems (replaced a significant quantity of 6300 motherboards on their PC for an MS-DOS clock problem they introduced by clearing the seconds in the RTC chip at each boot)... They had issues with their Field Service techs being unwilling to work on Pyramid OS/x boxes under Unix (AT&T System 7000) because that was system software and they were only willing to work with a (nonexistant on Pyramid) offline diagnostics set. An AT&T Union tech walkout from Pyramid classes was averted on that one... They were not too successful selling Alliant FX/1 and FX/8 boxes as AT&T machines as well. I worked for both computer companies in service and training and saw this first hand.AT&T was to hand AT&T Business cards to Alliant Service personnel to handle the customers. They tried to sell the 3b20 simplex box against the Vax into scientific markets only to find that although the integer performance was superior... Scientific use really needs hardware floating point. The later 3b line got much better but the first entry was frightenening Unfortunately, half of Pyramid's sales were through OEM's (Siemens-Nixdorf and AQT&T mostly) so the ton of business dropped immediately once the NCR deal took hold. It happened just as Pyramid moved to DCOS/x (Their SVR4 port to MIPS). This killed a ton of growth and the deal to move the US Internal Revenue from System III based Zilog Zeus boxes to Pyramid... Sometimes you can't always get what you want. Sometimes when you get it you screw yourself into the ground. AT&T, I was told, couldn't figure out how MCI could undercut them in long distance. The experts said -- we have the network in place and paid for and there's no way we could do it for under 10c per minute... They didn't figure MCI (later LDDS) could cook the books to make the numbers look better. Back in '84 DEC was to train me as a Unix admin and act as the outsource contractor supplier to AT&T. This would've had one source of service and support for all their Vaxes and eliminated the large collection of Sysadmin and Operator suppliers. Pre-IBM Global Services type stuff. The wife was at the Labs at the time and they supposedly announced it. Rumor says a DEC and AT&T merger about the same time fell apart. Perhaps the history is buried in the DEC Archives now in the Computer Museuum. I was told I was in on the deal in Oct/Nov 1983 or 84 and it fell apart the next January or so. Bill -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171206/2cd0e371/attachment-0001.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-06 19:20 ` William Pechter @ 2017-12-07 14:26 ` Ron Natalie 0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Ron Natalie @ 2017-12-07 14:26 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 829 bytes --] Ø For AT&T (which no longer is a company since the current AT&T is really AT&T in name only. SBC Communications bought AT&T Corp. on November 18, 2005, and changed its name to AT&T Inc. (The real AT&T is no longer...) Well SBC was one of the RBOCs so while it wasn’t the post-Greene ATT, it is a decent chunk of the original monopoly. Not only the old BellSouth but also Illinois, Inndiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pacific, Southwestern and Pacific Bells. They did acquire the old long lines AT&T and wireless sytem. Of course AT&T and already spun out what we would have called Western Electric in the days (and hence the UNIX heritage). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171207/cec97187/attachment-0001.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-06 18:49 ` [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] Jon Steinhart 2017-12-06 18:53 ` Warner Losh 2017-12-06 18:54 ` Clem Cole @ 2017-12-06 19:23 ` William Corcoran 2017-12-06 20:30 ` Kurt H Maier 2017-12-07 5:08 ` Jon Steinhart 2017-12-11 18:17 ` Paul Winalski 3 siblings, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: William Corcoran @ 2017-12-06 19:23 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3236 bytes --] Well, sure in 1963 the T1 carrier was a huge pipe. It was a huge pipe in 1970. It was also a huge pipe in 1980 for business. (Not so for the telcos, as ATT had Metrobus in the 80’s and the telcos had SONET in the 90’s—-completely inaccessible but to the largest corporations) However, today, I have Fios with nearly 1 Gigabit up and down for a small fee. Thank you Judge Greene! (Let’s not forget, I now have access to a working v7 for free where the license previously cost $28,000.) Bill Corcoran On Dec 6, 2017, at 1:49 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com<mailto:jon at fourwinds.com>> wrote: Clem Cole writes: On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:15 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com<mailto:jon at fourwinds.com>> wrote: Can't answer your question directly, but I think that some of this was the result of the prior consent decree banning them from being in the data business. I seem to recall that it was technically illegal for them to sell SW and don't know how giving it away would have been viewed. I really think Jon is correct here. The behavior was all left over from the 1956 consent decree, which settled the 1949 anti-trust case against