[00:00.920 --> 00:04.680]  I've been the moderator of the Telecom Digest since roughly 2007.
[00:06.080 --> 00:08.260]  First thing up is the door prize.
[00:09.220 --> 00:13.560]  Does anybody know how many stops there are on 53rd Street for the E train?
[00:19.940 --> 00:23.080]  How many times the E train stops on 53rd Street?
[00:23.200 --> 00:24.060]  Who can tell me that?
[00:31.400 --> 00:32.560]  How many stations?
[00:36.770 --> 00:37.790]  Well, there's two.
[00:38.470 --> 00:40.030]  I found that out the hard way.
[00:40.170 --> 00:47.670]  I got off two feet from the Hudson River and walked all the way to the East River or thereabouts because it stops twice on 53rd Street.
[00:47.790 --> 00:49.330]  Who uses the subway in New York?
[00:52.190 --> 00:54.350]  This is for whoever needs it.
[00:54.410 --> 00:55.390]  You, sir, you take it.
[00:57.130 --> 00:59.030]  I think there's one ride left on it.
[01:07.010 --> 01:16.810]  Bernie asked me to do this and I thought I'd give you a linear history of the Telecom Digest from one end to the other and highlights from every year and so forth.
[01:17.370 --> 01:24.190]  You know, I started looking through the archives and it occurred to me all the interesting stuff as far as this goes was right at the front.
[01:24.430 --> 01:32.810]  When the archive was founded in 1981, the telephone industry was just about to go through the biggest change in its entire history.
[01:33.670 --> 01:51.210]  And I've concentrated mostly on that time when people were still new to the Internet and still new to ARPANET, in fact, and there was no such thing as USENET until PolySci and Telecom became part of the first USENET groups.
[01:52.990 --> 01:56.550]  The history of the Telecom Digest is parallel to my history.
[01:56.770 --> 02:05.810]  In 1981, I was slogging my way toward the end of my college degree and I was working on the radio board at Franklin Street in Boston.
[02:08.710 --> 02:19.810]  I was punching cards on IBM 029 at Northeastern University and learning to program Fortran and dreaming of my bright future as a computing professional.
[02:21.330 --> 02:22.490]  You know, I have a theory.
[02:23.390 --> 02:27.350]  I don't think anybody ever sees it coming when it's their ox that's going to get gored.
[02:28.130 --> 02:31.030]  I wish I could say I was an exception to the rule.
[02:32.570 --> 02:40.550]  As I look back, I realized I was present at the end of the electromechanical age in the telephone network in North America.
[02:41.630 --> 02:52.630]  When I started the New England Telephone and Telegraph, we were still using EMX1 and EMX2 signaling units that had been designed for use on telegraphs, literal telegraphs.
[02:53.410 --> 03:01.870]  They had been in service for, oh, I don't know, maybe a hundred years without much redesign and we still used them.
[03:02.110 --> 03:16.610]  We'd hook them up to the T-carrier channel units and use them for private line and just generally had a great time drawing a wage and working swing shift in Back Bay in Boston.
[03:18.690 --> 03:23.490]  The T-carriers were new channel units in the old end carrier bays.
[03:23.870 --> 03:26.810]  That, by the way, is why a T-carrier has 24 channels in it.
[03:28.710 --> 03:34.650]  And we'd try to figure out the Wheatstone bridges that we were never trained to use.
[03:35.350 --> 03:44.470]  They were no longer needed for the Varley measurements because the T-carriers had freed up so many trunk pairs that nobody ever needed to bother to work on trunks anymore.
[03:45.550 --> 03:51.530]  The changes brought about by digital voice transmission and the computer revolution, they're old news now.
[03:52.550 --> 03:55.110]  But I witnessed many of them first-hand.
[03:55.530 --> 03:59.010]  Coaxial cables and microwave gave way to fiber.
[03:59.990 --> 04:05.410]  L5 carrier waves to DACs, local test boards for MLT, and toll tests to SARTs.
[04:06.270 --> 04:26.270]  And during the same time, the once-proud craft workforce where senior technicians took examinations to earn the privilege of wearing a tie at work saw an influx of people whose definition of success was not getting caught smoking a joint on the roof.
[04:29.170 --> 04:45.750]  The craft workforce decreased in quality and experience to the point where it became obvious that the job was going to be dumbed down to the point where semi-skilled workers could do it.
[04:46.570 --> 04:49.750]  And I decided to get out and went into other things.
[04:50.650 --> 05:00.050]  I became a computer programmer at NYNEX, which was what New York Telephone and New England Telephone became after the Bell System breakup.
[05:01.050 --> 05:03.650]  And I witnessed the revolution in computer programming, too.
[05:04.170 --> 05:09.810]  The methodology and practice I saw as a systems analyst.
[05:09.810 --> 05:11.470]  I got promoted a couple of times.
[05:12.270 --> 05:26.990]  Well, they were just constantly pivoting to partake in the latest fad, optimizing compilers and case tools and vendors who promised us the world on a string, but whose primary job skill turned out to be lying through their teeth.
[05:29.880 --> 05:42.600]  In roughly 1994, I saw pretty quickly that the computer programming was going to go away, at least in the United States.
[05:45.160 --> 05:51.780]  I was asked to put in a work-at-home arrangement for a girl who was one of the key players on an important team.
[05:52.200 --> 05:58.680]  She was going out on pregnancy leave, so I, having been in the craft, was asked to help out.
[05:58.840 --> 06:00.400]  I knew who to call and what equipment we needed.
[06:00.880 --> 06:08.840]  And she sent me an email on an old system called Profs that we were still using then and saying, this is great, you know, I'm in my house.
[06:08.840 --> 06:09.920]  It's just like being at work.
[06:09.920 --> 06:14.260]  And I sat there at my desk in, I think it was 125 High Street in Boston.
[06:15.180 --> 06:19.600]  And I said to myself, if they can move this job 10 miles, they can move it 10,000.
[06:20.340 --> 06:21.680]  I knew it was going away.
[06:21.800 --> 06:22.540]  I knew it was gone.
[06:24.380 --> 06:29.320]  As it happened, I was lucky enough to get another position in the engineering department at Verizon.
[06:30.520 --> 06:33.920]  I'd forgotten whether we were Bell Titanic, I mean, Bell Atlantic at that time.
[06:35.760 --> 06:38.260]  And, but anyway, I got a job in engineering.
[06:39.260 --> 06:44.720]  And a month before I left the programming groups, we were told that COBOL Maintenance was going to a firm in India.
[06:44.720 --> 06:47.280]  So if I do say so myself, I saw it coming.
