The Backbone – Now in Book Form!

Apr 26, 2026 By Lisa Davis

This took much longer than I had expected, but it’s finally here. My series “The Backbone” is now available as a book, in both Kindle and paperback formats. You can find it at Amazon.com here.

The book improves upon the original posts in many ways:

  • professionally edited text revised to make it flow more smoothly as a book, and to improve correctness and clarity.
  • a new section about the role military fire control systems played in setting the stage for interactive computing culture.
  • an expanded introduction and conclusion, and (for the print edition) an extensive index.
  • improved visual design and layout

Highly Recommended

High Pressure, Part 2: The First Steam Railway

Railways long predate the steam locomotive. Trackways with grooves to keep a wheeled cart on a fixed path date back to antiquity (such as the Diolkos, which could carry a naval vessel across the Isthmus of Corinth on a wheeled truck). The earliest evidence for carts running atop wooden rails, though, comes from the mining districts of sixteenth century Europe. Agricola describes a kind of primitive railway used by German miners in his 1556 treatise De Re Metallica. Agricola reports that the miners ran trucks called Hunds (“dogs”) (supposedly because of the barking noise they made while in motion) over two parallel wooden planks. A metal pin protruding down from the truck into the gap between the planks kept it from rolling off the track.[1] This system allowed a laborer to carry far more material out of the mine in a single trip than they could by carrying it themselves. British Railways Wooden railways called “waggon ways” are first attested in the coal-mining areas of Britain around 1600. These differed in two important ways from earlier mining carts: first, they ran outside the mine, carrying coal a short distance (perhaps a mile or two) to the nearest high-quality road or navigable waterway from which it could be brough to market. Second, they were drawn by horses, at least on the uphill courses—on some eighteenth-century wagon ways, the horse actually caught a ride downhill, standing on a flat carriage behind the cart. Flanged wheels to keep the wagon on the track were also probably introduced around this time. Both wheels and rails were still constructed of wood, however, which limited the load the wagons could carry.[2] By the middle of the eighteenth century, waggon ways crisscrossed the mining districts of northern England, especially around the coalfields, creating a substantial trade in birch wheels and rails of beech or ash from the South. They were called by many different names, such as “gangways,” “plateways,” “tramways,” or “tramroads.” Colliers invested sophisticated engineering into their design, using bridges, causeways, and tunnels to create a smooth grade from the pithead to the point of embarkation (such as the Tyne or the Severn rivers).[3] Most were no more than a mile or two long, but some ran as far as ten miles. They were smooth enough that a single horse could haul several times on rails what it could on an ordinary eighteenth-century road: the figures given by various sources for the load of a horse-drawn rail carriage range from two to ten tons, likely depending on the grade of the railway and the material composition of the rails and wheels.[4] The Little Eaton Gangway, a railway built in the 1790s, that, incredibly, continued to operate until 1908, when this photo was taken. It carried coal five miles down to the Derby Canal. This close-up of the Little Eaton Gangway shows clearly the design of the railbed, with L-shaped rails to hold the wagon on the track, and stone blocks underneath to which they were nailed. The Penydarren railway, discussed below, had the same design. This may seem prologue enough, but two further milestones in the development of railways still intervened before the steam locomotive came into the picture. Around the late 1760s, the Darbys of Coalbrookdale step into our history once more. They are reputed to have been the first to introduce durable cast iron plates to strengthen the rails that they used to carry materials among their various Shropshire properties.[5] Later the Darbys and others introduced fully cast-iron rails, doing away with wood altogether. With this change in material the railways of England (already intimately linked with coal mining) now became fully enmeshed in the cycle of the triumvirate—coal, iron, and steam—well before they became steam-powered. Then, in 1799, came the first public horse-drawn railway. Up to this time, all railways  served the needs of a single owner (though some required an easement across neighboring properties), typically a mining concern. But the Surrey Iron Railway, which ran from Croydon (south of London) up to the Thames at Wandsworth, was open to any paying cargo, much like a turnpike road or a canal. Among the backers of the Surrey Iron Railway was a Midlands colliery owner, William James, who will have an important part to play later in our story.[6] So, although we think of them now as two components of a single technological system, the locomotive and the railway did not start out that way. Instead, the locomotive appeared on the scene as an alternative way of hauling freight over an already familiar and well-established transportation medium. Trevithick Richard Trevithick was the first Englishman to attempt this substitution. He was born in 1771, in the heart of the copper-mining region of Cornwall. His birthplace, the village of Illogan, sat beneath the weathered hill of Carn Brea, said to be the ancient dwelling place of a giant.[7] But the only giants still found upon the landscape of eighteenth-century Cornwall breathed steam. They sheltered in the stone engine houses that still dot the countryside today, and raised water from the bottom of the mine, allowing the proprietors to delve ever deeper into the earth. Trevithick’s father was a mine “captain,” a high-status position with the responsibilities of a general manager and some of the same cachet among the mining community as a sea captain would have in a nautical community. This included the privilege of an honorific title: he was “Captain Trevithick” to his neighbors. The elder Trevithick’s work included serving as mine engineer and assayer, and he would have been familiar with all the technical workings of the mine, from the digging equipment to the pumping engine. The younger Trevithick must have learned well from his father. At fifteen, he was employed by his father at Dolcoath, the most lucrative copper mine of the region. By age 21, having grown into something of a giant himself—standing a burly six feet two, his pastimes were said to include hurling sledgehammers over buildings—the miners of Cornwall already consulted him for his expertise on steam engines.[8] Linnell, John; Richard Trevithick (1771-1833); Science Museum, London ; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/richard-trevithick-17711833-179865 " data-medium-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fvh4aGvmBxWfkJ8nuFse_zi81ic9" data-large-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fup2esWZsI8X2tlxXLO8fiQzWI8j?w=739" loading="lazy" src="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fup2esWZsI8X2tlxXLO8fiQzWI8j?w=831" alt="" class="wp-image-14451" width="566" height="696" srcset="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FnhVecf3Lm75yyCxkoj00B9ZFNOG 566w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FikdTskwdmnAoksYCE_1j4a5Fl2B 122w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fvh4aGvmBxWfkJ8nuFse_zi81ic9 244w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FgMy22xNugUYyjZ88KOSKWMwaLrv 768w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fup2esWZsI8X2tlxXLO8fiQzWI8j 974w" sizes="(max-width: 566px) 100vw, 566px">A portrait of Trevithick painted in 1816, when he was 45. He gestures to the Andes of Peru in the background, where Trevithick intended, at the time, to make his fortune in silver mining. By the 1790s, Boulton and Watt were about as popular in Cornwall as Fulton and Livingston were in the American West, and for the same reason: they were seen as grasping monopolists who kept the miners of Cornwall, who depended on effective pumps for their livelihood, in thrall to the Watt patent. Fifteen years earlier, Watt’s efficient engines had appeared as a lifeline to copper mines suffering under competition from the prodigious Parys Mountain in Anglesey, whose ample ores could be cheaply mined directly from the surface.[9] But as the mines continued to struggle, Boulton and Watt began to take shares in mines in lieu of payment, and set up a headquarters at Cusgarne, right in the copper district, to oversee their investments. One of their most skilled mechanics, William Murdoch, moved to Cornwall and acted as their local agent. To the copper miners, Boulton and Watt began to look like meddlers as well as leeches. By the 1790s, Anglesey ran out of easy-to-reach ore, and the fortunes of the Cornwall copper mines began to look up. With their mutual enemy gone, the grudging partnership between the Cornish miners and Boulton and Watt soured rapidly. The Dolcoath Copper Mine, Camborne, Cornwall, circa 1831. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) " data-medium-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FqNKGmmJrqZRNRB6bm49nha_7A96?w=300" data-large-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FqNKGmmJrqZRNRB6bm49nha_7A96?w=739" loading="lazy" width="902" height="637" src="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FqNKGmmJrqZRNRB6bm49nha_7A96?w=902" alt="" class="wp-image-14453" srcset="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FqNKGmmJrqZRNRB6bm49nha_7A96 902w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FqNKGmmJrqZRNRB6bm49nha_7A96?w=150 150w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FqNKGmmJrqZRNRB6bm49nha_7A96?w=300 300w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FqNKGmmJrqZRNRB6bm49nha_7A96?w=768 768w" sizes="(max-width: 902px) 100vw, 902px">An 1831 engraving of Dolcoath copper mine, in Cornwall. Trevithick, a hot-headed young man, took up the banner of revolution against the Boulton and Watt regime in 1792, fighting a series of legal battles on behalf of the competing engine design of Edward Bull. By 1796 every battle had been lost—Bull and Trevithick’s attempt to defy the Watt patent had failed, and there seemed to be nothing for the Cornwall interests to do but wait for the expiration of its term, in 1800.[10] But Trevithick found another way forward: strong steam. More than any other element, the separate condenser distinguished Watt’s patent engine from its predecessors. By shedding the condenser and operating well above atmospheric pressure instead, Trevithick could avoid claims of infringement. Concerned that releasing uncondensed steam would waste all the power of the engine, he consulted Cornwall’s resident mathematician, Davies Giddy. Giddy reassured him that he would waste a fixed amount of power equal to the weight of the atmosphere, and would gain some compensation in return by saving the power required to work an air pump and lift water into the condenser.[11] As in the U.S., then, the socioeconomic environment pushed steam engine users on the periphery toward high-pressure, though in this case it was the presence of a rival patent rather than an absence of capital resources. Trevithick saw an immediate application for high-pressure steam as a replacement for the horse whim, an animal-powered lift which worked alongside the pumping engine in many Cornish mines, usually in the same vertical shaft, to raise ore and dross from below. A few whims had been installed with Watt engines, but Trevithick’s “puffers” (so called for the visible puff of exhaust steam they released) cost less to build and transport. The compact high-pressure engine also fit much more comfortably in the engine house alongside the pumping engine than a second Watt behemoth would.  An 1806 Trevithick stationary steam engine, minus the flywheel it would have had at the time to maintain a steady motion. Note how the exhaust flue comes out of the middle of the cylindrical boiler, the same return-flue design used by Evans to extract additional heat from the hot gases of the furnace. Trevithick’s engines thus began replacing horse whims in engine houses across Cornwall in the early 1800s.[12] The Watt interests were not happy: much later in life Trevithick claimed that Watt (probably referring in this case to the belligerent James Watt, Jr., the inventor’s son), “said to an eminent scientific character still living that I deserved hanging for bringing into use the high pressure,” presumably because of the danger of explosion.[13] One of Trevithick’s boilers, installed to drain the foundation for a corn mill in Greenwich, did in fact explode in 1803 when left unattended, and the Watts did not miss the opportunity to get in their “I told you sos” in the press.[14] In future engines Trevithick would include two safety valves, plus a plug soldered with lead as a final safety measure: if the water level fell too low, the heat would melt the solder and blow out the plug, relieving excess pressure. But Trevithick’s interest had by this time already wandered from staid industrial applications to the more romantic dream of a steam carriage. Steam Carriage As we have seen already several times in this story, many inventors and philosophers had dreamed the same dream, dating back well over a century. To realize how readily available the idea of a steam carriage was, we must remember that steam power’s job, in a sense, had always been to replace either horse- or water-power, and that carriages were the most ubiquitous piece of horse-powered machinery around in early modern Europe. The first person we know of to successfully build a steam carriage (if we construe success loosely), was a French army officer named Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot. More specifically, he built a steam fardier, a cart for pulling cannon. It was a curious looking tricycle with the boiler hanging off the front like an elephantine proboscis. Cugnot carried out some trial runs of his vehicle in 1769, but with no way to refill the boiler while in use, it had to stop every fifteen minutes to let the boiler cool, refill it, and work up steam once more. This was a curiosity without real practical value.