AT&T. As the recipients of the AT&T IP, we used to refer the behavior as "UNIX was abandoned on your doorstep." Throughout the 60s and 70s, the AT&T sr management from the CEO on down, were terrified of another anti-trust case. And of course they got one and we all know what judge Green did to resolve that in 1980. I described the activities/actions in detail in my paper: "UNIX: A View from the Field as We Played the Game" which I gave last fall in Paris. The proceeding are supposed to go on line at some point. Send me email if you want the details and I'll send you a PDF. I'm holding off cutting and pasting here for reasons of brevity. For an legal analysis I also recommend: “AT&T Divestiture & the Telecommunications Market”, John Pinheiro, Berkeley Technical Law Journal, 303, September 1987, Volume 2, Issue 2, Article 5 which I cite in my paper. Clem There's another aspect of this that I think that many people misunderstand which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the rest of us, not so good. Some of us remember the days in which phones were reliable and you could understand the person on the other end. Or when your phone lasted 60+ years. Or the current debate about whether it's ok to eliminate exchange powered phones that work in an emergency. During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought "Yeah, give me more of that. It's 60 years old, still works better than what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split." Not to mention it ended one of the best research labs in history. Jon -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171206/e29b5a1b/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-06 19:23 ` William Corcoran @ 2017-12-06 20:30 ` Kurt H Maier 2017-12-06 23:59 ` George Michaelson 2017-12-07 14:03 ` Ron Natalie 2017-12-07 5:08 ` Jon Steinhart 1 sibling, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Kurt H Maier @ 2017-12-06 20:30 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1203 bytes --] On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 07:23:00PM +0000, William Corcoran wrote: > Well, sure in 1963 the T1 carrier was a huge pipe. It was a huge pipe in 1970. It was also a huge pipe in 1980 for business. (Not so for the telcos, as ATT had Metrobus in the 80’s and the telcos had SONET in the 90’s—-completely inaccessible but to the largest corporations) > > However, today, I have Fios with nearly 1 Gigabit up and down for a small fee. > > Thank you Judge Greene! > > (Let’s not forget, I now have access to a working v7 for free where the license previously cost $28,000.) But that was the flip side of being allowed to maintain a monopoly -- you could get phone service damn near anywhere, while getting FiOS service is possible only in geographic regions small enough to be a rounding error compared to POTS penetration. Near-universal service was the burden AT&T was required to bear. Now, nobody is bearing it. The current state of bandwidth is great if you're in the right place at the right time. For everyone else in the US nothing is getting better. Even 100mbit service is unavailable to the majority of the nation, let alone laughably bizarre requests like "reliability." khm ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-06 20:30 ` Kurt H Maier @ 2017-12-06 23:59 ` George Michaelson 2017-12-07 14:03 ` Ron Natalie 1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: George Michaelson @ 2017-12-06 23:59 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2571 bytes --] The capital investment regime changed. AT&T like all the other telcos used utility scale funding options, to buy asset with a 50+ year life and then reaped the benefits against the long tail of payment on the investment funding to make it. Fast forward to the 1970s and people decided they'd rather sweat an asset fast, make a huge Return on Investment, and let dumb schmucks from their parents generation dig holes to earn low interest income for 50 years. Who wants to live forever! Cocaine on aisle three, Junk bond finance, speculation, deregulation... Pretty much everything we're using right now, right down the food chain comes from that decision. My laptop is in a three year depreciation cycle. My ISP is desperately trying not to have to spend money every 5-10 years re-engineering the switching and routing logic behind my fibre-to-the-home. The glass in the ground will last 50 years, but the government expects funding to complete its capital cost debt return inside 5. (insane) Admittedly, given the rate of change in technology, I think there was some coupling. If you had just invested in a strowger exchange and somebody showed you a transistor, if you were smart your heart was sinking: Kid was in meccano, not in mechanical switching any more... On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 6:30 AM, Kurt H Maier <khm at sciops.net> wrote: > On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 07:23:00PM +0000, William Corcoran wrote: >> Well, sure in 1963 the T1 carrier was a huge pipe. It was a huge pipe in 1970. It was also a huge pipe in 1980 for business. (Not so for the telcos, as ATT had Metrobus in the 80’s and the telcos had SONET in the 