[06:49.120 --> 06:54.320]  I finished my telephone career in engineering, which is a part of the business where things actually had to work right.
[06:56.480 --> 07:06.280]  It was a welcome change from the programming groups that had been filled a lot with buzzword babies and other people.
[07:06.280 --> 07:07.920]  So, well, the less said about them, the better.
[07:08.360 --> 07:09.620]  And I know, it's sad.
[07:12.680 --> 07:14.280]  I have a slide show on it.
[07:15.260 --> 07:18.060]  I'll comment on it as we go along.
[07:18.200 --> 07:21.760]  But before I start, I'll just paraphrase Jackson Brown.
[07:23.300 --> 07:25.640]  It seems to have gone by in the wink of an eye.
[07:57.700 --> 07:57.780]  Hmm.
[07:58.420 --> 07:59.760]  So, the question is correct.
[08:00.600 --> 08:01.280]  Mm-hmm.
[08:02.400 --> 08:03.680]  No, I don't want that one.
[08:04.040 --> 08:04.840]  I want that one.
[08:06.780 --> 08:07.900]  Those are my phone numbers.
[08:08.060 --> 08:09.540]  They are real dial-able phone numbers.
[08:10.420 --> 08:12.900]  And you wouldn't believe how hard it was to get those.
[08:16.090 --> 08:16.930]  Yeah, sure.
[08:18.330 --> 08:20.390]  Rugrats was the best I could do with 784.
[08:21.550 --> 08:23.670]  The other one, well, that's a Google voice number.
[08:23.830 --> 08:26.670]  And they just happened to offer the 364 exchange code.
[08:26.750 --> 08:27.750]  And I said, that one's for me.
[08:30.670 --> 08:33.630]  Obviously, the email address is my name, Bill at Horne dot net.
[08:33.750 --> 08:34.450]  I'm Bill Horne.
[08:34.550 --> 08:35.550]  That's pretty easy to remember.
[08:40.450 --> 08:43.370]  The first moderator of the digest was Jonathan Solomon.
[08:43.710 --> 08:45.370]  And it started in 1981.
[08:45.890 --> 08:47.170]  He was at Rutgers at the time.
[08:49.290 --> 08:53.130]  He went for, I know, about six years, roughly.
[08:53.810 --> 08:55.810]  And had to do other things for a while.
[08:56.450 --> 08:58.690]  Two guys helped him out, Elliot Moore and Jim Dixon.
[08:59.130 --> 09:03.510]  They were helping out, and I don't know if they had official status.
[09:04.050 --> 09:09.310]  Late in 1988, Pat Townsend took over the digest as the official moderator.
[09:10.190 --> 09:12.590]  And JSOL went on to other things.
[09:13.670 --> 09:16.550]  Pat had a stroke in, I think it was 2007.
[09:17.450 --> 09:20.650]  And I was on the phone, you know, wishing him well and stuff.
[09:20.650 --> 09:23.190]  And he asked me to help out while they got back on his feet.
[09:23.550 --> 09:24.550]  And I said, yeah, sure.
[09:24.870 --> 09:26.610]  I guess I can learn how to be a moderator.
[09:28.090 --> 09:30.530]  And I started doing it and just kept doing it.
[09:31.190 --> 09:35.030]  It's funny, though, because I found out later, Pat had never worked in the industry.
[09:35.030 --> 09:36.290]  I don't know about Jonathan.
[09:37.170 --> 09:44.450]  He was an academician, but I never had any more input about him or his background.
[09:44.470 --> 09:46.090]  It just wasn't available.
[09:46.650 --> 09:51.010]  I think I'm the first guy who actually worked in the phone company to moderate the digest.
[09:51.810 --> 09:54.770]  And many of the readers have told me it's much more technical now.
[09:55.090 --> 10:02.570]  I'm not so sure that's a good thing, because it seems to me we're going more and more toward a realm where regulations account for more than technology.
[10:02.570 --> 10:04.010]  But time will tell.
[10:06.550 --> 10:11.950]  The locations are not really very important, but Jonathan started out at Rutgers.
[10:12.470 --> 10:17.270]  And then for a time, the digest lived at MIT and was moved to Boston University.
[10:19.130 --> 10:22.390]  Jonathan made a big point of starting Volume 7 to celebrate the move.
[10:22.790 --> 10:26.250]  And then in 1988, when Pat took over, he was moved back to MIT.
[10:26.310 --> 10:27.730]  It's pretty much been there ever since.
[10:28.330 --> 10:37.330]  And a sincere thank you, by the way, to the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, because they give us a free PC, power pipe, and ping.
[10:38.870 --> 10:44.110]  And I will acknowledge also Garrett Wallman, who is the sysadmin there, who just found us a new machine.
[10:44.330 --> 10:53.510]  When the old one threw a rate array element and one of the disks in the rate array failed, we were limping along while he got a new machine going for us.
[10:53.510 --> 10:54.810]  So thanks to Garrett.
[10:58.060 --> 10:59.680]  Anybody know what ARPANET was?
[11:01.860 --> 11:02.880]  I'm surprised.
[11:03.140 --> 11:04.120]  That was a pretty rare beast.
[11:04.980 --> 11:18.380]  I helped to put in maybe the first lines from MIT to the first ISP in roughly 1979 or there's about...
[11:21.010 --> 11:22.950]  You know what bang path addressing is?
[11:25.470 --> 11:35.430]  Well, if you look here on the slide, you can see where the address was a series of bang paths.
[11:36.870 --> 11:48.590]  You had an address, UTZoo, exclamation point, et cetera, et cetera, and it was the major node down of the minor, separated by exclamation points, which are called bang elements in the trade.
[11:49.070 --> 11:54.130]  That form of addressing went for all the time when ARPANET was being used.
[11:54.570 --> 11:59.130]  And this is one of the very first messages sent out to the Digest, obviously just a test.
[12:03.320 --> 12:08.800]  I want to show you the second post on the Digest and then we'll... much later we'll get to the first one.
[12:09.080 --> 12:10.840]  I think you'll like the reason why.
[12:15.110 --> 12:20.830]  There was just, you know, some administrivia and a guy asking about alternatives for AT&T and a problem with the dimension.
[12:22.930 --> 12:36.250]  And as Jonathan put out there, J Solid Rutgers was his email, spinoff from the human nets, which was just the place they put these sorts of things on ARPANET.
[12:37.570 --> 12:48.410]  At the time when we were putting in those lines, I mentioned between MIT and BBN, we had all kinds of trouble with them.
