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Warp wrote:
> Wasn't that the idea with punched tape? (Although punched tapes might
> actually predate punch cards...)
The only tape readers I ever saw in operation were mechanical. I imagine
there would be the same differences there.
Now, the carriage control tape on the line printer was optical, but that was
only a loop as long as a page of paper, so that didn't really count.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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Well, I am from Germany.
We had a monopoly here, allowing ONLY German Telekom (then called
Bundespost) to do business in the field of communications. GT was a part of
the German state - a federal office - and all employees were civil servants,
starting at the top management down to the guy digging up the street and
placing the cables there. It was the same with postal services.
Now, don't confuse a US civil servant with a German one - our's don't pay
income tax and get lots of money compared to a normal worker - if you deduct
the taxes, social security and "Abgaben" - there is no real term for this in
English, it is another kind of tax in every sense but the legal one. It is
said the Eskimos have 50 different words for snow - we Germans have 50
different words for tax - but I disgress.
The monopoly had a rather severe impact on German online-services and BBS in
the 80's and 90's. You could only have a modem if it had the approval seal
of the GT. So a 56kbps modem that could be had for 50 dollars in the US was
sold by our bureaucrats for the equivalent of 500 dollars. Much cost for a
little sticker on the back of the modem. So either you were rich or used
illegally imported modems - or did not use modems at all, which most people
did. Hey, you even had to rent the actual phone from the GT in addition to
paying monthly for the line itself.
Find the old phones you had to rent here: actually these were quite hip at
the time.
http://schnitzler-aachen.de/Surftipps/Bundespost_1984_b.jpg
The standard model was mouse-grey platics with a dial. We had, at more
monthly cost, a green phone with dial. We used it until 1996. See a similar
phone below:
http://www.2blum.de/images/FeTAp611-2a.jpg
Now, I think it was a blessing when the Bundespost had to give up the
monopoly. However, I think it would be fair to grant a time-limited monopoly
on their own cables for any telco which actually digs up the ground and puts
IT-infrastructure in. Whoever pays for the new cables could be sure to reap
the profits. This way VDSL would spread into rural Germany much faster.
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TC wrote:
> We had a monopoly here, allowing ONLY German Telekom (then called
> Bundespost) to do business in the field of communications.
Here we had competition up until 1934 or so. (Legally, 1934. Reality of
course drags on, or happens before legally required, etc.) At that point,
there were so many phone lines that the government granted "regulated
monopoly" status to AT&T, aka "The Bell System." Bell was the only company
allowed to run phone lines. This legal decision was called the "Final
Judgment". Anything you hooked up to Bell's phone lines had to be approved
by Bell.
At the time, things were analog, so it took careful planning to route a call
across country without swamping the signal with noise every time it went
through a switch.
But the company was regulated. They had to follow strict accounting rules,
they had to depreciate things over 30 to 50 years (i.e., they had to buy
equipment that would work for 50 years before it wore out enough that it
needed to be replaced), they could only make a certain amount of profit
(that was, on the other hand, pretty much guaranteed given they were a
monoply), and they had to service every customer. They even had to pay the
same rate for the phone on the desk of the guy sitting in the central office
as you did for the phone in your house. But if you were a park ranger 15
miles from the nearest central office, you could still get a telephone.
However, this meant that while phone service was remarkably inexpensive for
the time, and even a tiny portion of the money going to Bell Labs made it
one of the foremost research organizations in the world for decades, it also
meant that things didn't really move forward very fast. ISDN never took
off, because by the time that 30-year-old mechanical phone switch was paid
for, we were already up to ADSL and such. You (usually) rented your phone,
but since AT&T didn't want to pay for new phones, they lasted pretty much
forever.
http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/test2007/mp_greatestgadget_f.jpg
In the late 1970s, MCI (Michigan Communications Inc or something like that)
installed digital microwave towers to let truck drivers going between
Chicago and Minneapolis (or something like that) talk to their bosses. AT&T
sued MCI, saying they had a government-granted monopoly. AT&T won, but the
courts revisited the "Final Judgment", decided that since it was no longer
necessary to carefully control the network (due to digital transmission and
wireless transmission), they would create a "Modified Final Judgment" in 1984.
The MFJ said that The Bell System gets broken up in to AT&T Long Lines
(which were not allowed to offer local service, but which were allowed to
basically charge whatever they wanted etc), and the seven Regional Bell
Operating Companies (Pacific Bell, New England Bell, etc) who were not
allowed to provide communication between LATAs (Local Access Telephone
Areas). A LATA is basically a city, or one "area code" if you've ever been
to the USA.