90’s—-completely inaccessible but to the largest corporations) >> >> However, today, I have Fios with nearly 1 Gigabit up and down for a small fee. >> >> Thank you Judge Greene! >> >> (Let’s not forget, I now have access to a working v7 for free where the license previously cost $28,000.) > > But that was the flip side of being allowed to maintain a monopoly -- > you could get phone service damn near anywhere, while getting FiOS > service is possible only in geographic regions small enough to be a > rounding error compared to POTS penetration. Near-universal service was > the burden AT&T was required to bear. Now, nobody is bearing it. > > The current state of bandwidth is great if you're in the right place at > the right time. For everyone else in the US nothing is getting better. > Even 100mbit service is unavailable to the majority of the nation, let > alone laughably bizarre requests like "reliability." > > khm ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-06 20:30 ` Kurt H Maier 2017-12-06 23:59 ` George Michaelson @ 2017-12-07 14:03 ` Ron Natalie 2017-12-07 15:34 ` William Corcoran 1 sibling, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Ron Natalie @ 2017-12-07 14:03 UTC (permalink / raw) T1 wasn't cheap nor ubiquitous. I ran the networking for the degree granting public colleges in NJ (which on the whole is a fairly metropolitan area) but there were places we couldn't get it. It was also expensive. Old school copper T1 required repeaters every quarter mile or so. Debugging could be fun. At least our telco (NJ Bell) back then could move the loop back around while I did tests to tell them where the line was failing. And yeah, I live in one of those backwaters now. No cable, no fiber optic anything. I use two DSL lines to get an aggregate 20M down 1.5M up. That's the best the vesiges of the old GTE telco down here can do. ATT has fiber in communities down the road but we're too sparse to attract their interest. Comcast won't even pull in a local drop from the main road. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-07 14:03 ` Ron Natalie @ 2017-12-07 15:34 ` William Corcoran 0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: William Corcoran @ 2017-12-07 15:34 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2179 bytes --] Oh, yes! I remember the copper T1’s eventually traveled over a single pair using ADSL at high voltage. In our metropolitan area, the copper plant had loading coils everywhere—undocumented. If your copper T1 had the misfortune of having a loading coil somewhere in its path then your circuit was doomed. Plus, these little Pairgain’s would literally explode inside the manholes. Copper and T1s should have been outlawed. Especially, since using fiber for everything but the last foot (TLF, lol) was far more reliable. I do hope that the archivists view the delivery mechanisms like the T1, POTS, and so on as having historical significance and are inextricably linked to UNIX. Talking to anyone that worked on the Bell System (and later telcos) always reveal great stories. Many are worthy of preservation. Incidentally, I had a similar issue with a staffer needing remote access. There were no viable wired solutions. However, surprisingly, 4G MIFI with an unlimited data plan actually was a stable solution—-and she even received a dedicated IP. Bill Corcoran On Dec 7, 2017, at 9:04 AM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com<mailto:ron at ronnatalie.com>> wrote: T1 wasn't cheap nor ubiquitous. I ran the networking for the degree granting public colleges in NJ (which on the whole is a fairly metropolitan area) but there were places we couldn't get it. It was also expensive. Old school copper T1 required repeaters every quarter mile or so. Debugging could be fun. At least our telco (NJ Bell) back then could move the loop back around while I did tests to tell them where the line was failing. And yeah, I live in one of those backwaters now. No cable, no fiber optic anything. I use two DSL lines to get an aggregate 20M down 1.5M up. That's the best the vesiges of the old GTE telco down here can do. ATT has fiber in communities down the road but we're too sparse to attract their interest. Comcast won't even pull in a local drop from the main road. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171207/95f6ed06/attachment-0001.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-06 19:23 ` William Corcoran 2017-12-06 20:30 ` Kurt H Maier @ 2017-12-07 5:08 ` Jon Steinhart 2017-12-07 15:09 ` Larry McVoy 1 sibling, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Jon Steinhart @ 2017-12-07 5:08 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 905 bytes --] William Corcoran writes: > Well, sure in 1963 the T1 carrier was a huge pipe. It was a huge pipe in > 1970. It was also a huge pipe in 1980 for business. (Not so for the telcos, > as ATT had Metrobus in the 80’s and the telcos had SONET in the > 90’s—-completely inaccessible but to the largest corporations) > > However, today, I have Fios with nearly 1 Gigabit up and down for a small fee. > > > Thank you Judge Greene! > > (Let’s not forget, I now have access to a working v7 for free where the license > previously cost $28,000.) > > > Bill Corcoran Well yes, the consent degree made that possible. But remember that a whole pile of the technology came from BTL and that sort of stuff isn't getting done at the same level without research funding. And lucky you. I pay $450/month for a T1 which is the best that I can get where I live because there is no universal service. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-07 5:08 ` Jon Steinhart @ 2017-12-07 15:09 ` Larry McVoy 0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2017-12-07 15:09 UTC (permalink / raw) On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 09:08:20PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote: > And lucky you. I pay $450/month for a T1 which is the best that I can get where > I live because there is no universal service. For you folks with crappy net connections, first I have felt your pain, my condolences. I live in the Santa Cruz mountains in a rural area even for the mountains. So no cable, no reliable DSL. But what we do have is line of sight to a tower on Loma Prieta. I worked a deal with Etheric where I get 8Mbit down and up guaranteed and they let it burst to available space on the radio. I average about 20 down/up, it sometimes goes lower but that's the average. Just tried now and 25 down/up. I worked a 5 year prepaid deal with them and got them down to $130/month. It's point to point wifi and works really well. See if you can get some of that. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-06 18:49 ` [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] Jon Steinhart ` (2 preceding siblings ...) 2017-12-06 19:23 ` William Corcoran @ 2017-12-11 18:17 ` Paul Winalski 2017-12-11 18:39 ` Clem Cole 2017-12-11 20:11 ` William Cheswick 3 siblings, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Paul Winalski @ 2017-12-11 18:17 UTC (permalink / raw) On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote: > > There's another aspect of this that I think that many people misunderstand > which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew > that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their > monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the > rest of us, not so good. Except that the new AT&T, liberated from the regulatory chains of the Bell operating companies, never learned how to compete in the free market. They got their clock cleaned by the competition. In desperation they bought Olivetti and only managed to run it into the ground. -Paul W. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-11 18:17 ` Paul Winalski @ 2017-12-11 18:39 ` Clem Cole 2017-12-12 0:27 ` Steve Johnson 2017-12-13 17:05 ` Jason Stevens 2017-12-11 20:11 ` William Cheswick 1 sibling, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2017-12-11 18:39 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2649 bytes --] On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 1:17 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote: > On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote: > > > > There's another aspect of this that I think that many people > misunderstand > > which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew > > that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their > > monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the > > rest of us, not so good. > > Except that the new AT&T, liberated from the regulatory chains of the > Bell operating companies, never learned how to compete in the free > market. They got their clock cleaned by the competition. In > desperation they bought Olivetti and only managed to run it into the > ground To be fair you are both right. I think at the time Charlie Brown and Team at AT&T wanted to make a go at IBM and DEC (*i.e.* large systems) and Paul's right, they missed. But Jon is right that they had realized that it going to be a data centric business and he and his team felt that the current consent decree we going to keep them from being players in it. To me there were a couple of issues. The Phone System and 'TPC' was centrally controlled (a lot like a communist country). Where it worked, it was fine. But... the problem was that anything outside their view of reality was a threat. It's funny as the time, IBM, DEC et al were trying to build centrally managed (closed garden networks) too, just like the phone system, so it was not a stretch for them the think that way. IP and datagrams were very much built on no central control, which was something TPC thought was bad and fought. I remember so, so many of those fights at the time and trying to explain that IP was going to win. In the end, it was MetCalfe's law (which was formulated on observations about the phone system) that caused IP to win, along with "Clark's Observation" making everything a "network of networks" instead if a single managed system - which made the plumbing work. So while I find it sad to see Comcast, Current version of AT&T, Verizon et al, all want to see the net neutrality go away, I do not find it surprising. Its the same behavior as before. What would have happened if Judge Green had not broken them up? I do think broadband would be more universal, but .... I suspect AT&T would have fought it and tried to use things that dreamed up (ATM, ISDN, et al). My 2 cents.... Clem -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171211/312fde3d/attachment-0001.