[12:48.530 --> 12:53.570]  We equalized them to 50,000 hertz, which was a very, very high quality broadcast equalization.
[12:54.390 --> 12:58.450]  Even FM stations lines were only equalized to 15.
[12:58.690 --> 12:59.890]  These were set up at 50.
[13:00.650 --> 13:07.290]  And specially made paradigm modems that delivered, wait for it, 50,000 bits per second.
[13:08.030 --> 13:11.070]  That was blazingly fast in 1979.
[13:11.590 --> 13:13.310]  Expensively blazingly fast.
[13:14.410 --> 13:18.590]  But here you see J Solid's first how you doing message.
[13:22.320 --> 13:23.720]  The San Jose Mercury.
[13:23.960 --> 13:25.060]  This was the second post.
[13:25.420 --> 13:26.680]  It was a copy of...
[13:26.680 --> 13:30.040]  Somebody sent in a copy of an editorial from the San Jose Mercury.
[13:30.200 --> 13:33.720]  They were pioneers in electronic broadcasting or publishing.
[13:34.760 --> 13:49.320]  But it felt as if I were writing it myself because I tend to be a curmudgeon about the lack of utility and lack of usefulness of many of the electronic toys people bring to work these days.
[13:50.100 --> 13:53.980]  The guy said, you know, this new dimension system was unnerving.
[13:53.980 --> 13:58.760]  And, well, are we the servants or the masters?
[13:58.800 --> 14:07.020]  I have a cell phone, which for practical purposes is an electronic leash held by my employer.
[14:08.940 --> 14:15.160]  And I'd just rather turn the thing off and do without it and go back to the old hand crank Ma and Pa Kettle used.
[14:15.600 --> 14:21.180]  I imagine there's others in the same boat.
[14:21.180 --> 14:30.300]  But I don't know why I think these things have been hyped and publicized to the point where I start to ask just exactly what we got in this trade-off.
[14:32.400 --> 14:41.880]  The guy that wrote the editorial talked about a dimension that had a dial tone Morse code where you had to know a certain number of beep combinations and so forth.
[14:43.120 --> 14:45.340]  And long before SMS, of course.
[14:45.340 --> 14:58.580]  But the complaints received, and I can attest to them because I was, as I say in the business, from new features from ESS that required people to adapt to new ways of doing things.
[15:01.060 --> 15:08.960]  If you ever try to explain how to flash a telephone hook switch and get somebody who understands you on the first try, please tell me how, because I never could.
[15:08.960 --> 15:13.140]  It was just a nightmare to get people to use the 1A.
[15:14.300 --> 15:17.100]  I suppose we all adapted without quite realizing it.
[15:20.270 --> 15:23.250]  Somebody at Bell Labs didn't think that was a very good editorial.
[15:26.460 --> 15:29.420]  And that was a phrase I'd heard before.
[15:29.820 --> 15:33.240]  And when I read this and I was preparing this, I said, isn't that the truth?
[15:33.840 --> 15:38.400]  Before we'll have complete adoption of these little gadgets, all the old people will have to die.
[15:38.900 --> 15:40.400]  There's a cheery thought for you.
[15:44.950 --> 15:47.770]  I was surprised to find how many posts there were about modems.
[15:47.970 --> 15:57.610]  Everybody wanted to know how the modem worked and there were tips on how to get the maximum performance and so forth.
[15:57.790 --> 16:03.110]  But there was a lot of interest in data transmission on the phone network in the early years of the digest.
[16:09.010 --> 16:18.310]  One of the first things the 1A did, and I started in an office which had panel operating in service, when I started with it, and was converted to 1A ESS.
[16:19.650 --> 16:23.710]  International direct distance dialing was a very big feature of the 1A, one of the big sellers.
[16:24.710 --> 16:42.010]  And although it wasn't advertised, the 800 numbers in use at the time were mostly rerouted into 1A switches, because having capability to use SS7, and in some cases still SS6, they obviated the use of blue boxes for 800 number fraud.
[16:42.630 --> 16:51.050]  So all of the 800 numbers were rehomed into 1As and served from there, so that the phone company didn't have to worry about blue boxes anymore.
[16:53.960 --> 16:55.720]  Who remembers Western Union?
[16:56.780 --> 16:59.460]  Has anyone in this room actually ever sent a telegram?
[17:04.830 --> 17:05.550]  I haven't.
[17:05.670 --> 17:06.790]  I never had the occasion.
[17:06.950 --> 17:14.670]  The funny thing was, in roughly 1976, I was working nights at a driving cab when I was first in school, and we used to deliver telegrams.
[17:14.750 --> 17:22.630]  There was a Model 28 teletype right in the cab office, and we'd pick them up and put them in yellow envelopes and drive them out to where they were supposed to go.
[17:27.350 --> 17:31.950]  So, the first couple of issues of the digest bore news that Western Electric...
[17:31.950 --> 17:40.350]  I'm sorry, Western Union was going to invest in AirPhone, and I had maintained the AirPhone system when I was on the radio board.
[17:42.710 --> 17:45.870]  Long before I was hired, TWX had been sold to Western Union.
[17:46.110 --> 18:01.750]  There was some sort of court order, but it was always near and dear to my heart, because I had been trained to maintain Model 33 teletypes, and if you ever want to get an earful about Model 33, just buy me a drink and sit me down, and I'll tell you everything you wanted to know about them.
[18:04.840 --> 18:07.100]  There were a lot of posts about new features.
[18:07.500 --> 18:10.720]  Not only of the 1A, but things that you see here.
[18:10.800 --> 18:18.340]  Picture phone, TSPS and TOPS, the singing clock, etc.
[18:25.200 --> 18:33.140]  And it wasn't until 1982 that AT&T did sign the consent degree, which ultimately broke up the Bell system in 1984.
[18:34.580 --> 18:36.280]  There was a lot of pushback.
[18:36.440 --> 18:44.940]  A lot of readers started in the denial phase of accepting it, and were saying this won't be any different, and so forth and so on.
[18:45.200 --> 18:53.060]  But the majority were very interested in what the future would bring, and how the new paradigm would change the phone network they knew and loved.
[18:58.650 --> 19:07.250]  There was a lot of information about how to get past the front line trouble desk or the clerks at the phone company if you had a problem with your modem.
[19:08.530 --> 19:18.070]  That got to be such a severe problem in later years, especially for high price circuits like T1s, that many companies would routinely demand to talk to a third liner on their first call.
[19:18.070 --> 19:21.390]  And they'd want the guy's phone number and his home phone number, too.