[15] Cugnot’s Fardier à Vapeur, preserved at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. Trevithick probably never heard of Cugnot, but he certainly knew William Murdoch, Watt’s representative in Cornwall. Murdoch began experimenting with high-pressure steam carriages in the 1780s, and built a three-wheeled carriage that (like Cugnot’s cart) survives today in a museum. Unlike Cugnot’s, vehicle however, Murdoch’s surviving machine is a model, no more than a foot tall. Lacking the backing of his employers, who disliked strong steam and found the carriage concept unpromising if not ridiculous, Murdoch’s tinkerings did not even get as far as Cugnot’s. There is no evidence that he ever built a full-sized carriage. [16] Editing Undertaken: Levels, Unsharp Mask " data-medium-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FhB8HkLDtOTEC4mIMPtlRbD1ZWQw" data-large-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FhK0Cs7bJUzfypvzPNEZgik6nL4T?w=739" loading="lazy" src="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FhK0Cs7bJUzfypvzPNEZgik6nL4T?w=1024" alt="" class="wp-image-14457" width="561" height="421" srcset="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FpqH97sUpkaqcDXUxuJIXFhnlUoO 561w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FjVNxoFYXseTtLwNZJAeiqhVHwOf 150w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FhB8HkLDtOTEC4mIMPtlRbD1ZWQw 300w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FtfsjNccReQS7wrfGvu9EyUGjYcr 768w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FhK0Cs7bJUzfypvzPNEZgik6nL4T 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 561px) 100vw, 561px">Murdoch’s model steam carriage. It’s unclear why Trevithick decided to build a steam-powered vehicle—he may have been trying to develop a portable engine that could be moved between work sites under its own power. It is possible that Trevithick got the idea for a steam carriage from Murdoch, but, as we have seen, the idea was commonplace. In the execution of that idea, Trevithick went far beyond his predecessor. He began work on his steam carriage in late 1800, with the help of his cousin Andrew Vivian and several other local craftsmen. He already had in hand his high-pressure engine design, with a very favorable power-to-weight ratio compared to a Watt engine. A small and light engine was advantageous in a steamboat, but it was crucial in a land vehicle that had to rest on wheels and fit on narrow roads. He used the same return-flue boiler design as Oliver Evans had; given the distance and timing, they almost certainly arrived at this idea independently. Many wise men of the time doubted that a self-driving wheel was even possible, arguing that it would simply spin in place without an animal with traction to pull it. Trevithick therefore felt it necessary to first disprove this theory (in an experiment probably devised by Giddy) by sitting in a chaise with his compatriots, and moving the vehicle by turning the wheels with their hands.[17] In December 1801 they went for their first steam-powered ride. What exactly the first carriage looked like is unknown, but it was likely a simple wheeled platform with engine and boiler mounted atop it and a crude lever for steering. Years later one “old Stephen Williams” (not so old at the time) would recall: I was a cooper by trade, and when Captain Dick [Trevithick] was making his first-steam carriage I used to go every day into John Tyack’s blacksmiths’ shop at the Weith, close by here, where they were putting it together. …In the year of 1801, upon Christmas-eve, coming on evening, Captain Dick got up steam, out in the high road… we jumped up as many as could; may be seven or eight of us. ‘Twas a stiffish hill going from the Weith up to Cambourne Beacon, but she went off like a little bird.[18] Within days, this first carriage quite literally crashed and burned (though the burning was apparently caused by leaving the carriage unattended with the firebox lit, not by the crash itself).[19] Nonetheless, Trevithick formed a partnership with his cousin Vivian to develop both the high-pressure engine and its use in carriages, and they went to London to seek a patent and additional backers and advisers, including such scientific luminaries as Humphrey Davy and Count Rumford. They had a second carriage built, this one designed as a true passenger vehicle with a compartment to accommodate eight. Giddy nicknamed it “Trevithick’s Dragon.” It worked better than the first attempt, running a good eight miles-per-hour on level ground, but the ride was rough. For some decades, steel spring suspensions had been standard on carriages, but the direct geared linkage between the drive wheels and the engine on Trevithick’s carriage did not allow for them to move independently.[20] The steering mechanism also worked poorly. In one early trial Trevithick tore the rail from a garden wall, and Vivian’s relative Captain Joseph Vivian (actually a sea captain) reported after a drive that he “thought he was more likely to suffer shipwreck on the steam-carriage than on board his vessel…”[21] It offered no obvious advantages over a horse carriage to offset the loss of comfort and control, not to mention the risk of fire and explosion. The Dragon attracted some curious onlookers, but no investors. Steam Railway If steam-powered vehicles on water found success first in the U.S. because alternative modes of inland transportation were lacking, steam-powered vehicles on land found success first in Britain because the transportation medium to support them already existed. The railways offered the perfect solution for the problems of Trevithick’s steam carriage: a road without cobbles or ruts to jounce on, a road that steered the carriage for you, and a road with no passengers to annoy or endanger. But Trevithick was not positioned to see it, because Cornwall did not have railways of any kind (its first, the Portreath Tramroad was not constructed until 1812). It would take a new connection to link the engine born out of the struggle with Watt over the mines of Cornwall to the rails created to solve the problems of northern coalfields. On business in Bristol in 1803, Trevithick made that connection, when he met a Welsh ironmaster named Samuel Homfray, who provided him with fresh capital in exchange for a share in his patent, and solicited his aid in building steam engines for his ironworks, called Penydarren. It also happened that Homfray also had part ownership of a railway, and the opportunity thus arose to marry high-pressure steam to rails. For Homfray this was also an opportunity to show up a rival. He and several other ironmasters had invested in a canal to carry their wares down to the port at Cardiff, but the controlling partner, Richard Crawshay, demanded exclusive privileges over the waterway. Homfray and several of the other partners exploited a loophole to bypass Crawshay. At the time, any public thoroughfare (on land or water) required an act of Parliament to approve its construction. The act approving the Cardiff canal also allowed for the construction of railways within four miles of the canal. The intent of this was to allow for feeder lines. Rails, at the time, were a strictly secondary transportation system. They provided “last-mile” service from mining centers to a navigable waterway. A boom in canal building that began in the later eighteenth century extended and interconnect those waterways, which offered far lower transportation costs than any form of land transportation. If a horse could pull several times the weight on a railway that it could on an ordinary road, it could pull several times more again when hitched to a canal barge.[22] (The plummeting transportation costs brought about by the ability to float cargo to the coast from nearly any town in England by horse-drawn barge account for the lack of British interest in riverine steamboats.) So the goal was almost always to get goods to water as quickly as possible. The trick that Homfray and his allies pulled was to build a railway as a primarytransportation link in its own right, paralleling the canal for over nine miles, rather than connecting directly to it, and thereby neutering Crawshay’s privileges.[23] It was on this railway that Homfray (or perhaps Trevithick, which partner initiated the idea is unknown) proposed to replace horse power with steam power. Crawshay found the concept laughable. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that the smooth wheels would find no purchase on smooth rails, and would simply spin in place. The ironmasters placed a not-so-friendly wager of 500 guineas over whether Trevithick could build a locomotive to haul ten tons of iron the length of the railway. On February 21st, 1804, Crawshay lost. As Trevithick reported to Giddy: Yesterday we proceeded on our journey with the engine; we carry’d ten tons of Iron, five waggons, and 70 Men riding on them the whole of the journey. Its above 9 miles which we perform’d in 4 hours & 5 Mints, but we had to cut down som trees and remove some Large rocks out of road. The engine, while working, went nearly 5 miles pr hour; …We shall continue to work on the road, and shall take forty tons the next journey. The publick untill now call’d mee a schemeing fellow but now their tone is much alter’d.[24] We should not picture the Penydarren engine in the mind’s eye as the iconic, fully-developed steam locomotive of the mid-19th century. The railbed itself looked very different than what we might imagine: the cast-iron rails were outward-facing Ls, whose vertical stroke kept the wheels from leaving the track. Nails driven into two parallel rows of stone blocks held the rails in place. This arrangement avoided having perpendicular rail ties (or sleepers, as the British call them) that could trip up the horses, who walked between the rails as they pulled their cargo. Trevithick’s locomotive resembled a stationary engine jury-rigged to a wheeled platform. A crosshead and large gears carried power from the cylinder down to the left-hand wheels (only, the right side received no power), and a flywheel kept the vehicle from lurching each time the piston reached the dead center position. Trevithick’s goal was to show off the versatility of high-pressure steam, not to launch a railroad revolution. A replica showing what the Penydarren locomotive may have looked like. Note the fixed gearing system for delivering power to the two wheels in the foreground, the flywheel in the background, and the L-shaped rails. Notice also how much it resembles Trevithick’s stationary steam engine, with additional mechanisms to transmit power to the wheels. The Penydarren locomotive performed several more trial runs; on at least one, the rails cracked under the engine’s weight: a portent of a major technical obstacle yet to be overcome before steam railways could find lasting success. Trevithick then seems to have removed the engine and put it to work running a hammer in the ironworks; what became of the rest of the vehicle is unknown.[25] Many other endeavors captured Trevithick’s attention in the following years; among them stationary engines at Penydarren and elsewhere, steam dredging experiments, and a scheme to use a steam tug to drag a fireship into the midst of Napoleon’s putative invasion fleet at Bolougne (as we have seen, Robert Fulton was at this time trying to sell the British government on his “torpedoes” to serve the same purpose). In 1808, he made once last stab at steam locomotion, a demonstration vehicle called the Catch-me-who-can that ran over a temporary circular track in London. Again, rail breakage proved a problem. Trevithick hoped to earn some money from paying riders and to attract the interest of investors, but he failed on both accounts.[26] The reasons for the lack of interest are clear. Trevithick’s locomotives were neither much faster nor obviously cheaper than a team of horses, and they came with a host of new, unsolved technical problems. Twenty more years would elapse before rails would begin to seriously challenge canals as major transport arteries for Britain, not mere peripheral capillaries. To make that happen would require improvements in locomotives, better rails, and a new way of thinking about the comparative economics of transportation. Trevithick himself had twenty-five more years of restless, peripatetic life ahead of him, much of it spent on fruitless mining ventures in South and Central America. In an irresistible historical coincidence, in 1827, at the end of a financially ruinous trip to Costa Rica, he crossed paths with another English engineer named Robert Stephenson. Stephenson gave the downtrodden older man fifty pounds to help him get home. After a spate of mostly failed or abortive projects, Trevithick died in 1833. The one item of real wealth remaining to him, a gold watch brought back from South America, went to defray his funeral expenses.[27] Young Stephenson, however, returned to much brighter prospects in England. He and his father would soon redeem the promise hinted at by the trials at Penydarren.

