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Pictorial and Written History of Bell Systems
gngulrajani writes "I have wasted an afternoon digging though this website. Lots of old school Bell marketing posters as well as technical specifications for things such as 'Telephone Memory Devices' and a 'dataphone service'."
Phone Loosers
I week or two ago I found this
Video from the Bell System's Pavilion at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962. It's fairly interesting and amusing. It shows such advances as touch-tone dialing, pagers, and autodialing.
It's not exactly slashdotted... The index page has been changed, but the "deep links" still work... Desperate for this site? Google-cache the base page here and follow the links to the real site. (Until they decide they don't like that either...)
Now that is a funny 403 message...
The novation applecat was the most amazing chunk of hardware you could add to an apple in those days.
You are not kidding. Those things were fully programable so that one could create a list of numbers to dial (or even dial randomly) and then log the numbers which were answered by computer modems for call back and investigation when you got back from school. I could not afford the Applecat at first and relyed on a cheap modem card and one of those phone handset cradles for a while before I could mow enough lawns around the neighborhood to purchase the Applecat. As I recall, it seems to have pulled about $300 out of my 14year old pockets, but there was a friend of mine (from a decidedly wealthy background) that was doing all sorts of custom programming on his even hooking up an old cassette player to function as an anwering machine which totally blew me away.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Mostly because it's Good Enough(tm).
They give the phones enough bandwidth to carry the important frequencies for speech. If they gave more bandwidth to phones, they would lose total carrying capacity.
Complexity is Easy. Simplicity is Hard.
http://mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/which contains a great deal of interesting material collected over the years from the comp.dcom.telecom newsgroup on USENET.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Well the biggest hidden secret fact is that Alexander Graham Bell did not actually invent the telephone. As was finally recognised by the US Congress in 2002, the inventor was a poor Italian immigrant Antonio Meucci.
Meucci had taken a 'one year renewable intent to patent' out on the invention as he couldn't afford the full patent, and a few years later Bell, who had access to Meucci's materials got hold of the stuff and claimed it as his own.
from the article:He sent a model and technical details to the Western Union telegraph company but failed to win a meeting with executives. When he asked for his materials to be returned, in 1874, he was told they had been lost. Two years later Bell, who shared a laboratory with Meucci, filed a patent for a telephone, became a celebrity and made a lucrative deal with Western Union.
Meucci sued and was nearing victory - the supreme court agreed to hear the case and fraud charges were initiated against Bell - when the Florentine died in 1889. The legal action died with him.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Nice, but:
1. Ken Thompson had Unix running by 1983.
2. Dennis Ritchie had invented C by 1983.
3. Bjarne Stroustrup was almost in Murray Hill by 1983.
Why no mention of them?
It sound "telephonic" because the voiceband frequencies are restricted to only 3200 cycles. This frequency bandpass has been in existence since a technology called t-carrier (DS1)evolved in the late 60's. This was needed at the time because the conversion from analog to digital used a frequency rate of 8000 cycles. Nyquists theorem required at least two samples of the analog sine wave to be able reconstruct it at the receiving end. Restricting the bandwidth facilitated this process with the technology they had at the time. Only eight bits represented each possible 256 bit sample. CD quality signals now have 44 bits representing them. Technology marches on but the Telco's still only have 8-bit representing the voice you hear
That is the swedish 'kobratelefon' - "the cobra phone".
/ kobratel efon.html
They were the property of the public phone company of
older days in Sweden. Ericsson built them.
Here you can see the rotary dial and the red button "hook"
in the bottom of the phone:
http://www.antika.nu/Diverse/Diversebild2
It seems that they can be bought for less than 100 USD:
http://www.tradera.com/auction/aid_5004226
You obviously never used the computer. If you use the brackets, you understand just what is going on.
/.
/// did indeed use the "/" character in its name. An no, it is not just a varient font but the actual name of the computer.
Please, before you comment on something you don't know anything about, think.
Of course, what else is new on
Yes, it was called the Apple two, but in just about every reference and magazine (except more mainstream press like Time or the New York Times) used the ][ symbols because that is what Apple used, even in technical manuals as well as the boot text when the computer was first turned on. People use the symbols for fondness of the old system. BTW, the Apple
Also, the command prompt for an Apple ][ was the right bracket "]". (Yes, I know about integer basic ">", and the monitor prompt "*", but floating point basic ("FP") was the default prompt.)
Sorry about getting way off topic here, but I can't let something like this go by. Now onto more about the Bell System.
Sherwin Gooch's Account of John Bardeen's Lecture (Score:1)
by Baldrson (jabowery@netcom.com) on Tuesday December 28, @08:58AM EST
(User Info) http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery
In any case, I'll check with Sherwin Gooch to see if he has any more direct evidence from Bardeen himself to support the controversial account of the hide-away experimental stand.
I did, and here is Sherwin's response:
Jim,
Thank you for alerting me to your discussion.
To provide a more solid foundation, one should be aware that I heard this story from the horse's mouth.
John Bardeen himself gave a talk one evening at Altgeld Hall on the University of Illinois campus, circa 1978, in which he related various experiences surrounding his inventing the transistor. At the time, people suspected that the scheduling of this presentation may have been related to Bardeen's health.
Professor Bardeen showed us the B&W 16mm film BB&S had made at Bell Labs immediately after they got the first transistor to work (and, presumably, before Bardeen's boss got to work the next morning...) I have seen individual frames and out-takes of this film since, but I don't know if the entire film still exists. The "rolly-cart" with their experimental set-up is plainly in evidence on the film.
It was John Bardeen himself, at Altgeld Hall, who related that his boss had said that the "solid-state amplifying device" which they wanted to develop was "not feasible," and that, "even if it were possible, it would have no practical application." Dr. Bardeen related that sometimes, when his boss stayed at work past 5 p.m., the three of them would become very impatient waiting for him to leave so they could roll their setup out of the coat-closet, and get busy on what they, apparently, thought was the greatest "cool hack" of the day.
I wonder who Bardeen's boss was. His boss should be immortalized in history next to the NASA manager who advised the last engineer withholding approval of the Challenger launch to "put on your management hat!"
One of the anecdotes John Bardeen related was how he had left his set of photographic slides in the taxi which took him to the ceremony to collect his Nobel prize, and all the trouble to which he and the Swedish government had gone in trying to recover them. But their efforts were unsuccessful; the slides were never recovered. Professor Bardeen was extremely apologetic that he didn't have them to use in his presentation, and so we would just have to make-do with his relating the incidents to us.
With my background in computer music, I found one of the pieces of supporting paraphernalia that Dr. Bardeen didn't lose in Sweden quite interesting. He brought along a transparent plexiglas box, approximately the shape of a 6" cube, with randomly distributed 3/4" or so holes (apparently for cooling?) in the sides. On the top were a number (6 or so) of black SPST N.O. push buttons. A small loudspeaker was mounted inside. (There must have also been a battery of some kind, but I don't recall it.) The box contained a collection of electronic components, their leads soldered to one-another ("tacked together"), and hanging in "free space." (He hadn't bothered to use a prototyping board or connecting strip.) There were resistors, capacitors, possibly some coils, and these ~1" long bar things (which were the transistors), of which there were 3. Dr. Bardeen explained that he had had chosen to build this device because it em
Seastead this.