[19:22.170 --> 19:35.750]  And given that T1 lines could bill out at several thousands of dollars a month, back when that was serious money, they would usually get very good service on those.
[19:37.190 --> 19:50.050]  And surprisingly enough, what I noted was that there were always a fair number of questions about basic telephone stuff, the old tip and ring questions and whether I want to use the red wire or the green wire or the yellow wire in my house, and things of that sort.
[19:53.860 --> 19:56.300]  Some people just couldn't accept it.
[19:58.140 --> 20:09.000]  MCI and Sprint were camming in, and some of the guys that wrote into the digest were saying, well, this won't happen, this won't change anything, et cetera, et cetera.
[20:09.400 --> 20:15.640]  The general opinion of the regulators was, no, nothing will change and everybody will be fine and ignore that man behind the curtain.
[20:16.400 --> 20:18.780]  And that was pretty much what happened.
[20:19.100 --> 20:22.180]  We all know that MCI and Sprint didn't go away.
[20:22.660 --> 20:29.520]  But at the time, the first reaction of many writers, many posters in the digest was obviously hope that it would.
[20:34.440 --> 20:52.700]  One of the big complaints that I was surprised to hear of, I hadn't read before, was that many of the readers were complaining that MCI and Sprint representatives would just lie to their face and tell them that things were perfect and perfectly usable when it was obviously not the case.
[20:53.460 --> 21:06.240]  I wondered if that was in contrast to the Bell Systems old policy, the first case of a telecom, relatively major telecom company, just lying to people just because they could.
[21:08.180 --> 21:14.760]  And we've seen some of the results in customer relations departments ever since.
[21:17.160 --> 21:24.040]  Pretty much the old days when you could depend on somebody to tell you the truth when you talk to the phone company are gone and gone forever.
[21:28.530 --> 21:30.290]  There were a lot of questions about rent.
[21:30.530 --> 21:31.410]  Who knows what rent is?
[21:32.190 --> 21:33.390]  Yeah, there you go.
[21:34.070 --> 21:36.270]  I think my line totals up about ten.
[21:46.320 --> 21:51.760]  The FCC specifications for telephones you could buy in the store included the ringer equivalence number.
[21:52.320 --> 21:55.900]  One meant a one standard 500 set Western Electric phone.
[21:57.360 --> 22:05.240]  And if you had a ringer equivalence much above three or four, you had to have special equipment to deal with it.
[22:05.860 --> 22:11.580]  Most people just had the usual two or three phones and it worked fine.
[22:12.080 --> 22:20.920]  There was a lot of confusion in the early digest about our J11 and other interconnect kind of standards and how do they get wired and whether you should put the wires on pin, whatever.
[22:22.840 --> 22:25.920]  I don't think people were actually wiring our J11 jacks.
[22:25.920 --> 22:31.320]  They just wanted to be reassured that the phone network that they knew and loved wouldn't change all that much.
[22:36.940 --> 22:57.860]  The Notes on Distance Dialing, which was a publication from Bell Labs along about 65 or so, predicted area code exhaust in the classic area code allocation set, those with only one or zero in the second position and never one or zero in the first, predicted exhaust in,
[22:57.860 --> 22:58.940]  I believe, 1987.
[22:59.720 --> 23:02.100]  The statisticians at Bell Labs are pretty good at their job.
[23:02.600 --> 23:09.360]  And there were the first posts about possible exhaust and people predicting it in roughly 1982.
[23:09.960 --> 23:17.760]  So, I think the new competitors that were allowed into the markets were speeding up what had been an inevitable trend.
[23:21.700 --> 23:25.020]  I'm not sure fax machines were... the question is fax machines, too.
[23:25.140 --> 23:26.260]  I'm not sure they were such a factor.
[23:27.820 --> 23:36.660]  Group 2 fax was a factor in that it did increase demand for numbers, but by their very nature, you'd never have more than one for a company, you see.
[23:36.860 --> 23:40.180]  And that was never, I think, a big draw in the area codes.
[23:40.340 --> 23:48.940]  What really speeded up area code exhaust was that, at the time, new competitors were being allocated 10,000 number blocks.
[23:48.940 --> 23:52.980]  They would get an entire exchange code in each area code, at least one.
[23:53.420 --> 23:57.700]  And, of course, if they did business in three or four cities, they'd be getting three or four exchange codes.
[23:58.220 --> 24:04.180]  It took several years for the companies all to sit down and say, we're killing ourselves here, we'd better work out a plan.
[24:04.520 --> 24:09.380]  And they went to a system where they would split across thousands of groups for assignments in different companies.
[24:09.700 --> 24:20.960]  But when the independent carriers came in and were actually able to compete in the dial tone market, they reached assigned entire exchange codes, which did exhaust the area codes fairly quickly.
[24:28.430 --> 24:36.910]  And, as I say, a lot of posts about, well, this isn't going to happen, or people being crabby and complaining about MCI or Sprint and so forth.
[24:38.230 --> 24:40.330]  There's always somebody who wants to turn the clock back.
[24:41.770 --> 24:46.170]  There's times when I include myself in that group, but we all know that that never works.
[24:48.070 --> 24:52.450]  There was mention, and this surprised me because I've been saying for years that I wanted to have one of these.
[24:52.610 --> 25:05.370]  There was mention of a company that was going to sell an electronic butler, which people would have to call twice or once and let it ring twice or something, and then they could call back because now the machine was armed and it actually left the ringing through to your phone.
[25:07.870 --> 25:10.990]  And somebody else wrote in saying, well, you can't do that.
[25:10.990 --> 25:17.910]  First of all, it's illegal because you're defrauding the phone company of revenue by using their signaling system without fee.
[25:18.790 --> 25:32.690]  And secondly, at that time, one of the big features of SS7, which the network was rapidly being converted to, was that it divorced audible ringing that a caller hears from physical ringing, which is the one the call party hears.
[25:32.690 --> 25:45.450]  That was done deliberately to avoid exactly this kind of scheme where you would count the rings and free means I landed okay, etc., etc., so that people couldn't use dialing and ringing codes to avoid long distance charges.
[25:59.230 --> 26:13.990]  As you can see here, the second phase of the adjustment to the new paradigm was a lot of people got mad and started sending in flames and other troll bait that said AT&T was doing them wrong and so forth and so on.
[26:14.430 --> 26:21.770]  Again, I don't think it was serious, just people felt out of balance and uncertain about how much the companies were changing and how quickly.
[26:25.320 --> 26:26.560]  This one surprised me.
[26:26.860 --> 26:29.000]  This was in February of 82.
[26:29.000 --> 26:33.060]  I noticed about a new phone system called cellular.