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From ACS to Altair: The Rise of the Hobby Computer

[This post is part of “A Bicycle for the Mind.” The complete series can be found here.] The Early Electronics Hobby A certain pattern of technological development recurred many times in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century: a scattered hobby community, tinkering with a new idea, develops it to the point where those hobbyists can sell it as a product. This sets off a frenzy of small entrepreneurial firms, competing to sell to other hobbyists and early adopters. Finally, a handful of firms grow to the point where they can drive down costs through economies of scale and put their smaller competitors out of business. Bicycles, automobiles, airplanes, and radio broadcasting all developed more or less in this way. The personal computer followed this same pattern; indeed, it marks the very last time that a “high-tech” piece of hardware emerged from this kind of hobby-led development. Since that time, new hardware technology has typically depended on new microchips. That is a capital barrier far too high for hobbyists to surmount; but as we have seen, the computer hobbyists lucked into ready-made microchips created for other reasons, but already suited to their purposes. The hobby culture that created the personal computer was historically continuous with the American radio hobby culture of the early twentieth-century, and, to a surprising degree, the foundations of that culture can be traced back to the efforts of one man: Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback (born Gernsbacher, to well-off German Jewish parents) came to the United States from Luxembourg in 1904 at the age of nineteen, shortly after his father’s death. Already fascinated by electrical equipment, American culture, and the fiction of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, he started a business, the Electro Importing Company, in Manhattan, that offered both retail and mail-order sales of radios and related equipment. His company catalog evolved into a magazine, Modern Electrics, and Gernsback evolved into a publisher and community builder (he founded the Wireless Association of America in 1909 and the Radio League of America in 1915), a role he relished for the rest of his working life.[1] Gernsback (foreground) giving an over-the-air lecture on the future of radio. From his 1922 book, Radio For All, p. 229. The culture that Gernsback nurtured valued hands-on tinkering and forward-looking futurism, and in fact viewed them as two sides of the same coin. Science fiction (“scientifiction,” as Gernsback called it) writing and practical invention went hand in hand, for both were processes for pulling the future into the present. In a May 1909 article in Modern Electrics, for example, Gernsback opined on the prospects for radio communication with Mars: “If we base transmission between the earth and Mars at the same figure as transmission over the earth, a simple calculation will reveal that we must have the enormous power of 70,000 K. W. to our disposition in order to reach Mars,” and went on to propose a plan for building such a transmitter within the next fifteen or twenty years. As science fiction emerged as its own genre with its own publications in the 1920s (many of them also edited by Gernsback), this kind of speculative article mostly disappeared from the pages of electronic hobby magazines. Gernsback himself occasionally dropped in with an editorial, such as a 1962 piece in Radio-Electronics on computer intelligence, but the median electronic magazine article had a much more practical focus. Readers were typically hobbyists looking for new projects to build or service technicians wanting to keep up with the latest hardware and industry trends.[2] Nonetheless, the electronic hobbyists were always on the lookout for the new, for the expanding edge of the possible: from vacuum tubes, to televisions, to transistors, and beyond. It’s no surprise that this same group would develop an early interest in building computers. Nearly everyone who we find building (or trying to build) a personal or home computer prior to 1977 had close ties to the electronic hobby community. The Gernsback story also highlights a common feature of hobby communities of all sorts. A subset of radio enthusiasts, seeing the possibility of making money by fulfilling the needs of their fellow hobbyists, started manufacturing businesses to make new equipment for hobby projects, retail businesses to sell that equipment, or publishing businesses to keep the community informed on new equipment and other hobby news. Many of these enterprises made little or no money (at least at first), and were fueled as much by personal passion as by the profit motive; they were the work of hobby-entrepreneurs. It was this kind of hobby-entrepreneur who would first make personal computers available to the public. The First Personal Computer Hobbyists The first electronic hobbyist to take an interest in building computers, whom we know of, was Stephen Gray. In 1966, he founded the Amateur Computer Society (ACS), an organization that existed mainly to produce a series of quarterly newsletters typed and mimeographed by Gray himself. Gray has little to say about his own biography in the newsletter or in later reflections on the ACS. He reveals that he worked as an editor of the trade magazine Electronics, that he lived in Manhattan and then Darien, Connecticut, that he had been trying to build a computer of his own for several years, and little else. But he clearly knew the radio hobby world. In the fourth, February 1967, number of his newsletter, he floated the idea of a “Standard Amateur Computer Kit” (SACK) that would provide an economical starting point for new hobbyists, writing that,[3] Amateur computer builders are now much like the early radio amateurs. There’s a lot of home-brew equipment, much patchwork, and most commercial stuff is just too expensive. The ACS can help advance the state of the amateur computer art by designing a standard amateur computer, or at least setting up the specs for one. Although the mere idea of a standard computer makes the true blue home-brew types shudder, the fact is that amateur radio would not be where it is today without the kits and the off-the-shelf equipment available.[4] By the Spring of 1967, Gray had found seventy like-minded members through advertisements in trade and hobby publications, most of them in the United States, but a handful in Canada, Europe, and Japan. We know little about the backgrounds or motivations of these men (and they were exclusively men), but when their employment is mentioned, they are found at major computer, electronics, or aerospace firms; at national labs; or at large universities. We can surmise that most worked with or on computers as part of their day job. A few letter writers disclose prior involvement in hobby electronics and radio, and from the many references to attempts to imitate the PDP-8 architecture, we can also guess that many members had some association with DEC minicomputer culture. It is speculative but plausible to guess that the 1965 release of the PDP-8 might have instigated Gray’s own home computer project and the later creation of the ACS. Its relatively low price, compact size, and simple design may have catalyzed the notion that home computers lay just out of reach, at least for Gray and his band of like-minded enthusiasts. Whatever their backgrounds and motivations, the efforts of these amateurs to actually builda computer proved mostly fruitless in these early years. The January 1968 newsletter reported a grand total of two survey respondents who possessed an actual working computer, though respondents as a whole had sunk an average of two years and $650 on their projects ($6,000 in 2024 dollars). The problem of assembling one’s own computer would daunt even the most skilled electronic hobbyist: no microprocessors existed, nor any integrated circuit memory chips, and indeed virtually no chips of any kind, at least at prices a “homebrewer” could afford. Both of the two complete computers reported in the survey were built from hand-wired transistor logic. One was constructed from the parts of an old nuclear power system control computer, PRODAC IV. Jim Sutherland took the PRODAC’s remains home from his work at Westinghouse after its retirement, and re-dubbed it the ECHO IV (for Electronic Computing Home Operator). Though technically a “home” computer, to borrow an existing computer from work was not a path that most would-be home-brewers could follow. This hardly had the makings of a technological revolution. The other complete “computer,” the EL-65 by Hans Ellenberger of Switzerland, on the other hand, was truly an electronic desktop calculator; it could perform arithmetic ably enough, but could not be programmed. [5] The Emergence of the Hobby-Entrepreneur As integrated circuit technology got better and cheaper, the situation for would-be computer builders gradually improved. By 1971, the first, very feeble, home computer kits appeared on the market, the first signs of Gray’s “SACK.” Though neither used a microprocessor, they took advantage of the falling prices of integrated circuits: the CPU of each consisted of dozens of small chips wired together. The first was the National Radio Institute (NRI) 832, the hardware accompaniment to a computer technician course disseminated by the NRI, and priced at about $500. Unsurprisingly, the designer, Lou Freznel, was a radio hobby enthusiast, and a subscriber to Stephen Gray’s ACS Newsletter. But the NRI 832 is barely recognizable as a functional computer: it had a measly sixteen 8-bit words of read-only memory, configured by mechanical switches (with an additional sixteen bytes of random-access memory available for purchase).[6] OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA " data-medium-file="https://technicshistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/nri-832_pic1.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://technicshistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/nri-832_pic1.jpg?w=739" loading="lazy" width="1024" height="684" src="https://technicshistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/nri-832_pic1.jpg?w=1024" alt="" class="wp-image-14940">The NRI 832. The switches on the left were used to set the values of the bits in the tiny memory. The banks of lights at the top left and right, showing the binary values of the program counter and accumulator, were the only form of output  [vintagecomputer.net]. The $750 Kenbak-1 that appeared the same year was nominally more capable, with 256 bytes of memory, though implemented with shift-register chips (accessible one bit at a time), not random-access memory. Indeed, the entire machine had a serial-processing architecture, processing only one bit at a time through the CPU, and ran at only about 1,000 instructions per second—very slow for an electronic computer. Like the NRI 832, it offered only switches as input and only a small panel of display lights for showing register contents as output. Its creator, John Blankenbaker, was a radio lover from boyhood before enrolling as an electronics technician in the Navy. He began working on computers in the 1950s, beginning with the Bureau of Standards SEAC. Intrigued by the possibility of bringing a computer home, he tinkered with spare parts for making his own computer for years, becoming his own private ACS. By 1971 he thought he had a saleable device that could be used for teaching programming, and he formed the eponymous “Kenbak” company to sell it.[7] Blankenbaker was the first of the amateur computerists to try to bring his passion to market; the first hobby-entrepreneur of the personal computer. He was not the most successful. I found no records of the sales of the NRI 832, but by Blankenbaker’s own testimony, only forty-four Kenbak-Is were sold. Here were home computer kits readily available at a reasonable price, four years before Altair. Why did they fall flat? As we have seen, most members of the Amateur Computer Society had aimed to make a PDP-8 or something like it; this was the most familiar computer of the 1960s and early 1970s, and provided the mental model for what a home computer could and should be. The NRI 832 and Kenbak-I came nowhere close to the capabilities of a PDP-8, nor were they designed to be extensible or expandable in any way that might allow them to transcend their basic beginnings. These were not machines to stir the imaginative loins of the would-be home computer owner. Hobby-Entrepreneurship in the Open These early, halting steps towards a home computer, from Stephen Gray to the Kenbak-I, took place in the shadows, unknown to all but a few, the hidden passion of a handful of enthusiasts exchanging hand-printed newsletters. But several years later, the dream of a home computer burst into the open in a series of stories and advertisements in major hobby magazines. Microprocessors had become widely available. For those hooked on the excitement of interacting one-on-one with a computer, the possibility of owning their own machine felt tantalizing close. A new group of hobby-entrepreneurs now tried to make their mark by providing computer kits to their fellow enthusiasts, with rather more success than NRI and Kenbak. The overture came in the fall of 1973, with Don Lancaster’s “TV Typewriter,” featured on the cover of the September issue of Radio-Electronics (a Gernsback publication, though Gernsback himself was, by then, several years dead). Lancaster, like most of the people we have met in this chapter, was an amateur “ham” radio operator and electronics tinkerer. Though he had a day job at Goodyear Aerospace in Phoenix, Arizona, he figured out how to make a few extra bucks from his hobby by publishing projects in magazines and selling pre-built circuit boards for those projects via a Texas hobby firm called Southwest Technical Products (SWTPC). The 1973 Radio-Electronics TV Typewriter cover. His TV Typewriter was, of course, not a computer at all, but the excitement it generated certainly derived from its association with computers. One of many obstacles to a useful home computer was the lack of a practical output device: something more useful than the handful of glowing lights that the Kenbak-I sported, but cheaper and more compact than the then-standard computer input/output device, a bulky teletype terminal. Lancaster’s electronic keyboard, which required about $120 in parts, could hook up to an ordinary television and turn it into a video text terminal, displaying up to sixteen lines of thirty-two characters each. Shift-registers continued to be the only cheap form of semiconductor memory, and so that was what Lancaster used for storing the characters to be displayed on screen. Lancaster gave the parts list and schematic to the TV Typewriter away for free, but made money by selling pre-built subassemblies via SWTPC that saved buyers time and effort, and by publishing guidebooks likethe TV Typewriter Cookbook.