* [TUHS] MERT?
@ 2017-12-12 3:11 Noel Chiappa
0 siblings, 0 replies; 3+ 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] 3+ 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
0 siblings, 1 reply; 3+ messages in thread
From: Steve Johnson @ 2017-12-12 0:27 UTC (permalink / raw)
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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
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^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 3+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] [ and besides it's "Addendum" ]
2017-12-12 0:27 [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] Steve Johnson
@ 2017-12-12 1:05 ` Jon Steinhart
2017-12-12 1:45 ` [TUHS] MERT? Larry McVoy
0 siblings, 1 reply; 3+ messages in thread
From: Jon Steinhart @ 2017-12-12 1:05 UTC (permalink / raw)
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"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
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2017-12-12 3:11 [TUHS] MERT? Noel Chiappa
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2017-12-12 0:27 [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] 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
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