[26:35.600 --> 26:43.340]  And the FCC's decision to allow serious investments in the new cellular system.
[26:43.660 --> 26:48.040]  I hadn't realized it had gone back that fast or that far.
[26:48.220 --> 26:56.440]  The first cell phones that were available in the Boston area came about roughly in the 1992-3 or so range.
[27:03.540 --> 27:07.460]  480 bucks for a 1200 baud modem.
[27:10.200 --> 27:13.680]  1200 baud was pretty hot stuff in 1982.
[27:15.220 --> 27:19.140]  And this guy was saying, is this real?
[27:20.200 --> 27:23.960]  Can I really pay only 480 bucks for a 1200 baud modem?
[27:24.320 --> 27:26.960]  As it happened, I was in school in 1982.
[27:26.960 --> 27:32.820]  I happened to have a 1200 baud modem, a genuine Western Electric 212A, which had fallen off the back of a telephone truck.
[27:36.480 --> 27:38.200]  Well, I had a reason to have it.
[27:38.300 --> 27:43.260]  As I said, I was in school and we were still using punch cards, believe it or not.
[27:43.380 --> 27:46.760]  I have a stack of them in a drawer someplace that I found just a couple of weeks ago.
[27:46.760 --> 27:52.840]  And at the end of each quarter at Northeastern University, the punch room would be totally busy.
[27:53.000 --> 27:54.160]  The line would be around the block.
[27:54.500 --> 27:59.440]  And I told my professor, hey, I'm holding on a full-time job and doing this other stuff.
[27:59.600 --> 28:00.500]  Give me some help here.
[28:00.680 --> 28:05.760]  And he gave me an account on the dial-in system, which it turned out would take a 1200 baud modem.
[28:07.260 --> 28:10.440]  So I managed to obtain one and it made quite a difference.
[28:10.720 --> 28:16.020]  It was saving me a world's worth of time, you know, waiting for those key punch machines.
[28:16.340 --> 28:23.520]  Anybody who's ever dealt with a key punch machine knows those ancient behemoths had 10,000 pound test keys.
[28:23.560 --> 28:26.260]  You could pound on them with a sledge hammer and they wouldn't be bothered.
[28:26.260 --> 28:29.140]  And I speak as a guy who learned to type on a Model 19.
[28:38.070 --> 28:39.970]  Yep, some things don't ever change.
[28:40.210 --> 28:41.070]  Crank callers.
[28:46.890 --> 28:59.010]  And there was something, as you see, about San Francisco and how this new device could read or reread or delete messages sent to it through some electronic connection.
[28:59.490 --> 29:01.870]  That's probably the forerunner of the digital pager.
[29:01.870 --> 29:04.610]  But again, I was very surprised that it had happened that early.
[29:06.110 --> 29:08.390]  And just as an aside, see if you like this one.
[29:08.450 --> 29:15.350]  I was living with my brother-in-law and he came home.
[29:15.490 --> 29:19.750]  He was just out of Worcester Poly Tech in 1983, as I recall.
[29:20.130 --> 29:27.730]  And he came home one day with a big old Motorola brick pager on his belt, the ones that had the tuned reeds in them and the batteries that would last three or four hours or whatever.
[29:28.870 --> 29:31.230]  And I said to him, you must be an important person.
[29:31.230 --> 29:32.710]  You've got a pager now.
[29:33.670 --> 29:37.070]  Don't ever forget this because it's as true now as when he said it.
[29:37.370 --> 29:41.090]  He looked at me and he said, Bill, the important people do the paging.
[29:47.270 --> 29:48.750]  Telegrams, as I say, they were gone.
[29:48.950 --> 29:51.650]  They were just fading away.
[29:51.810 --> 29:58.610]  And there was a story in March of 82 about a guy who wound up in the London airport and had a flight delayed and wanted to send a telegram.
[29:58.730 --> 30:02.430]  But they told him point blank, it'll be two or three days before it gets delivered.
[30:02.430 --> 30:07.250]  But if you send flowers by telegram, it'll be delivered today.
[30:07.370 --> 30:09.650]  So you can bribe them and pay extra.
[30:10.110 --> 30:13.070]  And because the flowers might spoil, they'll deliver it today.
[30:13.690 --> 30:14.710]  It was a shame.
[30:15.190 --> 30:18.350]  Telegrams were an essential part of our economy.
[30:18.350 --> 30:24.270]  And I never thought many businessmen used them at all well after fax machines became available.
[30:24.850 --> 30:25.650]  C'est la vie.
[30:29.820 --> 30:41.540]  One of the first things that came about in the data revolution was that savvy system administrators and computer planners would rent what were called burglar alarm circuits.
[30:42.260 --> 30:43.560]  It's just a dry pair.
[30:43.880 --> 30:46.160]  It's a tip and ring from one place to another.
[30:46.660 --> 30:49.780]  And they were supposedly used for DC signaling.
[30:50.000 --> 30:54.040]  At the time, the phone company still sold circuits for burglar alarm use.
[30:54.500 --> 31:05.520]  And they would attach line drivers to them made by various companies and use them as digital circuits so that they could get a lot higher rates than even at the time.
[31:05.720 --> 31:17.920]  The premier standard for data transmission was the T1 line, which was, depending on how it was arranged and used, either 1.544 or 1.536 megabits per second.
[31:18.200 --> 31:24.880]  But you could get up to 10 or even 15 if you had a short haul and just a couple of burglar alarm circuits between two buildings.
[31:26.880 --> 31:28.920]  It's not the proudest part of my life.
[31:30.460 --> 31:33.720]  We made it our business to frustrate those who tried to do that.
[31:34.180 --> 31:40.320]  The attitude among the craft workforce was if they wanted high-speed data, they should damn well pay for it.
[31:41.080 --> 31:53.820]  And one of my favorite tricks was to repair burglar alarm circuits by finding two defective pairs, one with the tip open, one with the ring open, and so forth, and connect the burglar alarm circuit to those.
[31:53.960 --> 31:56.580]  There was no specification for audio quality, of course.
[31:56.720 --> 31:57.840]  It was a DC line.
[31:58.220 --> 32:01.940]  And all it needed to be able to do was close the burglar alarm relay.
[32:02.680 --> 32:10.680]  But, of course, the people that were using it for other things would call in and complain tremendously about noise, and we'd tell them, well, sounds like you're on an audio line, go talk to sales.
[32:12.080 --> 32:14.780]  And, as I say, not the proudest phase of my life.
[32:14.900 --> 32:28.700]  But then again, when you're on the swing shift at Back Bay and making really good money, and you even have a car, I mean, you know, that was high living for a Vietnam vet in his 20s.