[8] The next major landmark appeared six months later in a ham radio magazine, QST, named after the three-letter ham code for “calling all stations.” A small ad touted the availability of “THE TOTALLY NEW AND THE VERY FIRST MINI-COMPUTER DESIGNED FOR THE ELECTRONIC/COMPUTER HOBBYIST” with kit prices as low as $440. This was the SCELBI 8-H, the first computer kit based around a microprocessor, in this case the Intel 8008. Its creator, Nat Wadsworth, lived in Connecticut, and became enthusiastic about the microprocessor after attending a seminar given by Intel in 1972, as part of his job as an electrical engineer at an electronics firm. Wadsworth was another ham radio enthusiast, and already enough of a personal computing obsessive to have purchased a surplus DEC PDP-8 at a discount for home use (he paid “only” $2,000, about $15,000 in 2024 dollars). Since his employer did not share his belief in the 8008, he looked for another outlet for his enthusiasm, and teamed up with two other engineers to develop what became the SCELBI-8H (for SCientific ELectronic BIological). Their ads drew thousands of responses and hundreds of orders over the following months, though they ended up losing money on every machine sold.[9] A similar machine appeared several months later, this time as a hobby magazine story, on the cover the July 1974 issue of Radio-Electronics: “Build the Mark-8 Minicomputer,” ran the headline (notice again the “minicomputer” terminology: a PDP-8 of one’s own remained the dream). The Mark-8 came from Jonathan Titus, a grad student from Virginia, who had built his own 8008-based computer and wanted to share the design with the rest of the hobby. Unlike SCELBI, he did not sell it as a complete machine or even a kit: he expected the Radio-Electronics reader to buy and assemble everything themselves. That is not to say that Titus made no money: he followed a hobby-entrepreneur business model similar to Don Lancaster’s, offering an instructional guidebook for $5, and making some pre-made boards available for sale through a retailer in New Jersey, Techniques, Inc. The 1974 Mark-8 Radio-Electronics cover. The SCELBI-8H and Mark-8 looked much more like a “real” minicomputer than the NRI 832 or Kenbak-I. A hobbyist hungry for a PDP-8-like machine of their own could recognize in this generation of machines something edible, at least. Both used an eight-bit parallel processor, not an antiquated bit-serial architecture, came with one kilobyte of random-access memory, and were designed to support textual input/output devices. Most importantly both could be extended with additional memory or I/O cards. These were computers you could tinker with, that could become an ongoing hobby project in and of themselves. A ham radio operator and engineering student in Austin, Texas named Terry Ritter spent over a year getting his Mark-8 fully operational with all of the accessories that he wanted, including an oscilloscope display and cassette tape storage.[10] In the second half of 1974, a community of hundreds of hobbyists like Ritter began to form around 8008-based computers, significantly larger than the tiny cadre of Amateur Computer Society members. In September 1974, Hal Singer began publishing the Mark-8 User Group Newsletter (later renamed the Micro-8 Newsletter) for 8008 enthusiastsout of his office at the Cabrillo High School Computer Center in Lompoc, California. He attracted readers from all across the country: California and New York, yes, but also Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana. Hal Chamberlain started the Computer Hobbyist newsletter two months later. Hobby entrepreneurship expanded around the new machines as well: Robert Suding formed a company in Denver called the Digital Group to sell a packet of upgrade plans for the Mark-8.[11] The first tender blossoms of a hobby computer community had begun to emerge. Then another computer arrived like a spring thunderstorm, drawing whole gardens of hobbyists up across the country and casting the efforts of the likes of Jonthan Titus and Hal Singer in the shade. It, too, came as a response to the arrival of the Mark-8, by a rival publication in search of a blockbuster cover story of their own. Altair Arrives Art Salsberg and Les Solomon, editors at Popular Electronics, were not oblivious to the trends in the hobby, and had been on the lookout for a home computer kit they could put on their cover since the appearance of the TV Typewriter in the fall of 1973. But the July 1974 Mark-8 cover story at rival Radio-Electronics threw a wrench in their plans: they had an 8008-based design of their own lined up, but couldn’t publish something that looked like a copy-cat machine. They needed something better, something to one-up the Mark-8. So, they turned to Ed Roberts. He had nothing concrete, but had pitched Solomon a promise that he could build a computer around the new, more powerful Intel 8080 processor. This pitch became Altair—named, according to legend, by Solomon’s daughter, after the destination of the Enterprise in the Star Trek episode “Amok Time”—and it set the hobby electronics world on fire when it appeared as the January 1975 Popular Electronics cover story. The famous Popular Electronics Altair cover story. Altair, it should be clear by now, was continuous with what came before: people had been dreaming of and hacking together home computers for years, and each year the process became easier and more accessible, until by 1974 any electronics hobbyist could order a kit or parts for a basic home computer for around $500. What set the Altair apart, what made it special, was the sheer amount of power it offered for the price, compared to the SCELBI-8H and Mark-8. The Altair’s value proposition poured gasoline onto smoldering embers, it was an accelerant that transformed a slowly expanding hobby community into a rapidly expanding industry. The Altair’s surprising power derived ultimately from the nerve of MITS founder Ed Roberts. Roberts, like so many of his fellow electronics hobbyists, had developed an early passion for radio technology that was honed into a professional skill by technical training in the U.S. armed forces—the Air Force, in Roberts’ case. He founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) in Albuquerque with fellow Air Force officer Forrest Mims to sell electronic telemetry modules for model rockets. A crossover hobby-entrepreneur business, this straddled two hobby interests of the founders, but did not prove very profitable. A pivot in 1971 to sell low-cost kits to satiate the booming demand for pocket calculators, on the other hand, proved very successful—until it wasn’t. By 1974 the big semiconductor firms had vertically integrated and driven most of the small calculator makers out of business. For Roberts, the growing hobby interest in home computers offered a chance to save a dying MITS, and he was willing to bet the company on that chance. Though already $300,000 in debt, he secured a loan of $65,000 from a trusting local banker in Albuquerque, in September 1974. With that money, he negotiated a steep volume discount from Intel by offering to buy a large quantity of “ding-and-dent” 8080 processors with cosmetic damage. Though the 8080 listed for $360, MITS got them for $75 each. So, while Wadsworth at SCELBI (and builders assembling their own Mark-8s) were paying $120 for 8008 processors, MITS was paying nearly half that for a far better processor.[12] It is hard to overstate what a substantial leap forward in capabilities the 8080 represented: it ran much faster than the 8008, integrated more capabilities into a single chip (for which the 8008 required several auxiliary chips), could support four times as much memory, and had a much more flexible 40-pin interface (versus the 18 pins on the 8008). The 8080 also referenced a program stack an external memory, while the 8008 had a strictly size-limited on-CPU stack, which limited the software that could be written for it. The 8080 represented such a large leap forward that, until 1981, essentially the entire personal and home computer industry ran on the 8080 and two similar designs: the Zilog Z80 (a processor that was software-compatible with the 8080 but ran at higher speeds), and the MOS Technology 6502 (a budget chip with roughly the same capabilities as the 8080).[13] The release of the Altair kit at a total price of $395 instantly made the 8008-based computers irrelevant. Nat Wadsworth of SCELBI reported that he was “devastated by appearance of Altair,” and “couldn’t understand how it could sell at that price.” Not only was the price right, the Altair also looked more like a minicomputer than anything before it. To be sure, it came standard with a measly 256 bytes of memory and the same “switches and lights” interface as the ancient kits from 1971. It would take quite a lot of additional money and effort to turn into a fully functional computer system. But it came full of promise, in a real case with an extensible card slot system for adding additional memory and input/output controllers. It was by far the closest thing to a PDP-8 that had ever existed at a hobbyist price point—just as the Popular Electronics cover claimed: “World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models.” It made the dream of the home computer, long cherished by thousands of computer lovers, seem not merely imminent, but immanent: the digital divine made manifest. And this is why the arrival of the MITS Altair, not of the Kenbak-I or the SCELBI-8H, is remembered as the founding event of the personal computer industry.[14] All that said, even a tricked-out Altair was hardly useful, in an economic sense. If pocket calculators began as a tool for business people, and then became so cheap that people bought them as a toy, the personal computer began as something so expensive and incapable that only people who enjoyed them as a toy would buy them. Next time, we will look at the first years of the personal computer industry: a time when the hobby computer producers briefly flourished and then wilted, mostly replaced and outcompeted by larger, more “serious” firms. But a time when the culture of the typical computer user remained very much a culture of play. Appendix: Micral N, The First Useful Microcomputer There is another machine sometimes cited as the first personal computer: the Micral N. Much like Nat Wadsworth, French engineer François Gernelle was smitten with the possibilities opened up by the Intel 8008 microprocessor, but could not convince his employer, Intertechnique, to use it in their products. So, he joined other Intertechnique defectors to form Réalisation d’Études Électroniques (R2E), and began pursuing some of their erstwhile company’s clients. In December 1972, R2E signed an agreement with one of those clients, the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA, a government agronomical research center), to deliver a process control computer for their labs at fraction of the price of a PDP-8. Gernelle and his coworkers toiled through the winter in a basement in the Paris suburb of Châtenay-Malabry to deliver a finished system in April 1973, based on the 8008 chip and offered at a base price of 8,500 francs, about $2,000 in 1973 dollars (one fifth the going rate for a PDP-8).[15] The Micral N was a useful computer, not a toy or a plaything. It was not marketed and sold to hobbyists, but to organizations in need of a real-time controller. That is to say, it served the same role in the lab or factory floor that minicomputers had served for the previous decade. It can certainly be called a microcomputer by dint of its hardware. But the Altair lineage stands out because it changed how computers were used and by whom; the microprocessor happened to make that economically possible, but it did not automatically make every machine into which it was placed a personal computer. The Micral N looks very much like the Altair on the outside, but was marketed entirely differently [Rama, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr]. Useful personal computers would come, in time. But the demand that existed for a computer in one’s own home or office in the mid-1970s came from enthusiasts with a desire to tinker and play on a computer, not to get serious business done on one. No one had yet written and published the productivity software that would even make a serious home or office computer conceivable. Moreover, it was still far too expensive and difficult to assemble a comprehensive office computer system (with a display, ample memory, and external mass storage for saving files) to attract people who didn’t already love working on computers for their own sake. Until these circumstances  changed, which would take several years, play reigned unchallenged among home computer users. The Micral N is an interesting piece of history, but it is an instructive contrast with the story of the personal computer, not a part of it.

