You could pay through the nose for a Bell 202 modem (and the four-wire phone line required to make it work), to obtain a whopping 1200 baud. Ma Bell was similar over here on this side of the Atlantic. It was illegal to own a modem and you could only hire one from them, a 4U brown box that allowed a 150Bd link for the privileged few who could take a terminal home to edit files on a paper roll. Luxury! Before British Telecom was created the GPO had the monopoly on passing information between buildings, even if both were on private property. Not much has changed in that regard, either: I've been in some server-farm rooms, with several hundred little screeching DC fans in the servers, and you can't hear yourself think. A few hours in there and you'd walk out with your ears ringing. The visuals were quite spectacular: blinking address and data and I/O lights on the console, vacuum column tape drives, cards riffling through card readers and paper tape punches producing mountains of chad. Yes, computer rooms were noisy places, but I don't recall anything beeping, other than the Univac mainframes when pranksters would run an assembly language program containing the ALRM instruction, before Univac revised the microcode to make it a privileged instruction. That was the sort of computer that Max Matthews or John Chowning developed their ideas on.Īh, memories. The sound of mainframe computers was mainly fan noise roar, that you went hoarse shouting over, interspersed with the whining of hard disk drives the size of washing machines, line printers clunking, ASR33s rattling and people screaming when they dropped their stacks of punched cards or rolls of paper tape containing their life's work. Consider what this meant for the telecoms manager needing to respond to business and market demands. Delivery and installation times for a routine data circuit went from two weeks to several months. Coordination among these new entities, which formerly worked together smoothly, was now limited by government regulation to an absurd degree in the name of "fostering competition." Customers suffered. Immediately and for some years afterward, the telecommunications business was thrown into turmoil. Things got really bad following the 1984 divestiture, when AT&T was forced to split essentially into its long-lines/long-distance operations, and the multiple operating companies (Baby Bells). The AT&T monopoly was not oppressive, but services were expensive. This was broken down incrementally between 19. Likewise in the USA, AT&T had the same sort of monopoly. It was illegal to own a modem and you could only hire one from them. Graham Hinton wrote:Luxury! Before British Telecom was created the GPO had the monopoly on passing information between buildings, even if both were on private property.
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