Bell System Technical Journal [Telecom]

Fantastic! And every article is an individual PDF!

*HOWEVER*, must be the endpoint of a T1 or, perhaps, a 56K modem or even some tin cans connected by string -- something limited to a data rate of approximately 8-14 KBytes/S meaning almost an hour to download one article (all of which seem to be sized 30-50 MB each).

It's not my connection; I have a DOCSIS 2.0 cable connection and download full OS ISOs (3 to 5 GB) from, say, Microsoft in about 20 minutes, and similar speeds from Stanford U. and Hewlett-Packard as I just verified again a few minutes ago to be sure it's not my connection that's the bottleneck.

Traceroutes (from here, Silicon Valley) are fine until *.NYC8.ALTER.NET and then bog down incredibly at lucent-gw.customer.alter.net beyond which is a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, with hollow echoes. :-)

Pinging bstj.bell-labs.com resolves to orion.research.bell-labs.com and ICMP is apparently ignored (so no response to a ping request).

I suppose a scripted wget in the background is what's necessary to fetch articles as, for example:

"Mathematical theory of laminated transmission lines", November 1952, pages 1121-1206, 35.6 MB:

wget

at

Thanks for sharing this good news with us.

I only hope they put on the Bell Laboratories Record magazine. The Technical Journal is not written for laymen, though the "Record" is. The issues from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s are particularly fascinating.

Had to look into that ... but I get a blank page, with complete HTML source showing only as:

URL typo, perhaps? Cheers, -- tlvp

-- Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP

Heh ... trying traceroute from here leads, after lucent-gw.customer.alter.net (at [63.111.127.186]) only to [0.0.0.0] = [MyOwnComputerName]. 'Zat what you call "a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, with hollow echoes"?

That started to come in, s l o w l y , and then Adobe opened a little monologue box to inform me of an I/O error from the remote site, [OK]? OK, I guess. Pity.

Cheers, -- tlvp

Answering your (tlvp's) Q here: that URL is correct. I do receive a full web page with listings of articles just a moment ago at 7:15pm PDT 19-OCT-2010 from here in Silicon Valley.

Yes. :-)

Right. :-(

I let a wget run for awhile but it simply crawls so I killed it. It appears that after 1% or so has been transferred the outbound speed is dramatically throttled. I'm not going to wait 24 hours for an article.

I get the page to come up properly with the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.

Dick

I'd like to see that magazine online also.

I was a coauthor of an article in the May 1974 edition, with my picture (boy, was I fat then!) on "The Authors" page at the end of the issue. The article described the 1A Radio Digital Terminals, a system to add one T1 digital stream to a broadband microwave FM Radio system, using unused baseband bandwith below that of the first analog voice circuit. Hence the nickname: Data Under Voice.

Dick

+--------------- | Neal McLain wrote: | > Alcatel-Lucent has made the complete set of back issues of "Bell System | > Technical Journal," 1922-1983, available online at | > | | Had to look into that ... but I get a blank page, with complete HTML source | showing only as: | | | | URL typo, perhaps? Cheers, -- tlvp +---------------

No, I think it just got slashdotted for a while. It's back now...

-Rob

----- Rob Warnock

627 26th Avenue San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607

What is happening is that everyone in the world is hammering that site. This is a huge, huge deal. Many of these papers were never available in any digital form at all until now.

Pretty much all of the fundamental research into audio systems is in the BSTJ, and pretty much all of it was only available on paper or microfilm at a limited number of libraries.

So now it is available and needless to say a LOT of people are grabbing everything they can to make local copies.

--scott

Odd, I downloaded several articles, including several on the 1956 Atlantic telephone cable, with no trouble at all. I'm on ordinary non-Bell telco DSL.

R's, John

Given the huge pent up demand for these magazines, it's pretty likely their servers were simply overloaded...

(I'll wait a week or two to d/l mine...)

D'oh (and slaps forehead). :-)

Yes, definitely. It's like the Slashdot effect when a website would be inadvertently DoS'd (Denial of Service) after being featured on Slashdot and eleventy-seven bazillion geeks all over the world would visit it.

Thank you for the reality check!

I'm surprised there is that much demand for this historical information. Isn't it all basically technologically all obsolete? Wouldn't someone designing any kind of system want to use modern literature for the latest research on telephone system, audio, and electronic theory and components?

Much of the research of and operations of the old Bell System were concerned with economical usage of a very expensive physical plant. Copper wires or coax were expensive as was electro-mechanical and electronic switchgear. A great deal of the articles and work of the old Bell System was for planning the optimum level of equipment--not so much to be wasteful, but not so little to give poor service. Further, the old stuff was high maintenance compared to today and that was an issue, too.

(How much did the PC you're using now cost vs. your very first one, and yet how much more powerful is the current model vs. your first one?)

Most decent sized colleges that had an engineering department had this stuff available. Most larger central public libraries did, too.

As an aside, on my last visit to look up microfilm at a college library, I had to dig through the "compact shelving" where shelves are compressed (no aisles) to save space. I had the whole microfilm room all to myself the whole time. In contrast, they had a separate large room of PCs and every unit was in use. My old college library had Bell stuff stored off site and one had to request the desired volumes in advance. All this suggests to me the demand is not that high.

(For what it's worth, reading old Datamation and its precedessor magazine from the 1950s is fascinating, as well as 1950s issues of things like Business Week).

My biggest concern is that these large libraries will notice the limited use and dump the historic materials to use the space for other more desired items. Their space is finite, and sadly, many of their budgets are decreasing. (Many libraries have a rack out front with their discarded periodicals and books).

No, that is the thing about basic research, and a LOT of what the Bell Labs people did was basic research.

The theory hasn't changed, and what is interesting is that in the audio world, people are constantly re-inventing the wheel. Very few people have actually see any of the original research.

This is true, and a lot of the applied stuff appears in the BSTJ.... some of it remarkably useful like studies on the decay rates of different kinds of wood used for telephone poles... some of it totally useless in today's world like paper impregnation methods.

But there is a whole lot of actual fundamental pure research in there.

--scott

The same thing is true about human factors and network efficiency. You look at what the Labs did on the most efficient keypad layout to minimize the amount of time a touch tone dial register was used and compare that to all the goofy key layouts on phones.

Or try to find a home cordless phone set that isn't designed for midgets or to mimic a cell phone form factor. There's a reason why cell phones are small - they're supposed to be portable. Home phones don't have to be that tiny.

My biggest pet peeve these days are voicemail systems that assume you have alpha characters on each key (press *D to delete) when you are calling from a non-US phone, or have a Blackberry or other device that only has numbers.

at

Let's not forget that the Western Union Technical Review is available on this very site's archives. While not at the level of the BSTJ, it has interesting reports in it as well.