[32:30.460 --> 32:36.780]  And I look back, and I say, well, I understand why I did it, but I guess I really did drink the Kool-Aid on that one.
[32:40.080 --> 32:53.260]  Leased lines, and there were a lot of them at the time, when the Digest first started out, roughly the 1980 to 85 time period, it was very common for companies with PBXs to connect them with leased lines, to avoid dialing expense.
[32:55.060 --> 32:59.840]  Most PBXs were provided by the phone company at the time, and they were manufactured and installed.
[33:00.300 --> 33:03.380]  So that it was impossible to use them as tandem offices.
[33:04.080 --> 33:08.220]  If you were in Boston and you wanted to call Framingham, you'd pay for a toll call to Framingham.
[33:08.380 --> 33:19.800]  Even if you had a PBX in Framingham, and a leased line between your PBX in Framingham, they wouldn't let you jump across a tie line to get out into Framingham and complete a call that way.
[33:19.920 --> 33:21.820]  You had to pay the toll cost into Framingham.
[33:21.820 --> 33:27.520]  And since good old Ma Bell supplied all the PBXs, well, businessmen had a few choices.
[33:27.900 --> 33:40.640]  It wasn't until there was substantial competition in the PBX market, and all the competitors offered tandem dial-out service, and locked boxes and things of that sort, that Ma Bell learned to loosen up a little bit.
[33:42.120 --> 33:48.100]  There were a lot of problems with linemen and the old tip and ring guys.
[33:48.540 --> 33:53.580]  They'd click a butt-in'sky set on a pair, the lineman's handset, of course.
[33:54.160 --> 33:58.280]  And if they didn't hear anything, they didn't get dialed to them, they'd say, well, this is a pair, we'll use this one.
[33:58.400 --> 34:00.340]  Got a bad pair, I need a pair, we'll use this one.
[34:00.340 --> 34:06.140]  And, of course, they were stealing it from some audio circuit or some data circuit or whatever.
[34:06.420 --> 34:23.760]  The Special Service crews who had to go out and fix what the lineman left behind started putting resistors on them so that the local test board, when it looked at them, would see a resistor out at the subscriber location, called the Sub-In the trade, and wouldn't try to steal the pair.
[34:34.420 --> 34:41.320]  Even in 1982, there were devices available to allow what are now called nanny cams.
[34:42.180 --> 34:44.580]  Except there was no camera, you could just listen in.
[34:44.740 --> 34:55.480]  But I assume people would call home and trip this device that I wrote about here and see if there was a vacuum cleaner going or a party going and go from there.
[34:56.120 --> 35:03.540]  The funny thing was that it turned out that the device this company was selling was a version of a black box.
[35:03.720 --> 35:06.760]  It would trip ringing but not supervise the line.
[35:07.000 --> 35:11.080]  So, people could call home and listen to the nanny without actually paying for the call.
[35:11.700 --> 35:16.020]  And, needless to say, that wasn't a successful paradigm.
[35:18.660 --> 35:21.060]  There were many follow-ups.
[35:21.380 --> 35:22.980]  People talked about wiretapping.
[35:23.620 --> 35:30.700]  There was an entire thread that ran for a better part of a month about some kind of indicator to show whether your line was being tapped.
[35:31.180 --> 35:35.080]  And basically, at some point, cooler heads prevailed and said, you can't.
[35:35.180 --> 35:36.240]  It's utterly impossible.
[35:36.520 --> 35:38.320]  Don't even pay the money for these things.
[35:49.190 --> 35:57.810]  The first point is that, yeah, under $500 modems for $1200, and we'll put up a $300 baud until then.
[35:58.110 --> 36:06.870]  Yes, these were real people who really thought that having a $1200 baud modem for less than $500 would be a great advance.
[36:08.230 --> 36:09.570]  At the time, they were right.
[36:09.990 --> 36:16.210]  And as you can see my feelings about VI, well, I used the one truer editor.
[36:28.320 --> 36:29.090]  I don't know.
[36:29.340 --> 36:29.800]  What do you think?
[36:29.900 --> 36:31.040]  Could it have been the clunk system?
[36:34.440 --> 36:38.660]  If his name had been Alexander Graham Clunk, we would have the clunk system.
[36:45.720 --> 36:49.560]  And if his name had been Siren, would phones ring or would they wail?
[36:52.120 --> 36:54.260]  Well, that's a pest for humor in 1982.
[36:58.830 --> 36:59.710]  Oh, yes.
[37:02.510 --> 37:03.250]  I know.
[37:03.470 --> 37:05.370]  He eliminated all the jobs in broadcasting.
[37:05.670 --> 37:11.950]  His people at the FCC made my expertise in that of a lot of other guys useless.
[37:19.020 --> 37:23.600]  I don't know who Frankston at... Frankston.softarse was, but...
[37:24.960 --> 37:25.640]  Say again?
[37:27.860 --> 37:30.860]  Well, Frankston, he's still all about the same thing today.
[37:31.100 --> 37:31.480]  Yeah.
[37:31.900 --> 37:32.480]  Yeah, he is.
[37:33.180 --> 37:39.080]  Well, he didn't like the fact that the phone company wasn't being as responsive as you can see.
[37:47.060 --> 37:48.320]  This struck me as funny.
[37:48.580 --> 37:53.140]  There was a threat on the Minitel system that was being installed at the time in France.
[37:53.580 --> 37:58.100]  And a lot of people questioning whether they could get it to work on regular telephone lines.
[37:58.620 --> 38:04.140]  The Minitel system was a character-based replacement for information operators.
[38:05.920 --> 38:08.760]  And France made it work, made it successfully work.
[38:09.200 --> 38:11.700]  And as you see here, it was recently retired.
[38:11.840 --> 38:15.480]  There were a lot of the farmers that used it during those, what, 30 years?
[38:16.180 --> 38:18.040]  They didn't want to do without it anymore.
[38:18.040 --> 38:24.060]  They just were content with the character-based terminals and being able to get phone numbers and what they were used to.
[38:30.610 --> 38:48.750]  Phil Karn, who was one of the savviest guys ever in cellular design, was also a ham operator, still is, and designed a software package that would allow ham operators to hook up their radios and do TCP/IP.
[38:49.110 --> 38:55.690]  In effect, each ham station became a router on a packet radio network.
[38:56.990 --> 38:58.790]  The Internet had nothing to fear.
[38:58.950 --> 39:03.930]  The hams, just because of technical reasons, are pretty much limited to 1200 baud.
