Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Thinking on it, the difference was speed. Was it a mechanical card reader or 
> an optical card reader.  Did it shine light thru the holes? Then you could 
> slide a stack of cards past pretty much as fast as you want, which was good 
> if you had a giant IBM or something and you wanted to do lots of processing. 

  Wasn't that the idea with punched tape? (Although punched tapes might
actually predate punch cards...)

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                                                          - Warp

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>> My employer's Internet connection is *guaranteed* to be 5 Mbit/sec in both 
>> directions at all times. (There are also contractual guarantees about how 
>> quickly the ISP will fix it if it breaks.)
>>

>>
>> How much do you pay for your broadband?
> 
> Ouch!

Yeah, well, it's 5 Mbit/sec IN BOTH DIRECTIONS. (ADSL is typically 5 
Mbit/sec up and 0.5 Mbit/sec down.) And it has service guarantees. And a 
  static IP address. Etc. In other words, it's a business package, not a 
residential package. Hence the price tag.

> However, nobody here expands into rural areas. The reason is simple: if you 
> are in communications and invest into infrastructure, our laws force the 
> companies to "open" their lines to competitors at very cheap rates. So new 
> cables are only places below surface where they can be reasonably sure that 
> enough customers will stay with them to make it worth their while. That is 
> only the case where many people are crammed into very small spaces, like the 
> large cities. Free markets are not always good...

Laws forcing companies to do things doesn't sound like a very "free" 
market to me...

-- 
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http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Fri, 30 Apr 2010 21:37:55 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> Laws forcing companies to do things doesn't sound like a very "free"
> market to me...

Free markets still need to be regulated so as to ensure they remain free 
markets (ie, open to competition).

Jim

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Laws forcing companies to do things doesn't sound like a very "free" 
> market to me...

I don't know where TC is from, but we haven't had a free market in land-line 
phone service in the USA in over 100 years.

-- 
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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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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