Bell System Technical Journal--Reason for publication? [Telecom]

BSTJ was indeed a very high quality scientific/engineering journal, published from 1926 through 1984 (dates from memory), fully equal in quality to Phys Rev or Science, and including many very important fundamental papers (Shannon on Information Theory, etc), as well as many more engineering-oriented papers related to all aspects of telephone technology (from fundamental acoustics down to the chemistry of increasing the life of wooden telephone poles).

[I was never at Bell Labs myself, but knew many of the basic electronic device researchers there as professional colleagues from mid 1950s onward.]

Why did they publish it? You have to remember: The Bell System was in essence a regulated monopoly, very well run, and very well regulated. Bell Labs was its research arm: a superb, immensely wide ranging, equally well run, university quality research lab, supported, along with BSTJ, by in essence a tiny tax on every phone bill in the Bell System.

BSTJ was, in essence, a way to report the results of much of that research, and secondarily to transmit the engineering aspects of telephony through the huge, complex, but highly integrated Bell System/Bell Labs/Western Electric system.

With respect to patents, sorry, you have it more or less backwards. Bell Labs researchers could not submit anything for publication to any journal (or technical meeting) until it had been vetted by their patent people, who were quick but very competent in doing this and in filing on anything significant. But, these high-quality researchers whom Bell Labs wanted to attract would-- like most high-quality university researchers -- never have come there if they were not free to publish.

Given this, running their own journal (which really covered only a minor fraction of the immense publication output of Bell Labs researchers), and which was sold to university and industrial libraries just like a professional society journal, gave prestige to Bell Labs, and probably cost little if anything more per article than having the researchers publish in society journals and pay page charges.

Similar situation for IBM Labs, which was not a regulated monopoly, but was so immense and profitable in those days that cost of publishing IBM J. Res. & Dev. was lost in the noise.

The sad situation -- which I've been bugging old Bell Labs colleagues about for some years now -- is that when BSTJ was abruptly terminated at the time of deregulation in mid-1980s, online preparation and publishing of technical journals was not yet established, though it was just about to appear. Professional society journals are now prepared totally online -- some never appear on paper at all -- and as a side effect, most major journals have also scanned their entire earlier press runs into electronic form. I can sit by a window at Lake Tahoe, as I am right now, snow falling on an 8 feet base outside, and download PDFs of Phys Rev articles right back to volume 1, issue no. 1, from 1893. BSTJ is, however, to the best of my knowledge, not available online anywhere

-- and that's very sad.

Final thought: The regulated (but "investor owned and operated") electrical power industry has its Bell Labs analog, EPRI (the Electrical Power Research Institute). If a similarly minute "tax" on electricity bills had been collected and used with anything approaching the same effectiveness by the electrical power industry over its history to date, God knows what technical miracles would have come from this. We might well not have any of the energy problems we have staring down at us today.

As an addendum to what I posted a few minutes ago: I have no quarrel at all with any of the moderator's comments, which I only got down to after I had written my own reply to the original post.

It still sort of lives on as the Bell Labs Technical Journal, published by Wiley for Alcatel, which now owns Lucent which was Western Electric. Articles since 1996 are available online for $$$.

Two, actually, the IBM Systems Journal (since 1962) and and the IBM Journal of R+D (since 1957.)

IBM has a pretty good handle on this newfangled Internet thing, so full sets of both are available online:

Volume 1 Number 1 of the IBMJR+D has an interesting article on a promising new storage device called a "magnetic disk".

R's, John

That was interesting. One of the other things about Bell Labs were that they were very generous about sharing the ideas including very cheap licsensing of new technologies.

There are two things that came out of Bell Labs that we still use today. That computer you're using gets most of its brains from the transistor, and the network connection you're using probably goes over a strand of glass fiber via LASER, not to mention that your CD or DVD players both use the same technologies.

I subscribed to he BSTJ for many years. It was driven by Bell Labs. In addition to the purely scientific articles, they loved to show off how good their new network systems and their various class of elecronic switches were designed an how they worked. Lots of technical detail, both design and engineering implementation.

Such specifics were reviewed for patent protections and to not give away sensitive information.

In the latter a major screw up occurred when an article slipped by the overseers that explained in detail the inband signalling system thae emerged in the 1960s. The article gave all the information the hackers of the era needed to build the infamous Blue Box.

That one was a riot. ;-)

***** Moderator's Note *****

A little birdie once whispered in my ear that Steve Jobs got the seed money for Apple by selling Blue Boxen to the California Computer club. The birdie told me that Jobs was the mysterious entrepreneur profiled in the now infamous Esquire article "The Secrets of the Little Blue Box", not, as some later claimed, Steve Wozniak.

Perhaps someone should call them up and ask ...

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

(Please put [Telecom] at the end of the subject line of your post, or I may never see it. Thanks!)

Except that Bell didn't really invent the transistor. They took existing semiconductor theory and *manufactured* the first transistor. Semiconductor theory had been around for decades before Bell got involved.

Regards,

Fred

Transistor came from Bell Labs, absolutely.

The laser and its predessor, the maser (or several kinds of masers): A more complex history, in which Bell Labs was a significant player -- but IMHO most definitely did not "invent the laser".

For one overview of this:

Most inventions take existing theory as the basis and build upon it. As I understand it, what Bell Labs did was create a significant advancement of the state of the art and that counts as invention. The specifics of what the three did are well documented and Bell Labs is recognized as the inventor.