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The Era of Fragmentation, Part 3: The Statists

In the spring of 1981, after several smaller trials, The French telecommunications administration (Direction générale des Télécommunications, or DGT), began a large-scale videotex experiment in a region of Brittany called Ille-et-Vilaine, named after its two main rivers. This was the prelude to the full launch of the system across l’Hexagone in the following year. The DGT called their new system Télétel, but before long everyone was calling it Minitel, a synecdoche that derived from the name of the lovable little terminals that were distributed free of charge, by the hundreds of thousands, to French telephone subscribers. Among all the consumer-facing information service systems in this “era of fragmentation” Minitel deserves our special attention, and thus its own chapter in this series, for three particular reasons. First, the motive for its creation. Other post, telephone, and telegraph authorities (PTTs) built videotex systems, but no other state invested as heavily in making it a success, nor gave so much strategic weight to that success. Entangled with hopes for a French economic and strategic renaissance, Minitel was meant not just to produce new telecom revenues or generate more network traffic, but to prime the pump for the entire French technology sector. Second, the extent of its reach. The DGT provided Minitel terminals to subscribers free of charge, and levied all charges at time of use rather than requiring an up-front subscription. This meant that, although many of them used the system infrequently,  more people had access to Minitel than to even the largest American on-line services of the 1980s, despite France’s much smaller population. The comparison to its nearest direct equivalent, Britain’s Prestel, which never broke 100,000 subscribers, is even more stark. Finally, there is the architecture of its backend systems. Every other commercial purveyor of digital services was a monolith, with all services hosted on their own machines. While they may have collectively formed a competitive market, each of their systems were structured internally as a command economy. Minitel, despite being the product of a state monopoly, was ironically the only system of the 1980s that created a free market for information services. The DGT, acting as an information broker rather than information supplier, provided one possible model for exiting the era of fragmentation. Playing Catch Up It was not by happenstance that the Minitel experiments began in Brittany. In the decades after World War II, the French government had deliberately seeded the region, whose economy still relied heavily upon agriculture and fishing, with an electronics and telecommunications industry. This included two major telecom research labs: the Centre Commun d’Études de Télévision et Télécommunications (CCETT) in Rennes, the region’s capital, and a branch of the Centre National d’Études des Télécommunications (CNET) in Lannion, on the northern coast. The CCETT lab in Rennes Themselves a product of an effort to bring a lagging region into the modern era, by the late 1960s and early 1970s these research departments found themselves playing catch up with their peers in other countries. The French phone network of the late 1960s was an embarrassment for a country that, under de Gaulle, wished to see itself as a resurgent world power. It still relied heavily on switching infrastructure built in the first decades of the century, and only 75% of the network was automated by 1967. The rest still depended on manual operators, which had been all but eliminated in the U.S. the rest of Western Europe. There were only thirteen phones for every 100 inhabitants of France, compared to twenty-one in neighboring Britain, and nearly fifty in the countries with the most advanced telecommunications systems, Sweden and the U.S. France therefore began a massive investment program of rattrapage, or “catch up,” in the 1970s. Rattrapage ramped up steeply after the 1974 election of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to the presidency of France, and his appointment of a new director for the DGT, Gérard Théry. Both were graduates of France’s top engineering school, l’École Polytechnique, and both believed in the power of technology to improve society. Théry set about making the DGT’s bureaucracy more flexible and responsive and Giscard secured 100 billion francs in funding from Parliament for modernizing the telephone network, money that paid for the installation of millions more phones and the replacement of old hardware with computerized digital switches. Thus France dispelled its reputation as a sad laggard in telephony. But in the meantime new technologies had appeared in other nations that took telecommunications in new directions – videophone, fax, and the fusion of computer services with communication networks. The DGT wanted to ride the crest of this new wave, rather than having to play catch up again. In the early 1970s, Britain announced two separate teletex systems, which would deliver rotating screens of data to television sets in the blanking intervals in television broadcasts. CCETT, DGT’s joint venture with France’s television broadcaster, the Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française (ORTF) launched two projects in response. DIDON1 was modeled closely on the the British television broadcasting model, but ANTIOPE2 took a more ambitious tack, to investigate the delivery of screens of text independently of the communications channel. Bernard Marti in 2007 Bernard Marti headed the ANTIOPE team in Rennes. He was yet another polytechnichien (class of 1963), and had joined CCETT from ORDF, where he specialized in computer animation and digital television. In 1977, Marti’s team merged the ANTIOPE display technology with ideas borrowed from CNET’s TIC-TAC3, a system for delivering interactive digital services over telephone. This fusion, dubbed TITAN4, was basically equivalent to the British Viewdata system that later evolved into Prestel. Like ANTIOPE it used a television to display screens of digital information, but it allowed users to interact with the computer rather than merely receiving data passively. Moreover, both the commands to the computer and the screen data it returned passed over a telephone line, not over the air. Unlike Viewdata, TITAN supported a full alphabetic keyboard, not just a telephone keypad. In order to demonstrate the system at a Berlin trade fair, the team used France’s Transpac packet-switching network to mediate between the terminals and the CCETT computer in Rennes. Théry’s lab had assembled an impressive tech demo, but as of yet none of it had left the lab, and it had no obvious path to public use. Télématique In the fall of 1977, DGT director Gerard Théry, satisfied with how the modernization of the phone network was progressing, turned his attention to the British challenge in videotex. To develop a strategic response, he first looked to CCETT and CNET, where he found TITAN and TIC-TAC prototypes ready to be put to use. He turned these experimental raw materials over to his development office (the DAII) to be molded into products with a clear path to market and business strategy. The DAIIn recommended pursuing two projects: first, a videotex experiment to test out a variety of services in a town near Versailles, and second, investment in an electronic phone directory, intended to replace the paper phone book. Both would use Transpac as the networking backbone, and TITAN technology for the frontend, with color imagery, character-based graphics, and a full keyboard for input. An early experimental Télétel setup, before the idea of using the TV as the display was abandoned. The strategy the DAII devised for videotex differed from Britain’s in three important ways. First, whereas Prestel hosted all of the videotex content themselves, the DGT planned to serve only as a switchboard from which users could reach any number of different privately-hosted service providers, running any type of computer that could connect to Transpac and serve valid ANTIOPE data. Second, they decided to abandon the television as the display unit and go with custom, all-in-one terminals. People bought TVs to watch TV, the DGT leadership reasoned, and would not want to tie up their screen with new services like the electronic phone book. Moreover, cutting the TV set out of the picture meant that the DGT would not have to negotiate over the launch with their counterparts at Télédiffusion de France (TDF), the successor to the ORDF5. Finally, and most audaciously, France cracked the chicken-and-egg problem (that a network without users was unattractive to service providers and vice versa) by planning to lease those all-in-one videotex terminals free of charge. Despite these bold plans, however, videotex remained a second-tier priority for Théry. When it came to ensuring DGT’s place at the forefront of communications technology, his focus was on developing the fax into a nationwide consumer service. He believed that fax messaging could take over a huge portion of the market for written communication from the post office, whose bureaucrats the DGT looked upon as hidebound fuddy-duddies.  Théry’s priorities changed within months, however, with the completion of a government report in early 1978 entitled The Computerization of Society. Released to bookstores in a paperback edition in May, it sold 13,500 copies in its first month, and a total of 125,000 copies over the following decade, quite a blockbuster for a government report6 How did such a seemingly recondite topic engender such excitement? The authors, Simon Nora and Alain Minc, officers in the General Inspectorate of Finance, had been asked to write the report by the Giscard government in order to consider the threat and the opportunity presented by the growing economic and cultural significance of the computer. By the mid-1970s, it was becoming clear to most technically-minded intellectuals that computing power could and likely would be democratized, brought to the masses in the form of new computer-mediated services. Yet for decades, the United States had led the way in all forms of digital technology, and American firms held a seemingly unassailable grip on the market for computer hardware. The leaders of France considered the democratization of computers a huge opportunity for French society, yet they did not want to see France become a dependent satellite of a dominating foreign power. Nora and Minc’s reported presented a synthesis that resolved this tension, proposing a project that would catapult France into the post-modern age of information. The nation would go directly from trailing the pack in computing to leading it, by building the first national infrastructure for digital services – computing centers, databases, standardized networks – all of which would serve as the substrate for an open, democratic marketplace in digital services. This would, in turn, stimulate native French expertise and industrial capacity in computer hardware, software, and networking. Nora and Minc called this confluence of computers and communications télématique, a fusion of telecommunications and informatique (the french word for computing or computer science). “Until recently,” they wrote, computing… remained the privilege of the large and the powerful. It is mass computing that will come to the fore from now on, irrigating society, as electricity did. La télématique, however, in contrast to electricity, will not transmit an inert current, but information, that is to say, power. The Nora-Minc report, and the resonance it had within the Giscard government, put the effort to commercialize TITAN in a whole new light. Before the report, the DGT’s videotex strategy had been a response to their British rivals, intended to avoid being caught unprepared and forced to operate under a British technical standard for videotex. Had it remained only that, France’s videotex efforts might well have languished, ending up much like Prestel, a niche service for a few curious early adopters and a handful of business sectors that it found it useful. After Nora-Minc, however, videotex could only be construed as a central component of télématique, the basis for building a new future for the whole French nation, and it would receive more attention and investment than it might otherwise ever have hoped for. The effort to launch Minitel on a grand scale gained backing from the French state that might otherwise have failed to materialize, as it did for Théry’s plans for a national fax service, which dwindled to a mere Minitel printer accessory. This support included the funding to provide millions of terminals to the populace, free of charge. The DGT argued that the cost of the terminals would be offset by the savings from no longer printing and distributing the phone book, and from new network traffic stimulated by the Minitel service. Whether they sincerely believed this or not, it provided at least a fig leaf of commercial rationale for a massive industrial stimulus program, starting with Alcatel (paid billions of francs to manufacture terminals) and running downstream to the Transpac network, Minitel service providers, the computers purchased by those providers, and the software services required to run an on-line business. Man in the Middle In purely commercial terms, Minitel did not in fact contribute much to the DGT’s bottom line. It first achieved profitability on an annual basis in 1989, and if it ever achieved overall net profitability, it was not until well into its slow but terminal decline in the later 1990s. Nor did it achieve Nora and Minc’s aspiration to create an information-driven renaissance of French industry and society. Alcatel and other makers of telecom equipment did benefit from the contracts to build terminals, and the French Transpac network benefited from a large increase in traffic – though, unfortunately, with the X.25 protocol they turned out to have bet on the wrong packet-switching technology in the long-term. The thousands of Minitel service providers, however, mostly got their hardware and systems software from American providers. The techies who set up their own online services eschewed both the French national champion, Bull, and the dreaded giant of enterprise sales, IBM, in favor scrappy Unix boxes from the likes of Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard. So much for Minitel as industrial policy, what about its role in enervating French society with new information services, which would reach democratically into both the most elite arrondissements of Paris and the plus petit village of Picardy? Here it achieved rather more, though still mixed, success. The Minitel system grew rapidly, from about 120,000 terminals at its initial large-scale deployment in 1983, to over 3 million in 1987 and 5.6 million in 1990.7 However, with the exception of the first few minutes of the electronic phonebook, actually using those terminals cost money on a minute-by-minute basis, and there’s no doubt that usage was distributed much more unequally than the equipment. The most heavily used services, the online chat rooms, could easily burn hours of call time in an evening, at a base rate of 60 francs per hour (equivalent to about $8, more than double the U.S. minimum wage at the time). Nonetheless, nearly 30 percent of French citizens had access to a Minitel terminal at home or work in 1990. France was undoubtedly the most online country (if I may use that awkward adjective) in the world at that time. In that same year, the largest two online services in the United States, that colossus of computer technology, totaled just over a million subscribers, in a population of 250 million8. And the catalog of services that one could dial into grew as rapidly as the number of terminals – from 142 in 1983 to 7,000 in 1987 and nearly 15,000 in 1990. Ironically, a paper directory was needed to index all of the services available on this terminal that was intended to supplant the phone book. By the late 1980s that directory, Listel, ran to 650 pages.9 A man using a Minitel terminal Beyond the DGT-provided phone directory, services ran the gamut from commercial to social, and covered many of the major categories we still associate today with being online – shopping and banking, travel booking, chat rooms, message boards, games. To connect to a service, a Minitel user would dial an access number, most often 3615, which connected his phone line to a special computer in his local telephone switching office called a point d’accès vidéotexte, or PAVI. Once connected to the PAVI, the user could then enter a further code to indicate which Minitel service they wished to connect to. Companies plastered their access code in a mnemonic alphabetic form onto posters and billboards, much as they would do with website URLs in later decades: 3615 TMK, 3615 SM, 3615 ULLA. The 3615 code connected users into the PAVI’s “kiosk” billing system, introduced in 1984, which allowed Minitel to operate much like a news kiosk, offering a variety of wares for sale from different vendors, all from a single convenient location. Of the sixty francs charged per hour for basic kiosk services, 40 went to the service itself, and twenty to the DGT to pay for the use of the PAVI and the Transpac network. All of this was entirely transparent to the user; the charges would appear automatically on their next telephone bill, and they never needed to provide payment information to establish a financial relationship with the service provider. As access to the open internet began to spread in the 1990s, it became popular for the cognoscenti to retrospectively deprecate the online services of the era of fragmentation – the CompuServes, the AOLs – as “walled gardens”10. The implied contrast in the metaphor is to the freedom of the open wilderness. If CompuServe is a carefully cultivated plot of land, the internet, from this point of view, is Nature itself. Of course the internet is no more natural than CompuServe, nor Minitel. There is more than one way to architect an online service, and all of them are based on human choices. But if we stick to this metaphor of the natural versus the cultivated, Minitel sits somewhere in between. We might compare it to a national park. Its boundaries are controlled, regulated, and tolled, but within them one can wander freely and visit whichever wonders might strike your interest. DGT’s position in the middle of the market between user and service, with a monopoly on the user’s entry point and the entire communications pathway between the two parties, offered advantages over both the monolithic, all-inclusive service providers like CompuServe and the more open architecture of the later Internet. Unlike the former, once past the initial choke point, the system opened out into a free market of services unlike anything else available at the time. Unlike the latter, there was no monetization problem. The user paid automatically for computer time used, avoiding the need for the bloated and intrusive edifice of ad-tech that supports the bulk of the modern Internet. Minitel also offered a secure end-to-end connection. Every bit traveled only over DGT hardware, so as long as you trusted both the DGT and the service to which you were connected, your communications were safe from attackers. This system also had some obvious disadvantages compared to the Internet that succeeded it, however. For all is relative openness, one could not just turn on a server, connect it to the net, and be open for business. It required government pre-approval to make your server accessible via a PAVI. More fatally, the Minitel’s technical structure was terribly rigid, tied to a videotex protocol that, while advanced for the mid-1980s, appeared dated and extremely restrictive within a decade.11 It supported pages of text, in twenty-four rows of forty characters each (with primitive character-based graphics) and nothing more. None of the characteristic features of the mid-1990s World wide Web – free-scrolling text, GIFs and JPEGs, streaming audio, etc. –  were possible on Minitel. Minitel offered a potential road out of the era of fragmentation, but, outside of France, it was a road not taken. The DGT, privatized as France Télécom in 1988, made a number of efforts to export the Minitel technology, to Belgium, Ireland, and even the U.S. (via a system in San Francisco called 101 Online). But without the state-funded stimulus of free terminals, none of them had anything like the success of the original. And, with France Télécom, and most other PTTs around the world, now expected to fend for themselves as lean businesses in a competitive international market, the era when such a stimulus was politically viable had passed. Though the Minitel system did not finally cease operation until 2012, usage went into decline from the mid-1990s onward. In its twilight years it still remained relatively popular for banking and financial services, due to the security of the network and the availability of terminals with an accessory that could securely read and transmit data from banking and credit cards. Otherwise, french online enthusiasts increasingly turned to the Internet. But before we return to that system’s story, we have one last stop to visit on our tour of the era of fragmentation. [Previous] [Next] Further Reading Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (2017) Marie Marchand, The Minitel Saga (1988)    

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The Pursuit of Efficiency and the Science of Steam

