All these posts about poor equipment manufacturing do seem to demonstrate why the old Bell System--and regulators--were so hesitant to allow customer owned equipment to be connected to the network. What good were 'standards' if they weren't followed?
***** Moderator's Note *****"Standards" has many meanings: if used to exclude competitors from any meaningful opportunity, then standards are conterproductive. If used to assure a level playing field, vice versa.
Bill Horne
It is not rocket science to build a device that properly meets telephone communication specifications and also is built well enough to ensure no power or other improper currents or signals get into the phone line, and the device does not unnecessarily go off-hook or otherwise misue the network. From the descriptions various posters have made about the devices, an awful lot seemed to be done really cheap, quick, and dirty.
I respectfully wish to offer some comments about monopolies, excluding competitors, and a level playing field.
First, as to public policy and monopolies:
Yes, the Bell System and Independents were assigned a deliberate monopoly which deliberately excluded competitors. But in return for that privilege, they had many restrictions on their business. They certainly could not charge rates to maximize profit, but rather had to charge low rates to maximize a customer base. It certainly would've been far more profitable for Bell to charge a higher minimum monthly rate and not have to be bothered providing unprofitable full service to very marginal subscribers.
Further, the Bell System was severely restricted from going into other lines of business. The Bell System with Western Electric and Bell Labs could've been a powerful player in industrial electronics and computers. Bell was mandated to license all Bell Labs discoveries at modest cost, not reap the profits from it. (Today, pharmaceutical companies make big profits from their research.)
Bell never made the kind of profits that a typical technology company of its times would make. American industry was in a long boom between
1950 and 1970, but the Bell System , despite its power technologies, was not part of it by deliberate design.So, yes, Bell was almost guaranteed to make a profit, but--at the same time--it was likewise guaranteed never to make huge profits.
Let's look at it another way: Suppose you own a restaurant and the government requires you to meet very stringent--and costly--food safety and public service standards. You are mandated to feed the homeless and be open with a full menu 24/7 , for example. Then the government, to provide a so-called "level playing field", excuses newcomer restaurants from meeting those same safety and public service standards; they don't have to be as clean, feed the homeless, or be open 24/7. Is that truly a "level playing field"? Is that truly in the public interest?
We must remember that after MCI gained a foothold Bell sought revised _lower_ rates to meet competition; rates that were based on competitive cost, not widespread averaging. Bell's applicaton was denied. Is that a level playing field?
Secondly, as to technology:
If your neighbor buys a modem or builds his own that fails to have proper safety precautions or uses crappy or wrongly installed parts, your neighbor could introduce power or interference current over a phone line and disrupt your service or even create a safety hazard, despite the system safeguards. Such "competitors" should be excluded. In reality a lot of crap was sent over Bell lines and it bore the cost of the cleanup. (A disrupted customer would call 611 and Bell would send a man and truck out to check it out but find nothing, because the offending customer would quickly disconnect the errant device.)
Let's look at another example:
In the 1960s, IBM revised its policies and allowed third party vendors to build peripherals (tape and disk drives) for connection to IBM's System/360-370 mainframe computers. A big business sprang up and vendors were able to undercut IBM's prices. Helping the vendors was IBM's Consent Decree, similar to Bell's, where it was required to license out its research results for a nominal fee. Also helping were former IBMers using their experience at a new company.
But when IBM, thanks to its research, wanted to upgrade (change the standards) its peripherals or lower prices--a better deal for customers--the changes would instantly obsolete the 3rd party vendors' offerings and financially hurt them. The 3rd party vendors cried foul, calling it unfair competition. I believe the court found IBM's actions to be exactly what competition was supposed to do: IBM's improvements benefited its customers and it was up to the competitors to go along.
Bill, was the standard in question published anywhere that might have made it an industry standard, or was it simply patented?
***** Moderator's Note *****I was speaking metaphorically. The original post drew an analogy between the early microcomputer maker's failure to comply with the RS-232-C standard, and how the old Bell System and its regulators were reluctant to allow interconnection of customer-provided-equipment to the PSTN.
I felt the need to point out that standards can be used to exclude competitors as well as to encourage competition: for example, the first response of Ma Bell to the Carterphone decision was to offer interconnection only through protective interfaces which cost as much to rent as the phones they replaced.
Bill Horne
On Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:28:56 -0400, Adam H. Kerman wrote: ........