So now you have seven phone companies, and they each have to pay AT&T to
connect a call to a different LATA, and AT&T has to pay to connect that call
to the destination. Telephone number information (i.e., looking up what
would be in a phone book) depends on which city they're in, etc. There's
even weird crap caused by SS7, which is the protocol used between phone
switches, because some of the data it transfers (like caller ID) was
considered "communications", while other data (like busy signals) was
considered "signaling", so now you had to start counting packets based on
their type, on a nation-wide network of computers that were never designed
for such a thing and which were all vitally necessary to continued operation
of the network.
AT&T wasn't allowed to talk to Bell. They had one year to figure out how to
give equal access to everyone. Considering the whole routing network was
based on phone numbers and their prefixes, it was a pretty herculean task.
It was still causing pain 10 years later.
Plus, the seven RBOCs were still regulated, at least for areas in which they
had monopolies. So the local companie still had to service every customer,
blah blah blah. But, local companies that weren't RBOCs didn't have those
types of restrictions, *and* they got to connect to the RBOC's switches at
the same rate the RBOCs charged themselves. So a company could come in, hook
up a fiber from the switch to the new office building, and get all the
$600/month business phones, and the RBOCs still had to service everyone else
for the same $20/month they were charging.
So, yeah, it was pretty much the same here.
The new stuff - fiber, cable, cell phones, etc - weren't part of the
regulated part, so you could have New York Bell competing for your business
with Pacific Bell for cell phone service, but not wired service.
In any case, at the time of the break-up, we had 56 light-minutes of copper
wire installed in the USA, and 96%+ had phones in their houses and offices.
So it's pretty reasonable that say only 15 years after cell phones were
actually useful, lots fewer people have them here than elsewhere.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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On Sat, 01 May 2010 02:03:07 +0200, TC wrote:
> Now, don't confuse a US civil servant with a German one - our's don't
> pay income tax and get lots of money compared to a normal worker
Actually, in the US many civil servants are FICA-exempt (meaning they
don't pay social security taxes) - because a government pension + Social
Security would be seen as "double-dipping".
The kicker there is that if you end up working somewhere and are FICA-
exempt, apparently you can NEVER collect social security, even if
afterwards you take a job in the private sector and have to pay into FICA.
Got a friend who works for a public university who is in such a situation
- and his father-in-law nearly took a part-time teaching job at another
university after 30+ years of working and contributing to social
security, and he could've lost it all for a $1500 teaching gig over one
semester.
But out of curiosity, are you considered a civil servant in Germany? (I
ask because I've a good friend who is, and just seems like a small world
to run into two people in such positions <g>)
Jim
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Jim Henderson wrote:
> The kicker there is that if you end up working somewhere and are FICA-
> exempt, apparently you can NEVER collect social security, even if
> afterwards you take a job in the private sector and have to pay into FICA.
I don't think that's always true. I know people who after they retire from
police work, they take a job for 5 years to get social security and such.
Maybe it's state vs federal, or maybe it's if your *last* job is
FICA-exempt, or maybe it's just the medicare or other "non-pension" part of
the social security deal I heard about, or something like that.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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This video reminded me of this thread.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9dpXHnJXaE
Back then modems were made with *style*.
--
- Warp
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> But out of curiosity, are you considered a civil servant in Germany? (I
> ask because I've a good friend who is, and just seems like a small world
> to run into two people in such positions <g>)
No - I'm a freelancer.
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Sneakernet: Providing backup to networks since before networks.
Regards,
John
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On Fri, 30 Apr 2010 22:55:20 -0700, Darren New wrote:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> The kicker there is that if you end up working somewhere and are FICA-
>> exempt, apparently you can NEVER collect social security, even if
>> afterwards you take a job in the private sector and have to pay into
>> FICA.
>
> I don't think that's always true. I know people who after they retire
> from police work, > they take a job for 5 years to get social security
> and such. Maybe it's state vs federal, or maybe it's if your *last* job
> is FICA-exempt, or maybe it's just the medicare or other "non-pension"
> part of the social security deal I heard about, or something like that.
Not all people who work for the government are considered FICA-exempt -
so it's possible that cops aren't (since FICA is federal, not state, and
police are generally state, not federal).
I had a bit of a chat with someone who falls under that, and he
researched it and told me what his research found, and that's essentially
what I've said above - so it's secondhand info that's sourced from
someone who falls under those rules.
Jim
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Warp wrote:
> Back then modems were made with *style*.
Wow. I used acoustic-coupled modems, but they were bakelite, not steam-punk.
:-) Very cool.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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