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-11 18:39 ` Clem Cole @ 2017-12-12 0:27 ` Steve Johnson 2017-12-12 1:05 ` [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] [ and besides it's "Addendum" ] Jon Steinhart 2017-12-13 17:09 ` [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] Jason Stevens 2017-12-13 17:05 ` Jason Stevens 1 sibling, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Steve Johnson @ 2017-12-12 0:27 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3833 bytes --] I don't dispute anything you said, but I think there is another element. It was simply an element of faith that to send voice you needed to have a guaranteed rate of speed. Thus the interest in time-division multiplexing. Deeply built into the Bell System mentality was the notion that you shouldn't offer service unless it is good service. Thus the dial tone -- if the network was jammed, they didn't let you make a call. But the ones that got through ran with no problems... Recently I've been attempting to Skype on a group call with 5 people in Europe. I would LOVE to have a guaranteed bandwidth for my call. For "ordinary", non-time critical things, I'd be happy to fight for bits on an equal footing with everybody else. Maybe the best solution is two networks... Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Clem Cole" <clemc at ccc.com> To: "Paul Winalski" <paul.winalski at gmail.com> Cc: "TUHS main list" <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org> Sent: Mon, 11 Dec 2017 13:39:44 -0500 Subject: Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 1:17 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com [1]> wrote: On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com [2]> wrote: > > There's another aspect of this that I think that many people misunderstand > which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew > that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their > monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the > rest of us, not so good. Except that the new AT&T, liberated from the regulatory chains of the Bell operating companies, never learned how to compete in the free market. They got their clock cleaned by the competition. In desperation they bought Olivetti and only managed to run it into the ground To be fair you are both right. I think at the time Charlie Brown and Team at AT&T wanted to make a go at IBM and DEC (_i.e._ large systems) and Paul's right, they missed. But Jon is right that they had realized that it going to be a data centric business and he and his team felt that the current consent decree we going to keep them from being players in it. To me there were a couple of issues. The Phone System and 'TPC' was centrally controlled (a lot like a communist country). Where it worked, it was fine. But... the problem was that anything outside their view of reality was a threat. It's funny as the time, IBM, DEC et al were trying to build centrally managed (closed garden networks) too, just like the phone system, so it was not a stretch for them the think that way. IP and datagrams were very much built on no central control, which was something TPC thought was bad and fought. I remember so, so many of those fights at the time and trying to explain that IP was going to win. In the end, it was MetCalfe's law (which was formulated on observations about the phone system) that caused IP to win, along with "Clark's Observation" making everything a "network of networks" instead if a single managed system - which made the plumbing work. So while I find it sad to see Comcast, Current version of AT&T, Verizon et al, all want to see the net neutrality go away, I do not find it surprising. Its the same behavior as before. What would have happened if Judge Green had not broken them up? I do think broadband would be more universal, but .... I suspect AT&T would have fought it and tried to use things that dreamed up (ATM, ISDN, et al). My 2 cents.... Clem Links: ------ [1] mailto:paul.winalski at gmail.com [2] mailto:jon at fourwinds.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171211/2470fdf2/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] [ and besides it's "Addendum" ] 2017-12-12 0:27 ` Steve Johnson @ 2017-12-12 1:05 ` Jon Steinhart 2017-12-12 1:45 ` [TUHS] MERT? Larry McVoy 2017-12-13 17:09 ` [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] Jason Stevens 1 sibling, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Jon Steinhart @ 2017-12-12 1:05 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3205 bytes --] "Steve Johnson" writes: > I don't dispute anything you said, but I think there is another element. It > was simply an element of faith that to send voice you needed to have a > guaranteed rate of speed. Thus the interest in time-division multiplexing. > Deeply built into the Bell System mentality was the notion that you shouldn't > offer service unless it is good service. Thus the dial tone -- if the network > was jammed, they didn't