And that sort of behaviour - replicated by many controlling telco's all around the place - ultimately led to their demise as it just highlighted to everyone that they were holding things back for their own interests.
It's amazing the resentment that can build up in people/business/governments when some tech company tells them that they *must* do things their way or take a hike - and as soon as an opportunity arises to weaken that sort of power it usually happens in a manner way out of magnitude to what would have been necessary, and then most people sit back and say that they deserved it......
Has anyone made a list of classic "Shot themselves in the foot" behaviour of Telco/IT companies and the ultimate consequences? I imagine it could be quite a long list by now.
This is not true.
Please note my recent post in this thread (9/11-2:19 pm).
I would suggest your statement is inaccurate or a gross [over]simplification.
In the U.S. the power companies tell residential and small business customers they MUST use [the] 110 or 220 [volt] 60 Hz power that they supply. If that's not acceptable, it's up to the customer to buy and install power conversion devices. Yet, no one seems to mind that.
When I was [a] kid I used to experiment with electricity, using a No. 6 dry cell as a power supply (1.5 V DC). It never occured to me or my parents to expect the power company to supply me with such current so I wouldn't have to buy batteries. Nor when I got older and experimented with phones, did I expect the power company to provide me with smooth 24 V DC for my switchboard. (The rectifiers in toy train transformers aren't very good for phone service.)
Our municipal sewer authority tells us things we may not flush down the sink or toilet. They go into businesses and inspect to ensure there is a grease trap so no cooking grease gets into the system. Yet, no one seems to mind.
Nobody likes getting a speeding ticket. Yet the townsfolk regularly come out to town council and demand the police be ever more aggressive in citing speeders going through twon.
I would suggest that such issues are not black and white, and most "resentments" fail to stand up to a close scrutiny of _all_ the facts. (Again, see my above post about many business restrictions imposed on the Bell System and IBM; restrictions not imposed on their competitors).
The fact is that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but consumers do want the cheapest yet fanciest lunch possible. Something has gotta give.
In public service, officials who prepare budgets quickly learn there is a big gap between what citizens are willing to pay and what services they expect. That gap leads to "resentments". Sadly, far too often good leaders have been voted out of office because of "resentments", but they were not at all justified by the facts.
Remember too that the async ports on a Data General Eclipse swapped the xmit/rcv pins.
The ports on the Eclipse console and multiplexer boards were DCE, which made sense since you normally plugged a terminal into them. If you want to plug a modem in, you need a cable which swaps the signal lines.
--scott
In all this discussion of serial port connectors, we need to keep in mind that RS-232 only specified the interface as a connector mounted on the modem and a cord coming from the "business machine" to the modem. If the manufacturer of the business machine decided to put a connector there, as most of them did, then the pin arrangement was not covered by the standard and could be anything at all.
I always like to save a portion of the blame for the standards process in this country: paying for standards work by copyrighting and charging for copies of the standard. The price is usually not high, but the pre-Internet process of finding out who publishes the standard and how to order copies was a significant deterrent. So many equipment designers learned about the standard the same way they learned about sex, from hearsay on the streets and playgrounds.
Contrast this with the way the Arpanet/Internet developed, with standards freely available online.
On Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:03:28 -0400, Jim Haynes wrote: ........
But it just highlights how various people will always disregard any "standard" if it is convenient.
In the telecoms area I still recall various voice mail systems that used DTMF in-band signalling who's designers decided that things like the inter-digit pauses, minimum pulse widths etc could all be cut back from whatever the standard was because it just worked with whatever other equipment they were using at the time (why spend 3.3 seconds sending all the tones when it can be done in 2.8 seconds...... our equipment is "better" if it does this quicker.....)
The trouble was that later on someone would invariably try and get this non-standard stuff working with something that was quite finicky with anything outside the DTMF standard, and many (many) hours would be wasted trying to work out what the problem was.
It didn't specify the well-known DB-25 connector, but gender of the connectors was specified, male on terminal and female on communications equipment. RS-232 standardized the voltage of signals and the functions of the physical interface pins, up to 20 different signal connections.
I'm doing this from memory. I've got what's his name's famous book on serial communications around here somewhere.
So a widely distributed method that educates the public on standards could improve sex too? I'm willing to give it a try.
One assumes memos were mailed back and forth in the beginning.
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