On April 19th, 1866, Alfred Holt, a Liverpudlian engineer who had apprenticed on the Liverpool & Manchester railroad before taking up steamship design in the 1850s, launched a singular ship that he dubbed the Agamemnon. As the third soon of a prosperous banker, cotton broker, and insurer, he had access to far more personal capital to launch this new enterprise than the typical engineer. This was a lucky thing for him, because the typical investor of the time considered his ambition—to enter the China tea trade on the basis of steam power—foolhardy. A typical oceangoing steamship used five pounds of coal per horsepower per hour and could not compete with sail over such long distances: they would either have to fill most of their potential cargo space with coal or make repeated, costly stops to refuel.[1] A contemporary photograph of Holt’s SS Agamemnon. Yet, in the end, Holt pulled off his gamble. He benefited from good timing (perhaps a mix of luck and foresight): the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 give steamships a tremendous leg up in trade between Europe to the Indian and Pacific Oceans. But in designing ships dainty enough in their coal consumption to pay their way to the Pacific, he also benefited from the late convergence of two complementary developments that had each begun in the early 1800s but did not intersect until the 1850s. First was a series of incremental, empirical improvements to steam engine design: After the massive leap forward from Newcomen to Watt, further increases in steam engine efficiency would be less dramatic. Simultaneously, a theory of heat gradually developed that could explain what made engines more or less efficient, and thus point engineers in the most fruitful direction. Double-Cylinder Engines Boulton & Watt erected most of its early pumping engines in Cornwall. Trevithick developed his high-pressure “puffer” there. So, it is only fitting that the last major architectural innovation in piston steam engine design—featuring an entirely new structural component—was Cornish, too. In that region, an ample supply of British engineering talent met an always-eager demand for efficient engines. The ever-deeper mines for extracting metal ore needed ever more pumping power, despite significantly higher coal prices than the coal-rich North. Joseph Hornblower, born in the 1690s, was one of the first engineers to build Newcomen engines for the mines of Cornwall in the 1720s. Sixty years later, his grandson Jonathan built the first known double-cylinder engine (later called a compound engine). Cornwall’s homegrown natural philosopher, Davies Giddy (later Gilbert), served in the same office he later served for Richard Trevithick, as Hornblower’s scientific advisor. In principle, the idea was quite simple: instead of immediately condensing the remaining steam after the expansion cycle of the piston, the still-warm steam was fed into another cylinder to let it do still more work. However, this added friction, complexity, and cost to the machine. In practice, therefore, Hornblower’s attempted improvement provide no more efficient than a traditional Watt engine.[2] Hornblower double-cylinder engine from Robert Thurston, A History of the Growth of the Steam-Engine, p. 136. A generation later, however, another Cornishman took up the idea and carried it further. Arthur Woolf, like many eighteenth-century engineers, got his start as a millwright, but by 1797 was working for the firm of Jabez Carter Hornblower (brother to Jonathan), at a brewery in London, erecting a steam engine. He continued to serve as engineer for the brewery for a decade afterward, and witnessed the operation of Trevithick’s steam carriage in the city in 1803. Woolf realized that he could combine the double-cylinder engine of his former employer’s brother with Trevithick’s truly high-pressure engines (operating at forty pounds per-square-inch or more). The higher-pressure steam, still quite hot after expanding in the first cylinder, would be able to do more work in the second cylinder rather than simply “puffing” out into the atmosphere. Both Watt and Trevithick had (from opposite points-of-view) seen low- and high-pressure steam as rivals, but in Woolf’s machine they complemented one another.[3] But, as Hornblower had already learned, the path did not always run straight and easy from idea to execution. Woolf led himself astray with an entirely unsound theoretical model for the inner workings of his engine: he believed that steam at twenty pounds per square inch (psi) would expand to twenty times its volume before equaling the pressure of the atmosphere, steam at thirty psi would expand thirty times, and so on ad infinitum. This turned out to be a substantially exaggerated expectation, and led him to begin with a drastically undersized high-pressure cylinder, which let off far too little steam to effectively work its low-pressure mate. Rather than leading him to doubt his theory, the failure of this engine led him into a wild goose chase for a non-existent leak in his pistons.[4] Woolf’s double-cylinder engine, unlike Hornblower’s, did at last succeed, after years of trial and error, in achieving better efficiency than a Watt engine. But because it was more expensive to build (and thus buy), and more complex to operate, it found favor only in markets without easy access to other, cheaper options. One such example was France, to which Woolf’s erstwhile partner Humphrey Edwards, decamped in 1815: there he sold at least fifteen engines and licensed twenty-five more to a French mining company.  Woolf meanwhile returned to Cornwall in 1811, where he found the advantages of his double-cylinder engine soon surpassed by the incremental improvements made by other local engineers to the Boulton and Watt design. He abandoned it after 1824 and built single-cylinder engines until 1833, when he retired to the island of Guernsey.[5] Meanwhile, steam engine builders carried on with tweaks to get yet one more increment of efficiency out of their engines. They extracted advantages from adjustments to the regulatory machinery of the engine: elements like “release mechanisms,” “dashpots,” and “wrist plates.” The Corliss engine, designed by George Corliss in 1849, became an icon of American industrial design after his company produced a gargantuan specimen to power the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Mighty as it was, however, it did not represent a great leap forward in steam engine architecture. Corliss’ design drew its relative advantages over prior engines from a clever combination of previous innovations in the valves that allowed steam to enter and leave the cylinder, and especially in the valve gear that controlled them.[6] Corliss engine valve gear from H.W. Dickinson, A Short History of the Steam Engine, p. 140. In the meantime, the double-cylinder engine, having failed to prove itself in the 1810s and 1820s, lay dormant. It would be restored to life decades later, by the engineers most desperate to eke as much power as possible out of every ounce of coal: the designers of ocean steamships. But to facilitate the consummation of that match, a solid theory of the steam engine was wanted, one that would dispel, once and for all, the confusions like Woolf’s that continued to trip up engineers’ efforts at improvement. Measuring Power The lack of a sound theoretical basis for steam power is evident in the fitful history of cylinder “lagging,” or insulation. Steam engineers borrowed the term lag (a barrel stave) from coopers, because they often insulated early steam boilers with such timbers, held in place with metal straps (this is evident in images of early locomotives like Rocket, with their distinctive wooden cladding). A contemporary lithograph of Robert Stephenson’s engine Northumbrian. Note the wooden lagging on the boiler. As early as 1769, Watt had recognized the value of insulating not just the boiler, but also the working cylinder of the engine (emphasis mine): My method of lessening the consumption of steam, and consequently fuel, in fire-engines, consists of the following principles:—First, That vessel in which the powers of steam are to be employed to work the engine, which is called the cylinder in common fire-engines, and which I call the steam-vessel, must, during the whole time the engine is at work, be kept as hot as the steam that enters it; first by enclosing it in a case of wood, or any other materials that transmit heat slowly; secondly, by surrounding it with steam or other heated bodies; and, thirdly, by suffering neither water nor any other substance colder than the steam to enter or touch it during that time.[7] Yet, despite Watt’s imprimatur, steam engine builders lagged their cylinders sporadically throughout the first half of the nineteenth century; it was a matter of whim, not principle.[8] In this era, engineers tended to think of the steam engine as analogous to its predecessor, the water wheel. Steam replaced liquid water as the mechanical working fluid, but just as water drove the wheel by pushing on its vanes, in their minds steam performed work by expanding and pushing on the piston. A typical description of the time stated that “[t]he force of the steam-engine is derived from the property of water to expand itself, in an amazing degree, when heated above the temperature at which it becomes steam.”[9] Engineers knew that the cylinder ought to be kept hot to prevent condensation of the steam inside, but within this framework it was not obvious that it ought to be kept as hot as possible. Watt, emphasizing the contrast between the hot cylinder and the cool condenser, had drawn attention to the role of heat in the engine, but the introduction and success of high-pressure engines with no condenser, where the primary factor seemed to be the expansive force of steam, muddled matters once again. The gradual development of a new, more robust theory began with a practical problem: how to measure the amount of power an engine generates. This became a particularly pressing problem for Boulton & Watt in the late eighteenth century, as they expanded from the traditional business of pumping engines into the new market of driving cotton mills. The traditional way of measuring the output of a steam engine, in terms of “duty” (the pounds of water lifted by one foot per bushel of coal burned) had gradually been supplemented with the concept of “power,” typically expressed in horsepower: pounds lifted over a given distance, but over a given period of time rather than with a given amount of fuel. Thomas Savery had begun to grope towards the concept in his 1702 book on the virtues of his steam pump, The Miner’s Friend: I have only this to urge, that water, in its fall from any determinate height, has simply a force answerable and equal to the force that raises it. So that an engine which will raise as much water as two horses working together at one time in such a work can do, and for which there must be constantly kept ten or twelve horses for doing the same, then, I say, such an engine will do the work or labour of ten or twelve horses…[10] Note here that Savery proposes to measure the muscular equivalent of the engine not in terms of the output of just the pair of horses running the machinery, but in terms of the total stock of horses that a mine owner would require to maintain the same power over a long period of time. This model of horsepower in terms of economic equivalency did not stick, however, and by the late eighteenth century horsepower became fixed to Watt’s figure of 33,000 foot-pounds per minute. Yet this remained a measure of power best suited to pumping work: if a mine needed to raise 20,000 pounds of water per hour from a 200-foot-deep shaft, one could readily calculate the engine horsepower required. Cotton spinning machinery—which varied in size, function, and design—did not lend itself to such simple arithmetic. In order to properly size engines to mills, Boulton & Watt needed some way measure the horsepower produced by an engine while driving various combinations of machinery. From the beginning, Watt had attached gauges to his engines to measure the pressure inside the engine, by connecting a small indicator cylinder to the main engine cylinder so that steam could flow between them. The level of pressure in the indicator could serve as a proxy for power output. But to actually capture the data was a maddening exercise, because the pressure varied constantly as the piston worked up and down. A means of capturing this continuous data came from a long-time Watt employee, John Southern. He had joined the company as a draftsman in 1782, and despite a predilection for music that the strait-laced Watt found suspicious, quickly became indispensable.[11] Southern’s indicator, as envisioned by Terrell Croft, Steam-Engine Principles and Practice, p. 40. In 1796, Southern devised a simple device to solve the power measurement problem. He attached a piece of paper above the indicator, rigged so that it would move back and forth as the main piston operated. Then he attached a pencil to the tip of the pressure gauge. As the pressure went up and down, so would the pencil, while the paper moved left and right beneath it with the cycle of the engine. The result, when running smoothly, would be a closed shape, which Southern called an indicator diagram, and the averagepressure during the operation of the engine could be computed from the average distance between the top and bottom lines of that shape, which would in turn be proportional to the power. By calibrating the diagramwhile an engine was pumping water, where the power output was well-defined, Boulton & Watt could then determine the power produced by the same engine while operating a given set of mill machinery.