[39:03.930 --> 39:07.410]  And if you wanted to go higher, you had to modify your radio.
[39:07.850 --> 39:21.350]  I once spent, right around 1993, I once spent the better part of a year, you know, in my spare time, trying to find paths, microwave paths, between various ham stations to get faster data transport rates.
[39:21.730 --> 39:22.770]  It didn't work out.
[39:22.930 --> 39:24.150]  I found out the hard way.
[39:24.270 --> 39:26.250]  New England has all kinds of hills.
[39:27.210 --> 39:30.070]  And everybody who owned the top of one wanted to be paid.
[39:32.610 --> 39:36.310]  The elimination of the Moore's Code was a hot topic in ham radio.
[39:36.870 --> 39:43.730]  And I think it was good that the debate sort of died out, at least on the Telecom Digest.
[39:43.850 --> 39:49.170]  Because on the ham radio news groups and so forth, it continued for years.
[39:50.150 --> 39:52.930]  I, as it turns out, I'm what is called an old law extra.
[39:53.150 --> 39:57.370]  And I passed the same code test as a commercial operator would.
[39:57.950 --> 40:02.190]  And having climbed the mountaintop, I'm entitled to say that the view was not worth the climb.
[40:04.250 --> 40:07.310]  The Moore's Code, it's gone for a reason.
[40:07.530 --> 40:08.730]  And good riddance to it.
[40:16.470 --> 40:22.970]  If you've ever been in a panel office that was in service, you know what I mean when I talk about the hors d'oeuvre of burnt burl cream.
[40:25.650 --> 40:28.930]  Because Rube Goldberg found a home in a panel office.
[40:28.930 --> 40:44.670]  They were these incredibly long stretches of rotating motor driven clutches and drive shafts.
[40:44.850 --> 40:50.150]  And clutches which would raise rods under electric command and so forth and so on.
[40:50.150 --> 41:00.090]  It was a mechanical engineer's, either his best home or his worst wet dream, I'm not sure which.
[41:01.130 --> 41:07.590]  But I started out in an office that had panel and you never forget that panel office smell.
[41:08.790 --> 41:13.770]  There was some debate about where the last panel office was going to be or what was at the time.
[41:13.930 --> 41:16.090]  But it was already on the way out.
[41:17.010 --> 41:26.010]  The funny thing was, after we cut the panel office, for about a part of a year you'd be going by and one of the rods would just start to raise on its own.
[41:26.450 --> 41:33.110]  As if there was still somebody out there with a phone connected to a panel office desperately trying to get through.
[41:34.190 --> 41:36.410]  And we never did quite figure out why.
[41:36.570 --> 41:42.850]  But every so often you'd get a ghost call in the old panel office until they finally did just pull the fuses and turn the motors off.
[41:42.850 --> 41:48.470]  It all went for scrap, but quite frankly I saw some of the old switchmen crying.
[41:48.910 --> 41:51.230]  It was... they'd given their life to that machine.
[41:51.410 --> 41:53.850]  You'd be amazed how attached they had gotten to it.
[42:05.190 --> 42:08.150]  Charles Luff was interviewed in an old switchmen.
[42:08.430 --> 42:11.250]  And as you see, it was sort of a steam engine.
[42:12.850 --> 42:16.010]  They have panel offices in museums here and there.
[42:16.010 --> 42:20.370]  And if you ever do get a chance to see one at work, I recommend that it's unforgettable.
[42:33.800 --> 42:36.100]  I don't choose to comment on the dress code.
[42:40.320 --> 42:45.700]  Poodle skirts or whatever they call them and starched white blouses were the norm.
[42:47.040 --> 42:54.600]  And because they had to keep the panel offices so hot, they would bring in ice and swamp coolers basically.
[42:54.900 --> 42:56.420]  Try to cool down the operators.
[43:13.370 --> 43:16.520]  There was really a Magneto office in Bryant-Pont, Maine.
[43:16.930 --> 43:19.680]  If you wanted the operator, you had to turn the crank on the phone.
[43:20.620 --> 43:26.330]  And the residents were told, great news, we're going to give you dial phones and you're going to be joining the 20th century.
[43:27.000 --> 43:29.850]  And a lot of people in town said, no, we don't want to.
[43:31.240 --> 43:33.020]  They didn't get to stop it.
[43:33.060 --> 43:33.830]  It did come about.
[43:34.260 --> 43:35.870]  But I can understand how they felt.
[43:36.000 --> 43:37.480]  They figured the old system worked fine.
[43:38.160 --> 43:52.400]  And there was always an unwritten contract in those small systems, which sociologists have written about, better minds than mine, frankly, about how the operator was expected to be not only a switcher, not only someone who completed the call to a desired number, but also a local information store.
[43:55.840 --> 43:59.020]  She had a call from Mr. Jones to Mrs. Jones.
[43:59.460 --> 44:01.480]  He might be told, well, she's not at home.
[44:01.620 --> 44:03.300]  She's over at the hairdresser's.
[44:03.440 --> 44:04.180]  I'll ring there for you.
[44:05.180 --> 44:13.540]  And people could be found and get along quite a bit more easily because the operator knew who everybody was and where they were, you know, most times in a day.
[44:17.260 --> 44:17.740]  Yeah.
[44:18.440 --> 44:36.500]  Well, the story goes, and it's one of those stories which has to be true even if it's apocryphal, that the guy who invented the first step-by-step switch, the Stroger switch, was a mortician named Stroger, who was mad that the operator in town who was married to his competitor was giving his business to his competition.
[44:36.500 --> 44:40.300]  So he decided to invent an automatic telephone switch.
[44:40.720 --> 44:44.040]  And if it isn't true, it should be.
[44:44.220 --> 44:47.300]  But that's where the automatic telephone switch came about.
[44:48.440 --> 44:49.600]  Stiff competition.
[44:51.840 --> 44:52.860]  Oh, come on.
[44:52.960 --> 44:53.660]  I couldn't resist.
[45:02.850 --> 45:04.950]  The ASCII TWX Network.
[45:07.070 --> 45:16.130]  Somebody had written in there was something about a MASH program where one of the actors said, I've got a TWX for you, and somebody was criticizing that as being an anachronism.
[45:16.970 --> 45:20.390]  And someone else sent in, no, it's not true.
[45:20.590 --> 45:22.370]  TWX was invented in 1931.
[45:22.730 --> 45:28.990]  Which surprised even me because I had been so involved with the teletype operations.
[45:29.810 --> 45:34.430]  Although, as I say, TWX had been sold to the Western Union before I was hired at Mother Bell.