The biggest thing to come out of Bell Labs was low cost telephone service because of continuing improvements in networking and technology. People forget how much the inflation-adjusted cost of telephone service, including local, toll, and station equipment, dropped in price and improved in reliability over the years thanks to Bell Labs improvements.

They were more or less required to, as a result of the 1956 Consent Decree.

It is interesting that Bell even went down the semiconductor amplifier/switch road. They had gotten their tubes to low power and high lifetimes. But the transistor held even lower power requirements and higher service lifetimes. There are still a bunch of 1AESS's out there with transistor logic.

Actually, the BSTJ wasn't the only source for this information. It was also published in "Notes on Distance Dialing" and its successor, "Notes on the Network," as well as ITU publications and a CRC telephony manual. It would be pretty hard to really keep secret information used by telecom companies around the world.

Wouldn't suprise me. Jobs was the salesman; Woz was the geek.

I heard the following legends; are they true?

1) Lay people discovered the network signal tones through a blind person with very sensitive hearing who was able to hear and discern the special tones. Simple oscillators reproduced the tones and allowed access. 2) A toy whistle included in a box of cereal ("Capn Crunch") just happened to have the pitch of the signal tones.

• * * *

I would also suspect that college students had student-intern type jobs with Bell Labs, Long Lines, or the operating companies and learned on the job about the process.

I guess that outside of a college electrical engineering laboratory, making an oscillator to create such tones was not a simple task for most people in the early 1960s. Further, long distance usage was still relatively expensive in those years so most people rarely made toll calls. People away from home communicated by letter. Thus the environment was such that that even knowing the 'secret' internal signals did not expose the network to abuse. (In other words, being able to enter and freely use a corporate computer in the early 1960s was a meaningless opportunity for most people since they had no idea how to make use of the computer.)

However, the cheapness of transistors and other electronic components and the growth of engineering students in the later 1960s increased the probability and ease to make such equipment, experiment with it, and exploit it. Further, the reduction of long distance rates at that time exposed more people to long distance calls and raised curiosity about how they worked, and ironically, interest in saving money. (In other words, by this time enough people knew enough about computers that if they got into a corporate data center, they could exploit the opportunity.)

As an aside, I heard that MIT students in 1965 could make 'free long distance calls'. Obviously an MIT student had the training and access to equipment to make that possible and knew what they were doing from a technical aspect. I suspect later fraud users were unskilled and merely using hardware ("Blue Box") and directions developed by others.

College students being who they were made this a very attractive item. By the late 1960s, they could save money on toll calls (big demand for such on campuses by then) and screw the "big bad evil" telephone company at the same time.

Today, many people criticize the tough anti-copying measures on music media and the aggressive stance on illegal downloads. But given the reality of college attitudes, I do have some sympathy with the copyright holders in wanting to protect their business interests. That is a very heated issue on the rec.arts.tv newsgroup.

P.S. As mentioned, by the late 1960s/early 1970s long distance rates dropped significantly, and college students could now afford to phone home and friends instead of just using the mail. They enjoyed this very much, but long and frequent calls still got expensive.

A number of students (certainly by no means all) felt a sense of 'entitlement', they is, they felt they were entitled to cheap communication and phone co rates were too high, even though rates had been coming down. They rationalized that it was ok to use fraud boxes or school business lines for toll calls. (Students who worked school switchboards often snuck out calls over trunks. Sometimes schools had FX lines to other places and these were freely taken advantage of.)

(Snip!)

Of course, there was more to a Blue Box than just 2600 Hz. The 2600 Hz ("Single Frequency") was a frequently used tone for controlling on-hook/off-hook conditions on a inter-machine trunk. That was certainly important but other signals were as important and were also produced by the boxes. KP signals, ST signals, digits 1 through 0, etc. were needed to control the switches once the trunk circuit had been taken control of. Most Blue Boxes had push buttons to control which tone was sent and the "operator" had to understand the protocol each network switch expected so he could properly "dial" the number he wanted to call.

Blue Boxes mimicked the Multi-Frequency scheme that used two tones to represent a digit or control character. This was another example of a "two of five" code, the subject hancock4 broached earlier this month in a discussion of trunk route selector machines. (and later the M-F scheme included six tone frequencies and became a 2 of 6 code)

Because they were doing actual research, instead of just product development. American corporations back then actually did real science.

And so IBM, DEC, and Xerox all published real journals. The Westinghouse Research Center, RCA, Bell Labs, and many smaller companies actually published real journals with actual research in them.

But then, back then you would buy equipment and it would come with actual schematics.

If you can patent it, it's not research, it's development. And a lot of the stuff that was in those journals WAS patented.

The downside of this is IBM's problem... the guys at T.J. Watson were at the forefront of technology, and their competitors always wound up adopting it long before they did. IBM invented the hard disk, the sealed HDA, the GaAs semiconductor, and the RISC architecture, and they never really implemented any of them extensively until everyone else had.

--scott

I can whistle the connect tone for the 300 acoustical couplers.

I would have great fun wandering through the computer lab and getting all the modems to start trying to connect at me.

-Hudson

Geez! Whistling up an acoustic coupler? That's a skill that goes back a ways! Although I've got one in my "collection" I don't recall seeing one in actual use since sometime in the early '80s!

***** Moderator's Note *****

Those old acoustic coupled modems are still useful - Civil War reenactors utilize them as part of a "Dial Up Morse" arrangement that allows them to operate Morse Code sounders and keys over dial up connections.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

(Please put [Telecom] at the end of the subject line of your post, or I may never see it. Thanks!)

This, in short, is an example of why security through obscurity just doesn't work.

--scott