[12] An ideal indicator diagram from Terrell Croft, Steam-Engine Principles and Practice, p.60. Thermodynamics Engineers now had a tool at hand for diagnosing the internals of a running engine. That tool, in turn, provided the seed for the birth of the science of thermodynamics, which began as the science of the steam engine. The first great leap in that direction was made by Sadi Carnot. Carnot’s story carries more than a whiff of the tragic. Though later honored as a founding father of thermodynamics, he achieved no recognition in his lifetime, and died of cholera as a still-young man in 1832. His father Lazare was an accomplished engineer and a major political figure in revolutionary France, but what we know of the son comes almost entirely from a fifteen-page biography sketched decades after the fact by his younger brother Hippolyte, which begins, pathetically, with the statement that: “the life of Sadi Carnot was not marked by any notable event…”[13] Carnot as an École student in 1813. In fact, Carnot’s short life was remarkably eventful. He grew up in Napoleon’s court, attended the elite engineering school École polytechnique at age 16, and was at the Chateau Vincennes during the 1814 assault on Paris that ended Napoleon’s first reign. He returned to Paris as a staff lieutenant in 1819, filling his free time with his passions: music, art, and scientific studies. There, in 1824, he produced his seminal work, Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu (Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire). In it he endeavored to explain how heat produces motion. I will allow him to elaborate in his own words: Every one knows that heat can produce motion. That it possesses vast motive-power no one can doubt, in these days when the steam-engine is everywhere so well known. To heat also are due the vast movements which take place on the earth. It causes the agitations of the atmosphere, the ascension of clouds, the fall of rain and of meteors, the currents of water which channel the surface of the globe, and of which man has thus far employed but a small portion.[14] As we have seen, the tendency of engineers to conceive of steam hydraulically, as a fluid that generated work through pressure much like water in a water wheel, had engendered some confusion about how to build and operate an engine most efficiently. Ironically, Carnot moved the understanding of the steam engine forward by taking the analogy of a steam engine to a water wheel even more seriously than his contemporaries. However, for him the key power-generating agent was not the pressure of steam, but the fall of heat. Just as a waterwheel required a head from which water descended by gravity to turn the wheel, so the steam engine required a reservoir of high heat, which then flowed down to a cold body and thereby did work. For Carnot this fall of heat in a steam engine was quite literal: it consisted of an imponderable fluid called caloric, that drained out from the hot body to the cool one: The production of motion in steam-engines is always accompanied by a circumstance on which we should fix our attention. This circumstance is the re-establishing of equilibrium in the caloric; that is, its passage from a body in which the temperature is more or less elevated, to another in which it is lower. …The steam is here only a means of transporting the caloric.[15] This caloric theory of heat as a substance still predominated in Carnot’s day, despite subversives like Count Rumford who advocated for a mechanical theory of heat, which understood heat purely as a form of motion. If the flow of heat from the hot to the cold body produced all the work in the steam engine, then making an efficient engine meant minimizing any spillage of heat that did no useful work. It also implied that to maximize the work produced by the engine, one must maximize the difference between the source of high temperature and the sink of low temperature—the height through which the caloric fluid falls. Carnot’s book was largely ignored. But his insights had their first chance to be rescued from obscurity shortly after his death. Émile Clapeyron, just a few years younger than Carnot, was an accomplished engineer who specialized in locomotives, and a fellow-graduate of the École Polytechnique. In 1834, he published a paper in the school’s journal showing that Carnot’s heat engine theory could be expressed in the language of calculus and seen graphically in the indicator diagram: the area inside the diagram (which could be expressed as an integral) corresponded to the work performed by the heat transfer in the engine. Clapeyron’s work revived Carnot’s abstractions, put them on a firmer mathematical basis, and publicized them to the community of engine builders. Yet once again, they reached a dead end. Steeped in the traditions of their craft, neither Clapeyron nor his peers seem not to have understood the heat engine theory as having practical applications to real-life engineering.[16] Vindication for Carnot would have to wait another fifteen years, when a series of exchanges between William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), Rudolf Clausius, and James Joule shortly before and after 1850 resolved various problems with the Carnot-Clapeyron heat engine, including reconciling it with the mechanical theory of heat: what flowed from the hot to the cold body was not a literal fluid but an abstraction called energy, which could take on many forms, but could only perform useful work over a fall in temperature. Through the medium of energy, a certain quantity of heat was directly equivalent to a certain amount of power.[17] The scientist who best synthesized this new science of heat for a wider engineering audience was Thomson’s colleague at the University of Glasgow, Macquorn Rankine. Perfecting the Marine Engine Rankine’s position was something of a novelty: he was only the second person to hold a chair of Civil Engineering at Glasgow, a position established by Queen Victoria in 1840. From the days of Watt and beyond, the University of Glasgow had been more practical-minded than the great Oxbridge schools of the South. But the establishment of a faculty chair in engineering did not just indicate that the university supported more hardheaded tasks than absorbing classical learning, it also signaled a desire to elevate engineering into a more theoretical, scientific discipline.[18] PGP R 2115.24 " data-medium-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FnlrZNj8fQTsaPvT22_9gd-YHEEq" data-large-file="https://technicshistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/william_john_macquorn_rankine_by_thomas_annan.jpg?w=739" loading="lazy" width="778" height="1023" src="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FrEoBHbrvJHyzrEXe93NzuOg6OWg" alt="" class="wp-image-14597" style="width:408px;height:auto" srcset="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FrEoBHbrvJHyzrEXe93NzuOg6OWg 778w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FmzgsPbBW_cLTscowMscuC3n_cwa 1556w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fp_NjcBxPV0wCxM3zCCtq6WnAxpV 114w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FnlrZNj8fQTsaPvT22_9gd-YHEEq 228w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FqppXmUOcVWA7m11yEWUApiqe2FB 768w" sizes="(max-width: 778px) 100vw, 778px">A leonine Rankine. Rankine, embodying this new spirit, straddling the worlds of theory and practice, preached thermodynamics to the engineering world: his 1859 A Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers (1859), a 500-page, densely mathematical treatise, explicated the new theory and its applicability to practical matters in great detail and popularized the term “thermodynamics.” However he also knew how to reach a wider audience: in an 1854 address to the Liverpool meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) he concisely expressed the laws of thermodynamics in terms of ordinary English and simple arithmetic: “As the absolute temperature of receiving heat is to the absolute temperature of discharging heat, so is the whole heat received to the necessary loss of heat.” That is, the more precipitous the fall of temperature from the high (receiving) to the low (discharging) point of the engine cycle, the more efficient the engine could be.[19] Among those in Rankine’s circle of influence in the 1850s was an experienced builder of marine steam engines in Glasgow named John Elder, who became the first to incorporate a double-cylinder engine into a successful steamship. Elder had marine engines in his blood: his father David had joined Robert Napier’s engine building firm and began designing steamboat engines in 1821. In addition to family tradition and his natural talents, Elder had two other advantages in this undertaking. First, he had access to Glasgow’s “thermodynamic network” (as the historian Crosbie Smith put it); he had tutors in the new thermodynamic science and probably got specific advice from Rankine to introduce steam jacketing to prevent condensation in the cylinder. Second, he had an eager buyer.[20] An anonymous engraving of John Elder. The Pacific Steam Navigation Company (PSNC) of Liverpool had overextended itself in the South American Pacific-coast trade, where high-quality steam coal could arrive only by a 19,000-mile round-trip supplied by sail. Profit margins were slim to none, and venture stayed in the black only by virtue of a government mail contract. This made the company willing to wait out teething problems in order to get a more efficient engine. From the time Elder and his partner took out their engine patent in January 1853, it took four years before PSNC ratified the superiority of their ship Valparaiso, which consumed 25% less coal than an equivalent single-cylinder model.[21] Elder’s success set the stage for Holt’s further vault forward in the 1860s. Among the latter’s achievements was to convince the Board of Trade that marine engines could operate safely at higher pressures; allowing a greater fall of temperature and thus more efficient use of fuel. This, in turn, set the stage for triple-expansion engines later in the century, to extract still more work from the heat as it falls from boiler to condenser. This polyphonic fugue of machinery heralded the age of steam’s baroque period, which engendered the fantasias of steampunk a century later. By about 1890, a triple-expansion engine, running at 160 pounds-per-square-inch, could consume one-and-a-half pounds of coal per-horsepower per-hour, less than a third of the going rate a few decades before, and about five times less than Watt’s engine.[22] SONY DSC " data-medium-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FtSQ8BekQNbv8kPS9uifApbwjKgt" data-large-file="https://technicshistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/tmw_677_-_triple_expansion_compound_steam_engine.jpg?w=739" loading="lazy" width="1024" height="975" src="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FnvB-w_zECM1YvpFkdg-gYKhv1iR" alt="" class="wp-image-14600" srcset="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FnvB-w_zECM1YvpFkdg-gYKhv1iR 1024w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FuWr2VLuwR94tPMUvE7sdYLm4x64 2046w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FvPIsIFR9yKXU_LcLXTgOMpJG8pE 150w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FtSQ8BekQNbv8kPS9uifApbwjKgt 300w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FuYz2_GUHfI2LpjeXYePQ7ky7D4- 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px">Cutaway of an 1888 Austrian triple-expansion engine, in the Vienna Technical Museum [Sandstein / Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported]. Yet even as it thrust the age of steam up towards its apex, thermodynamics pointed out the weak spot that would lead to its downfall. In his 1854 speech to the BAAS, Rankine had touted the advantages of the air engine, a device devised by the Scotsman Robert Stirling that used hot air as its working fluid.  As Rankine pointed out, the laws of thermodynamics have nothing in particular to do with steam, but hold “true for all substances whatsoever in all conditions…” Air had a decided advantage over steam insofar as it could be driven to very high temperatures without creating very dangerous pressures: “For example, at the temperature of 650 ° Fahr. (measured from the ordinary zero,) a temperature up to which air engines have actually been worked with ease and safety, the pressure of steam is 2100 pounds upon the square inch; a pressure which plainly renders it impracticable to work steam engines with safety….”[23] The Stirling air engine did not, in the event, prove to be the slayer of steam. Its use never expanded beyond occasional low-power domestic applications. But it brought the first adumbration of the coming eclipse. Stirling air engine – harbinger of doom? [Paul U. Ehmer / CC-BY-SA-4.0]

