Have you seen the T-Mobile commercial is which a young lady stops her car along a rural highway, pulls out a chain saw, and proceeds to cut down a telephone pole, bringing down the entire line?
Besides the fact that the poles appear to be carrying three-phase power lines, and I know its just a commercial, but still: I had to wonder if T-Mobile couldn't have made their point about "cutting the cord" by having the lady cut the cord of her home phone, rather than vandalizing the poles of a telco or utility company.
What's next? Blowing up a central office?
***** Moderator's Note *****
That commercial takes the classic approach to marketing: show the sheep something they're afraid of, and then sell them a product that lets them pretend they're not.
Men are afraid of beautiful, self-sufficient women who make their own decisions.
Women are afraid of power lines
Everyone is afraid of chain saws
So, by extrapolation, when you sign a T-Mobile contract, you become a beautiful, self-sufficient electrician and lumberjack with a buzzing, scary blade.
Bill Horne Temporary Moderator
Please put [Telecom] at the end of your subject line, or I may never see your post! Thanks!
We have a new address for email submissions: telecomdigestmoderator atsign telecom-digest.org. This is only for those who submit posts via email: if you use a newsreader or a web interface to contribute to the digest, you don't need to change anything.
If you have HDTV you can read the lawyer language they added in the fine print to say that they do not recommend or condone destruction of property blah blah blah....
Mark L. Smith
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________________________________ From: Fred Goodwin To: snipped-for-privacy@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Sent: Sunday, April 26, 2009 12:58:48 AM Subject: [telecom] T-Mobile glorifies vandalism? [Telecom]
Have you seen the T-Mobile commercial is which a young lady stops her car along a rural highway, pulls out a chain saw, and proceeds to cut down a telephone pole, bringing down the entire line?
Besides the fact that the poles appear to be carrying three-phase power lines, and I know its just a commercial, but still: I had to wonder if T-Mobile couldn't have made their point about "cutting the cord" by having the lady cut the cord of her home phone, rather than vandalizing the poles of a telco or utility company.
What's next? Blowing up a central office?
***** Moderator's Note *****
That commercial takes the classic approach to marketing: show the sheep something they're afraid of, and then sell them a product that lets them pretend they're not.
Men are afraid of beautiful, self-sufficient women who make their own decisions.
Women are afraid of power lines
Everyone is afraid of chain saws
So, by extrapolation, when you sign a T-Mobile contract, you become a beautiful, self-sufficient electrician and lumberjack with a buzzing, scary blade.
Bill Horne Temporary Moderator
Please put [Telecom] at the end of your subject line, or I may never see your post! Thanks!
We have a new address for email submissions: telecomdigestmoderator atsign telecom-digest.org. This is only for those who submit posts via email: if you use a newsreader or a web interface to contribute to the digest, you don't need to change anything.
The New York Times is available on-line via subscription. Some libraries may offer it.
Time Magazine
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archives are available on-line.
See:
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We learn that Popeye's creator, E.C. Segar, died at 43 in Oct 1938, and that Crystal City TX, a major spinach town, put up a monument in Popeye's honor.
I really wish the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature could be placed on-line, although obviously the sources it references are too voluminous.
But I sense from the library there isn't too much demand for archival stuff--if it's not on-line people aren't interested (perhaps because it's too old). At the library the public computers are in constant use, but the microfilm readers are freely available. Certain historical indexes have been put in compact storage meaning their harder to get to and there isn't much call for them.
(One frustrating part of microfilm lookups is that often you find a reference, pull out the correct reel, sequentially search through it, and then discover the reference is but a few sentences long. Some enormous technological innovations, such as the invention of the disk drive, warranted only a few lines.)
I wish I could visit the library of the town where the first real test of ESS took place (Morris, IL?) to see what was said back then. National newspapers gave it only a few lines.
The 'old news' I was referring to was things like the public-health data, dietary-deficiency studies, annual spinach consumption data, etc. You don't find much of this stuff in the NYT, and d*mn little in Time (even their archives).
One can find much more than =that= on-line at the Wikipedia., which the moderator was quoting from in the article to which I replied. e.g., that is only one of _three_ Popeye statues in the U.S.
But, even the Wikipedia articles make only minor, passing, mention of the stuff I was talking about.
Ayup. *Most* people are looking for current information, not doing 'historical research'.
"Local" news coverage didn't have a whole lot to say about it, either. Like most pre-divestiture changes to Bell system infrastructure, they put it in, and it "just worked". At least as far as the public was concerned. The 'big changes' were mostly 'behind the scenes' -- it was 'faster, cheaper, easier' for the telco to provide the same level of service. Yeah, some extra features were now available, but they cost money -- what were non-trivial amounts in that time.
All the significant coverage of 'what this all means' was in the house organs, and the trade press.
Yes, for that kind of stuff you'd need to visit a large library such as at a university. The good news is that most library catalogs are on-line so you can find out in advance who has what. The bad news is that some universities have closed their libraries to the general public.
I much prefer open stacks to request stacks because I often find stuff of interest on nearby shelves (which you can't do when you have to request things specifically.) Browsing is fun. (That's also a reason I like to read newspapers in hard copy rather than on-line since it's easier to scan a whole page and read articles of interest. While microfilm is a pain, it has that advantage as well.)
Unfortunately, although Wikipedia has a wealth of stuff in it, is it not authoritative. For something like entertainment news it's fine, but for more substantive research it's more of a only a starting point.
Which is unfortunate since there is so much we can learn from history. For instance, the NYT had very detailed articles on efforts to fight the 1918 influenza epidemic. While obviously science has changed drastically since then, crowded subways and business interests and needs haven't changed. Indeed, in some 100 year old articles one could merely substitute today's names for the past and the articles would read the same as today. (It's sad reading of all the intensive diplomatic efforts to prevent WW I long before it broke out--they knew it was coming well before it actually broke out.)
Collectors have posted some extensive local coverage of past telephone improvements, especially when they were a 'first'. Things such as the conversion of a town from manual to dial, the pioneer Englewood DDD service, and the first production ESS in NJ had good coverage. The introduction of dial service in NYC has massive coverage, including rather technical descriptions of the panel system.
The Morris, IL experiment represented a noticeable service change-- subscribers were given phones with tone ringers and 20 pps dials, for example. I don't know if they charged extra for advanced services for the experiment since they needed real people to try it out. I suspect it received widespread local publicity. Maybe if someone has access to a Chicago newspaper of that era they could look it up.
The 1950s were all about technological and commercial progress, especially when it was seen locally. Many areas were changing from manual to dial and back then it was a big deal in modest towns since it made them feel "modern". In the 1950s towns did NOT want to be like Mayberry*, that came later. In the 1950s people wanted businesses to prosper so they would prosper. Some places had a waiting list for a private line or for service altogether and the new exchange building with a new switch meant better service.
*In 1950s TV shows the families all had nice houses with lots of premium-model extension phones throughout the house, which cost money (even Andy Taylor's family had them in a manual exchange). Back then real people often had only one phone, and plenty still didn't have a phone line.
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