let you make a call. But the ones that got through ran > with no problems... > > Recently I've been attempting to Skype on a group call with 5 people in > Europe. I would LOVE to have a guaranteed bandwidth for my call. For > "ordinary", non-time critical things, I'd be happy to fight for bits on an > equal footing with everybody else. Maybe the best solution is two networks... > > Steve Well, many of us pine for the days in which one could get a quality voice call. I agree with Steve that Bell did quality. But I'm not sure that the relationship between bandwidth and dial tone is correct. It's my recollection that, because they were more expensive than other parts of the exchange especially back in the relay days, that the number of incoming registers was determined statistically. The incoming register was the thing that showed up on your line, gave you dial tone, accepted your dialing, hooked you up to the designated recipient, and then went away to service another line. In other words, they were transient resources. Theoretically every circuit on an exchange could be connected to another because it was a switched circuit system. But there were only so many of the machines available to make the connections. That's why it was hard to get dial tone in an emergency; everybody was trying to dial at the same time and had to wait for an incoming register to show up on their line. That's also why you get a busy signal if you don't dial quickly enough; the incoming register times out, hooks your line up to a busy tone generator, and goes off to do work for another line. Note that that's all independent from whether or not there were available circuits for toll calls between exchanges. I believe that it was the same general setup in the good old (hackable) common-control days; you just didn't get to hear the key pulse sender in operation. Funny story on that which is when the SS1 (slave switch one) was being developed which was possibly the first all digital exchange, Carl had a coding error that forgot to send the ST pulse and took every key pulse sender out of service at the Berkeley Heights exchange. I recall that the KP units don't time out and that some very angry person over there had to go in and manually reset all of them. But hey, they were the phone company and so were we so what could one do? For those of you that don't know about the SS1 project, which you wouldn't know about unless you were there, it was the first application of the digital filtering work done by Jim Kaiser and Hal Alles. It used a pair of PDP-11/10s. Tried to use LSI-11s but their idiotic memory refresh mechanism made them useless for real time work. It might have been Heinz created MERT for this project. Jon ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] MERT? 2017-12-12 1:05 ` [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] [ and besides it's "Addendum" ] Jon Steinhart @ 2017-12-12 1:45 ` Larry McVoy 2017-12-12 2:09 ` Jon Steinhart 0 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2017-12-12 1:45 UTC (permalink / raw) Do we have those sources? -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] MERT? 2017-12-12 1:45 ` [TUHS] MERT? Larry McVoy @ 2017-12-12 2:09 ` Jon Steinhart 0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Jon Steinhart @ 2017-12-12 2:09 UTC (permalink / raw) Larry McVoy writes: > Do we have those sources? I don't know if I've ever seen 'em outside of BTL. Probably the best person to ask is Heinz Lycklama. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-12 0:27 ` Steve Johnson 2017-12-12 1:05 ` [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] [ and besides it's "Addendum" ] Jon Steinhart @ 2017-12-13 17:09 ` Jason Stevens 1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Jason Stevens @ 2017-12-13 17:09 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4469 bytes --] I pay for QOS from Asia to the USA. I’m super bottom tier, but it’s a heck of a lot better than ‘normal let the bits fly’ type service. Some of those VPNs out there have private data centre backhauls which can actually make things smoother. For a while I was looking at doing one through Azure or Amazon but it was far less hassle to just go to my telco and upgrade my internet to business class, and get onto a direct connection to a trans pacific connection to San Francisco vs a shared line that went through Japan. Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: Steve Johnson Sent: Tuesday, 12 December 2017 8:28 AM To: Clem Cole; Paul Winalski Cc: TUHS main list Subject: Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] I don't dispute anything you said, but I think there is another element. It was simply an element of faith that to send voice you needed to have a guaranteed rate of speed. Thus the interest in time-division multiplexing. Deeply built into the Bell System mentality was the notion that you shouldn't offer service unless it is good service. Thus the dial tone -- if the network was jammed, they didn't let you make a call. But the ones that got through ran with no problems... Recently I've been attempting to Skype on a group call with 5 people in Europe. I would LOVE to have a guaranteed bandwidth for my call. For "ordinary", non-time critical things, I'd be happy to fight for bits on an equal footing with everybody else. Maybe the best solution is two networks... Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Clem Cole" <clemc at ccc.com> To: "Paul Winalski" <paul.winalski at gmail.com> Cc: "TUHS main list" <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org> Sent: Mon, 11 Dec 2017 13:39:44 -0500 Subject: Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 1:17 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote: On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote: > > There's another aspect of this that I think that many people misunderstand > which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew > that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their > monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the > rest of us, not so good. Except that the new AT&T, liberated from the regulatory chains of the Bell operating companies, never learned how to compete in the free market. They got their clock cleaned by the competition. In desperation they bought Olivetti and only managed to run it into the ground To be fair you are both right. I think at the time Charlie Brown and Team at AT&T wanted to make a go at IBM and DEC (i.e. large systems) and Paul's right, they missed. But Jon is right that they had realized that it going to be a data centric business and he and his team felt that the current consent decree we going to keep them from being players in it. To me there were a couple of issues. The Phone System and 'TPC' was centrally controlled (a lot like a communist country). Where it worked, it was fine. But... the problem was that anything outside their view of reality was a threat. It's funny as the time, IBM, DEC et al were trying to build centrally managed (closed garden networks) too, just like the phone system, so it was not a stretch for them the think that way. IP and datagrams were very much built on no central control, which was something TPC thought was bad and fought. I remember so, so many of those fights at the time and trying to explain that IP was going to win. In the end, it was MetCalfe's law (which was formulated on observations about the phone system) that caused IP to win, along with "Clark's Observation" making everything a "network of networks" instead if a single managed system - which made the plumbing work. So while I find it sad to see Comcast, Current version of AT&T, Verizon et al, all want to see the net neutrality go away, I do not find it surprising. Its the same behavior as before. What would have happened if Judge Green had not broken them up? I do think broadband would be more universal, but .... I suspect AT&T would have fought it and tried to use things that dreamed up (ATM, ISDN, et al). My 2 cents.... Clem -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171214/4525ac7c/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-11 18:39 ` Clem Cole 2017-12-12 0:27 ` Steve Johnson @ 2017-12-13 17:05 ` Jason Stevens 1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Jason Stevens @ 2017-12-13 17:05 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3328 bytes --] It absolutely was too late. By 1984 IBM had pushed out the AT, and although from there, we had PC stagnation until 1987, in those three years the rise of the IBM PC Clone was so insurmountable that IBM couldn’t push the PS/2 on anyone. IBM had utterly lost momentum and the Compaq Deskpro 386 with Windows/386 had setup the world in which we live in today. It’s crazy how seeming short that window was, and yet a company the size of IBM or AT&T couldn’t compete. Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: Clem Cole Sent: Tuesday, 12 December 2017 2:41 AM To: Paul Winalski Cc: TUHS main list Subject: Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 1:17 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote: On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote: > > There's another aspect of this that I think that many people misunderstand > which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew > that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their > monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the > rest of us, not so good. Except that the new AT&T, liberated from the regulatory chains of the Bell operating companies, never learned how to compete in the free market. They got their clock cleaned by the competition. In desperation they bought Olivetti and only managed to run it into the ground To be fair you are both right. I think at the time Charlie Brown and Team at AT&T wanted to make a go at IBM and DEC (i.e. large systems) and Paul's right, they missed. But Jon is right that they had realized that it going to be a data centric business and he and his team felt that the current consent decree we going to keep them from being players in it. To me there were a couple of issues. The Phone System and 'TPC' was centrally controlled (a lot like a communist country). Where it worked, it was fine. But... the problem was that anything outside their view of reality was a threat. It's funny as the time, IBM, DEC et al were trying