[45:34.990 --> 45:39.690]  There was a 60-speed TWX network using the old Model 15 and 19 machines.
[45:39.690 --> 45:43.450]  Way back when, they had manual operating cord boards.
[45:43.690 --> 45:46.510]  And the operators, of course, had teletype machines of their own.
[45:46.670 --> 45:52.030]  They would address requests for numbers or connections or whatever by using a teletype.
[45:52.610 --> 46:04.810]  And it was one of the odd things how my career in MobL spanned so many different groups that I picked up pieces of knowledge here and there.
[46:04.810 --> 46:17.330]  One of the pioneering studies in how to prevent hearing loss among telephone personnel revealed that TWX operators didn't suffer from the same degree of hearing loss as their voice counterparts.
[46:17.850 --> 46:32.730]  And it turned out that the operators who wore the headsets were having a lot more problems because, first of all, they were getting differentially imbalanced hearing, having had the headset on for, oh, 12 years.
[46:32.910 --> 46:34.030]  I suffer from that myself.
[46:34.370 --> 46:40.350]  Which tends to deprive them of stereoscopic hearing and introduces a lot of errors in what they hear.
[46:40.610 --> 46:45.330]  But the TWX operators, although in a noisy environment, so to speak, didn't have that problem.
[46:45.330 --> 46:58.850]  And they were able to make some very good changes, not only in the designs of the headsets, but in the addition of click prevention circuits to stop the old headsets from lessening the hearing of the operators.
[47:01.050 --> 47:07.370]  As I say, I learned to type on a Model 19, and those things were indestructible.
[47:07.370 --> 47:08.010]  They really were.
[47:08.170 --> 47:22.390]  The TWX network was, it was okay, but then the Model 33, excuse me while I digress, got a bad reputation because DEC put them on all of their vacs and other small computer systems they sold to schools.
[47:23.190 --> 47:28.210]  The 33 was available, it was cheap, but it wasn't designed for what they were using it for.
[47:28.350 --> 47:31.390]  It was only designed to be a TWX machine, so it got a bad reputation.
[47:31.390 --> 47:32.590]  I never thought it deserved.
[47:38.590 --> 47:41.370]  The first commands for the Hays modem.
[47:42.410 --> 47:47.210]  I almost titled this ATS0V1, but I didn't know how many of you would get the joke.
[47:56.100 --> 47:57.680]  The rest is history.
[47:58.380 --> 48:02.480]  The greatest changes in the phone network were at the end of the electromechanical age.
[48:02.760 --> 48:07.660]  And that's when, as I say, the stuff that we had all used for so long.
[48:08.280 --> 48:15.920]  They had coaxial cables on the center strips of the interstates and some of them still there, they've just been abandoned in place.
[48:16.700 --> 48:25.280]  But they were the head ends, the head ends for those cables, the L5 centers, strangely enough, were all located near major military bases.
[48:26.180 --> 48:36.880]  And the coaxial cables were buried at a depth which was adequate to prevent electronic spiking, what would be called electromagnetic pulse now.
[48:36.880 --> 48:42.340]  And so that the military, if nobody else, could still enjoy communications.
[48:42.760 --> 48:58.360]  I knew an installer who complained at great length about how when he was installing new equipment in one of those centers, he had to take each frame down individually through the air vent, which was literally shaped like a civil defense warning sign.
[48:58.960 --> 49:02.280]  And that was a symbol of an air vent that you could close.
[49:03.100 --> 49:04.780]  And he had to take stuff down.
[49:05.200 --> 49:08.480]  And, you know, none of the vanes lined up so he had to go down and they had to move the thing.
[49:08.680 --> 49:10.860]  And then he'd have to go down another one and so forth and so on.
[49:11.160 --> 49:12.980]  They were quite labor intensive.
[49:13.840 --> 49:19.100]  But the, the quasar cables were gone.
[49:19.360 --> 49:21.460]  They were replaced by fiber, needless to say.
[49:24.860 --> 49:28.040]  And, well, I don't think much has changed since then.
[49:28.440 --> 49:29.800]  Electronics became digital.
[49:30.860 --> 49:34.540]  There were some early transistorized design which gave way to integrated circuits.
[49:34.660 --> 49:35.100]  Who cares?
[49:36.080 --> 49:40.760]  The biggest change was right there, right at the start when I was in the thick of it.
[49:41.320 --> 49:45.180]  Telegraph signaling and private lines gave way to shared arrangements.
[49:46.060 --> 49:50.660]  And now it's unthinkable for a guy with a PBX to pay for a tie line.
[49:50.780 --> 49:51.500]  He wouldn't do it.
[49:51.580 --> 49:57.160]  He'll just have either a VoIP line on the Internet if he has the traffic to justify it.
[49:57.280 --> 50:01.740]  Or he'll suffer the message units and not pay for the tie lines.
[50:02.900 --> 50:07.980]  And, last but not least, I thought I would show you the first official post of the Telecom Digest
[50:15.590 --> 50:18.950]  where a guy complained about the high cost of AT&T service.
[50:25.340 --> 50:26.220]  In 1981.
[50:27.640 --> 50:29.100]  Well, I don't blame him.
[50:30.060 --> 50:33.800]  Of course AT&T was morphed into what used to be Southwestern Bell.
[50:35.420 --> 50:37.340]  But, now and then I think, yep.
[50:38.900 --> 50:40.700]  There's a whole story there too.
[50:40.840 --> 50:46.100]  I could write several books about the high cost of AT&T services and the ways people tried to get around them.
[50:46.100 --> 50:49.220]  And, I sympathize with the guy.
[50:49.400 --> 50:49.840]  I really do.
[50:52.200 --> 50:53.980]  Thank you for your time.
[50:54.180 --> 50:55.140]  I appreciate it.
[50:55.360 --> 50:59.080]  I hope I haven't bored you to tears and provided more light than heat.
[50:59.640 --> 51:08.980]  But, the Telecom Digest remains the oldest continuously published e-zine on the Internet.
[51:12.640 --> 51:16.260]  And, feel free to come on by, comp.dcom.telecom.
[51:17.460 --> 51:20.620]  And, take a look and contribute what you will.
[51:21.660 --> 51:22.360]  Appreciate it.
[51:31.870 --> 51:32.790]  Oh sure, yeah.
[51:32.790 --> 51:33.330]  You know that one.
[51:33.410 --> 51:33.590]  Okay.
[51:33.810 --> 51:34.430]  Of course, yes.
[51:37.630 --> 51:41.270]  It's funny because it's like, you listen to it now, it's like, hey, it's all...