to build centrally managed (closed garden networks) too, just like the phone system, so it was not a stretch for them the think that way. IP and datagrams were very much built on no central control, which was something TPC thought was bad and fought. I remember so, so many of those fights at the time and trying to explain that IP was going to win. In the end, it was MetCalfe's law (which was formulated on observations about the phone system) that caused IP to win, along with "Clark's Observation" making everything a "network of networks" instead if a single managed system - which made the plumbing work. So while I find it sad to see Comcast, Current version of AT&T, Verizon et al, all want to see the net neutrality go away, I do not find it surprising. Its the same behavior as before. What would have happened if Judge Green had not broken them up? I do think broadband would be more universal, but .... I suspect AT&T would have fought it and tried to use things that dreamed up (ATM, ISDN, et al). My 2 cents.... Clem -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171214/8a4b77f6/attachment-0001.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-11 18:17 ` Paul Winalski 2017-12-11 18:39 ` Clem Cole @ 2017-12-11 20:11 ` William Cheswick 2017-12-11 23:26 ` Arthur Krewat 1 sibling, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: William Cheswick @ 2017-12-11 20:11 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 952 bytes --] While I am no fan of how AT&T ran its business, and the diminution of Bell Labs is a capital crime to humanity, it must be noted that AT&T was competing with MCI, who was cooking the books. “How can they offer phone calls for $0.01/minute?” The answer: they couldn’t, but did anyway. BTW, there are still good people doing good work at Bell Labs. But it certainly isn’t what it used to be. > On 11Dec 2017, at 1:17 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote: > > Except that the new AT&T, liberated from the regulatory chains of the > Bell operating companies, never learned how to compete in the free > market. They got their clock cleaned by the competition. In > desperation they bought Olivetti and only managed to run it into the > ground. > > -Paul W. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20171211/6bfc7f76/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 2017-12-11 20:11 ` William Cheswick @ 2017-12-11 23:26 ` Arthur Krewat 0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Arthur Krewat @ 2017-12-11 23:26 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 567 bytes --] On 12/11/2017 3:11 PM, William Cheswick wrote: > While I am no fan of how AT&T ran its business, and the diminution of > Bell Labs is > a capital crime to humanity, it must be noted that AT&T was competing > with MCI, who > was cooking the books. “How can they offer phone calls for > $0.01/minute?” The answer: > they couldn’t, but did anyway. > As I recall, MCI was also passing calls into Canada, routing them back to the US and avoiding all sorts of fees. They were doing it to the US Govt, I'm not sure if they did that to regular people. art .k ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] MERT? @ 2017-12-12 3:11 Noel Chiappa 0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Noel Chiappa @ 2017-12-12 3:11 UTC (permalink / raw) > From: Jon Steinhart > Probably the best person to ask is Heinz Lycklama. I checked my email log for my previous MERT enquiries, and that's the exact same advice I got from Brian Kernighan when I asked him (a couple of years back) if he had any suggestions for tracking it down. I guess I need to finally get a 'round tuit'... unless there's someone else here who knows him well, and wants to give it a go. Noel ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2017-12-13 17:09 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 29+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed) -- links below jump to the message on this page -- 2017-12-06 0:33 [TUHS] V7 Addendem Warner Losh 2017-12-06 1:07 ` Warren Toomey 2017-12-06 16:11 ` Random832 2017-12-06 16:15 ` Jon Steinhart 2017-12-06 18:39 ` Clem Cole 2017-12-06 18:49 ` [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] Jon Steinhart 2017-12-06 18:53 ` Warner Losh 2017-12-06 18:58 ` Jon Steinhart 2017-12-06 18:54 ` Clem Cole 2017-12-06 19:20 ` William Pechter 2017-12-07 14:26 ` Ron Natalie 2017-12-06 19:23 ` William Corcoran 2017-12-06 20:30 ` Kurt H Maier 2017-12-06 23:59 ` George Michaelson 2017-12-07 14:03 ` Ron Natalie 2017-12-07 15:34 ` William Corcoran 2017-12-07 5:08 ` Jon Steinhart 2017-12-07 15:09 ` Larry McVoy 2017-12-11 18:17 ` Paul Winalski 2017-12-11 18:39 ` Clem Cole 2017-12-12 0:27 ` Steve Johnson 2017-12-12 1:05 ` [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] [ and besides it's "Addendum" ] Jon Steinhart 2017-12-12 1:45 ` [TUHS] MERT? Larry McVoy 2017-12-12 2:09 ` Jon Steinhart 2017-12-13 17:09 ` [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] Jason Stevens 2017-12-13 17:05 ` Jason Stevens 2017-12-11 20:11 ` William Cheswick 2017-12-11 23:26 ` Arthur Krewat 2017-12-12 3:11 [TUHS] MERT? Noel Chiappa
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