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The Switch – Now in Book Form!

My series “The Switch” is now available as a book, in both Kindle and paperback formats. You can find it at Amazon.com here. The book improves upon the original posts in several ways: I have re-edited the entire text (with professional help) to make it flow more smoothly as a book, and to improve correctness and clarity.I have added several professionally-created diagrams to illustrate key points.I have added a longer prologue and conclusion, and (for the print edition) an extensive index.The visual design of the book interior is to a much higher standard than the original posts. Share this: Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Like Loading...

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Britain’s Steam Empire

The British empire of the nineteenth century dominated the world’s oceans and much of its landmass: Canada, southern and northeastern Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Australia. At its world-straddling Victorian peak, this political and economic machine ran on the power of coal and steam; the same can be said of all the other major powers of the time, from also-ran empires such as France and the Netherlands, to the rising states of Germany and the United States. Two technologies bound the far-flung British empire together, steamships and the telegraph; and the latter, which might seem to represent a new, independent technical paradigm based on electricity, depended on the former. Only steamships, who could adjust course and speed at will regardless of prevailing winds, could effectively lay underwater cable.[1] A 1901 map of the cable network of the Eastern Telegraph Company (which later became Cable & Wireless) shows the pervasive commercial and imperial power of Victorian London. Not just an instrument of imperial power, the steamer also created new imperial appetites: the British empire and others would seize new territories just for the sake of provisioning their steamships and protecting the routes they plied. Within this world system under British hegemony, access to coal became a central economic and strategic factor. As the economist Stanley Jevons wrote in his 1865 treatise on The Coal Question: Day by day it becomes more obvious that the Coal we happily possess in excellent quality and abundance is the Mainspring of Modem Material Civilization. …Coal, in truth, stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities. It is the material energy of the country — the universal aid — the factor in everything we do. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times.[2] Steamboats and the Projection of Power As the states of Atlantic Europe—Portugal and Spain, then later the Netherlands, England, and France—began to explore and conquer along the coasts of Africa and Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their cannon-armed ships proved one of their major advantages. Though the states of India and Indonesia had access to their own gunpowder weaponry, they did not have the ship-building technology to build stable firing platforms for large cannon broadsides. The mobile fortresses that the Europeans brought with them allowed them to dominate the sea lanes and coasts, wresting control of the Indian Ocean trade from the local powers.[3] What they could not do, however, was project power inland from the sea. The galleons and later heavily armed ships of the Europeans could not sail upriver. In this era, Europeans rarely could dominate inland states. When it did happen, as in India, it typically required years or decades of warfare and politicking, with the aid of local alliances. The steamboat, however, opened the rivers of Africa and Asia to lightning attacks or shows of force: directly by armed gunboats themselves, or indirectly through armies moving upriver supplied by steam-powered craft. We already know, of course, how Laird used steamboats in his expedition up the Niger in 1832. Although his intent was purely commercial, not belligerent, he had demonstrated the that interior of Africa could be navigated with steam. When combined with quinine to protect European settlers from malaria, the steamboat would help open a new wave of imperial claims on African territory. But even before Laird’s expedition, the British empire had begun to experiment with the capabilities of riverine steamboats. British imperial policy in Asia still operated under the corporate auspices of the East India Company (EIC), not under the British government, and in 1824 the EIC went to war with Burma over control of territories between the Burmese Empire and British India, in what is now Bangladesh. It so happened that the company had several steamers on hand, built in the dockyards of Calcutta (now Kolkata), and the local commanders put them to work in war service (much as Andrew Jackson had done with Shreve’s Enterprise in 1814).[4] Most impressive was Diana, which penetrated 400 miles up the Irrawaddy to the Burmese imperial capital at Amarapura: “she towed sailing ships into position, transported troops, reconnoitered advance positions, and bombarded Burmese fortifications with her swivel guns and Congreve rockets.”[5] She also captured the Burmese warships, who could not outrun her and whose small cannons on fixed mounts could not effectively put fire on her either. A depiction of an attack on Burmese fortifications by the British fleet. The steamship Diana is at right. In the Burmese war, however, steamships had served as the supporting cast. In the First Opium War, the steamship Nemesis took a star turn. The East India Company traditionally made its money by bringing the goods of the East—mainly tea, spices, and cotton cloth—back west to Europe. In the nineteenth century, however, the directors had found an even more profitable way to extract money from their holdings in the subcontinent: by growing poppies and trading the extracted drug even further east, to the opium dens of China. The Qing state, understandably, grew to resent this trade that immiserated its citizens, and so in 1839 the emperor promulgated a ban on the drug. The iron-hulled Nemesis was built and dispatched to China by the EIC with the express purpose of carrying war up China’s rivers. Shemounted a powerful main battery of twin swivel-mount 32-pounders and numerous smaller weapons, and with a shallow draft was able to navigate not just up the Pearl River, but into the shallow waterways around Canton (Guangzhou), destroying fortifications and ships and wreaking general havoc. Later Nemesis and several other steamers, towing other battleships, brought British naval power 150 miles up the Yangtze to its junction with the Grand Canal. The threat to this vital economic lifeline brought the Chinese government to terms.[6] Nemesis and several British boats destroying a fleet of Chinese junks in 1841. Steamboats continued to serve in imperial wars throughout the nineteenth century. A steam-powered naval force dispatched from Hong Kong helped to break the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Steamers supplied Herbert Kitchener’s 1898 expedition up the Nile to the Sudan, with the dual purpose of avenging the death of Charles “Chinese” Gordon fourteen years earlier and of preventing the French from securing a foothold on the Nile. His steamboat force consisted of a mix of naval gunboats and a civilian ship requisitioned from the ubiquitous Cook & Son tourism and logistics firm.[7] Kitchener could only dispatch such an expedition because of the British power base in Cairo (from whence it ruled Egypt through a puppet khedive), and that power base existed for one primary reason: to protect the Suez Canal. The Geography of Steam: Suez In 1798, Napoleon’s army of conquest, revolution, and Enlightenment arrived in Egypt with the aim of controlling the Eastern half of the Mediterranean and cutting off Britain’s overland link to India. There they uncovered the remnants of a canal linking the Nile Delta to the Red Sea. Constructed in antiquity and restored several times after, it had fallen into disuse sometime in the medieval period. It’s impossible to know for certain, but when operable, this canal had probably served as a regional waterway connecting the Egyptian heartland around the Nile with the lands around the head of the Red Sea. By the eighteenth century, in an age of global commerce and global empires, however, a nautical connection between the Mediterranean and Red Sea had more far-reaching implications.[8] A reconstruction of the possible location of the ancient Nile-Suez canal. [Picture by Annie Brocolie / CC BY-SA 2.5] Napoleon intended to restore the canal, but before any work could commence, France’s forces in Egypt withdrew in the face of a sustained Anglo-Ottoman assault. Though British commercial and imperial interests presented a far stronger case for a canal than any benefits France might have hoped to get from it, the British government fretted about upsetting the balance of power in the Middle East and disrupting their textile industry’s access to the Egyptian cotton cloth. They contented themselves instead with a cumbrous overland route to link the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, a series of French engineers and diplomats, culminating in Ferdinand de Lesseps, pressed for the concession required to build a sea-to-sea Suez Canal, and construction under French engineers finally began in 1861. The route formally opened in November, 1869 in a grand celebration that attracted most of the crowned heads of continental Europe.[9] It was just as well that the project was delayed: it allowed for the substitution, in 1865, of steam dredges for conscripted labor at the work site. Of the hundred million cubic yards of earth excavated for the canal, four-fifths were dug out with iron and steam rather than muscle, generating 10,000 horsepower at the cost of £20,000 of coal per month.[10] Without mechanical aid, the project would have dragged on well into the 1870s, if it were completed at all. Moreover, Napoleon’s precocious belief in the project notwithstanding, the canal’s ultimate fiscal health depended of the existence of ocean-going steamships as well. By sail, depending on the direction of travel and the season, the powerful trade winds on the southern route could make it the faster option, or at least the more efficient one given the tolls on the canal.[11] But for a steamship, the benefits of cutting off thousands of miles from the journey were three-fold: it didn’t just save time, it also saved fuel, which in turn freed more space for cargo. Given the tradeoffs, as historian Max Fletcher wrote, “[a]lmost without exception, the Suez Canal was an all-steamer route.”[12] The modern Suez Canal, with the Mediterranean Sea on the left and the Red Sea on the right. [Picture by Pierre Markuse / CC BY 2.0] Ironically, the British, too conservative in their instincts to back the canal project, would nonetheless derive far more obvious benefit from it than the French government or investors, who struggled to make their money back in the early years of the canal. The new canal became the lifeline to the empire in India and beyond. This new channel for the transit of people and goods was soon complemented by an even more rapid channel for the transmission of intelligence. The first great achievement of the global telegraph age was the transatlantic cable laid in 1866 by Brunel’s Great Eastern, whose cavernous bulk allowed it to lay the entire line from Ireland to Newfoundland in a single piece in 1866.[13] This particular connection served mainly commercial interests, but the Great Eastern went on to participate in the laying of a cable from Suez to Aden and on to Bombay in 1870, providing relatively instantaneous electric communication (modulo a few intermediate hops) from London to its most precious imperial possession.[14] The importance of the Suez for quick communications with India in turn led to further aggressive British expansion in 1882: the bombarding of Alexandria and the de facto conquest of an Egypt still nominally loyal to the Sultan in Istanbul. This was not the only such instance. Steam power opened up new ways for empires to exert their might, but also pulled them to new places sought out only because steam power itself had made them important. The Geography of Steam: Coaling Stations In that vein, coaling stations—coastal and island stations for restocking ships with fuel—became an essential component of global empire. In 1839, the British seized the port of Aden (on the gulf of the same name) from the Sultan of Lahej for exactly that purpose, to serve as a coaling station for the steamers operating between the Red Sea and India.[15] Other, pre-existing waystations waxed or waned in importance along with the shift from the geography of sail to that of steam. St. Helena in the Atlantic, governed by the East India Company since the 1650s, could only be of use to ships returning from Asia in the age of sail, due to the prevailing trade winds that pushed outbound ships towards South America. The advent of steam made an expansion of St. Helena’s role possible, but then the opening of Suez diverted traffic away from the South Atlantic altogether. The opening of the Panama Canal similarly eclipsed the Falkland Islands’ position as the gateway to the Pacific.[16] In the case of shore-bound stations such as Aden, the need to protect the station itself sometimes led to new imperial commitments in its hinterlands, pulling empire onward in the service of steam. Aden’s importance only multiplied with the opening of the Suez Canal, which now made it part of the seven-thousand-mile relay system between Great Britain and India. Aggressive moves by the Ottoman Empire seemed to imperil this lifeline, and so the existence of the station became the justification for Britain to create a protectorate (a collection of vassal states, in effect) over 100,000 square miles of the Arabian Peninsula.[17] Britain created the 100,000-square-mile Aden protectorate to safeguard its steamship route to India. Coaling stations acquired local coal where it was available—from North America, South Africa, Bengal, Borneo, or Australia—where it was not, it had to be brought in, ironically, by sailing ships. But although one lump of coal may seem as good as another, it was not, in fact, a single fungible commodity. Each seam varied in the ratio and types of chemical impurities it contained, which affected how the coal burned. Above all, the Royal Navy was hungry for the highest quality coal. By the 1850s, the British Admiralty determined that a hard coal from the deeper layers of certain coal measures in South Wales exceeded all others in the qualities required for naval operations: a maximum of energy and a minimum of residues that would dirty engines and black smoke that would give away the position of their ships over the horizon. In 1871 the Navy launched its first all-steam oceangoing warship, the HMS Devastation, which needed, at full bore, 150 tons of this top-notch coal per day, without which it would become “the verist hulk in the navy.” The coal mines lining a series of north-south valleys along the Bristol Channel, which had previously supplied the local iron industry, thus became part of a global supply chain. The Admiralty demanded access to imported Welsh coal across the globe, in every port where the Navy refueled, even where local supplies could be found.[18] The dark green area indicates the coal seams of South Wales, where the best  steam coal in the world could be found. The British supply network far exceeded that of any other nation in its breadth and reliability, which gave their navy a global operational capacity that no other fleet could match. When the Russians sent their Baltic fleet to attack Japan in 1905, the British refused it coaling service and pressured the French to do likewise, leaving the ships reliant on sub-par German supplies. It suffered repeated delays and quality shortfalls in its coal before meeting its grim fate in Tsushima Strait. Aleksey Novikov-Priboi, a sailor on one of the Russian ships, later wrote that “coal had developed into an idol, to which we sacrificed strength, health, and comfort. We thought only in terms of coal, which had become a sort of black veil hiding all else, as if the business of the squadron had not been to fight, but simply to get to Japan.”[19] Even the rising naval power of the United States, stoked by the dreams of Alfred Mahan, could scarcely operate outside its home waters without British sufferance. The proud Great White Fleet of the United States that circumnavigated the globe to show the flag found itself repeatedly humbled by the failures of its supply network, reliant on British colliers or left begging for low-quality local supplies.[20] But if British steam power on the oceans still outshone that of the U.S. even beyond the turn of the twentieth century, on land it was another matter, as we shall next time.

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Steamships, Part I: Crossing the Atlantic

For much of this story, our attention has focused on events within the isle of Great Britain, and with good reason: primed by the virtuous cycle of coal, iron, and steam, the depth and breadth of Britain’s exploitation of steam power far exceeded that found anywhere else, for roughly 150 years after the groaning, hissing birth cry of steam power with the first Newcomen engine. American riverboat traffic stands out as the isolated exception. But Great Britain, island though it was, did not stand aloof from the world. It engaged in trade and the exchange of ideas, of course, but it also had a large and (despite occasional setbacks) growing empire, including large possessions in Canada, South Africa, Australia, and India. The sinews of that empire necessarily stretched across the oceans of the world, in the form of a dominant navy, a vast merchant fleet, and the ships of the East India Company, which blurred the lines of military and commercial power: half state and half corporation. Having repeatedly bested all its would-be naval rivals—Spain, the Netherlands, and France—Britain had achieved an indisputable dominance of the sea. Testing the Waters The potential advantages of fusing steam power with naval power were clear: sailing ships were slaves to the whims of the atmosphere. A calm left them helpless, a strong storm drove them on helplessly, and adverse winds could trap them in port for days on end. The fickleness of the wind made travel times unpredictable and could steal the opportunity for a victorious battle from even the strongest fleet. In 1814, Sir Walter Scott took a cruise around Scotland, and the vicissitudes of travel by sail are apparent on page after page of his memoirs:  4th September 1814… Very little wind, and that against us; and the navigation both shoally and intricate. Called a council of war; and after considering the difficulty of getting up to Derry, and the chance of being windbound when we do get there, we resolve to renounce our intended visit to that town… 6th September 1814… When we return on board, the wind being unfavourable for the mouth of Clyde, we resolve to weigh anchor and go into Lamlash Bay. 7th September, 1814 – We had amply room to repent last night’s resolution, for the wind, with its usual caprice, changed so soon as we had weighed anchor, blew very hard, and almost directly against us, so that we were beating up against it by short tacks, which made a most disagreeable night…[1] As it had done for power on land, as it had done for river travel, so steam could promise to do for sea travel: bring regularity and predictability, smoothing over the rough chaos of nature. The catch lay in the supply of fuel. A sailing ship, of course, needed only the “fuel” it gathered from the air as it went along. A riverboat could easily resupply its fuel along the banks as it travelled. A steamship crossing the Atlantic would have to bring along its whole supply. Plan of the Savannah. It is evident that she was designed as a sailing ship, with the steam engine and paddles as an afterthought. Early attempts at steam-powered sea vessels bypassed this problem by carrying sails, with the steam engine providing supplementary power. The American merchant ship Savannah crossed the Atlantic to Liverpool in this fashion in 1819. But the advantages of on-demand steam power did not justify the cost of hauling an idle engine and its fuel across the ocean. Its owners quickly converted the Savannah back to a pure sailing ship.[2] MacGregor Laird had a better-thought-out plan in 1832 when he dispatched the two steamships built at his family’s docks, Quorra and Alburkah, along with a sailing ship, for an expedition up the River Niger to bring commerce and Christianity to central Africa. Laird’s ships carried sails for the open ocean and supplied themselves regularly with wooden fuel when coasting near the shore. The steam engines achieved their true purpose once the little task force reached the river, allowing the ships to navigate easily upstream.[3] Brunel Laird’s dream of transforming Africa ended in tatters, and in the death of most of his crew. But Laird himself survived, and he and his homeland would both have a role to play in the development of true ocean-going steamships. Laird, like the great Watt himself, was born in Greenock, on the Firth of Clyde, and Britain’s first working commercial steamboats originated on the Clyde, carrying passengers among Glasgow, Greenock, Helensburgh, and other towns. Scott took passage on such a ferry from Greenock to Glasgow in the midst of his Scottish journey, and the contrast is stark in his memoirs between his passages at sea and the steam transit on the Clyde that proceeded “with a smoothness of motion which probably resembles flying.”[4] The shipbuilders of the Clyde, with iron and coal closet a hand, would make such smooth, predictable steam journeys ever more common in the waters of and around Britain.  By 1822, they had already built forty-eight steam ferries of the sort on which Scott had ridden; in the following decade ship owners extended service out into the Irish Sea and English Channel with larger vessels, like David Napier’s 240-ton, 70-horsepower Superb and 250-ton and 100-horsepower Majestic.[5] Indeed, the most direct path to long-distance steam travel lay in larger hulls. Because of the buoyancy of water, steamships did not suffer rocket-equation-style negative returns on fuel consumption with increasing size. As the hull grew, its capacity to carry coal increased in proportion to its volume, while the drag the engines had to overcome (and thus the size of engine required) increased only in proportion to the surface area. Mark Beaufoy, a scholar of many pursuits but with a deep interest in naval matters, had shown this decisively in a series of experiments with actual hulls in water, published posthumously by his son in 1834.[6] In the late 1830s, two competing teams of British financiers, engineers, and naval architects emerged, racing to be the first to take advantage of this fact by creating a large enough steamship to make transatlantic steam travel technically and commercially viable. In a lucky break for your historian, the more successful team was led by the more vibrant figure, Isambard Kingdom Brunel: even his name oozes character. (His rival’s name, Junius Smith, begins strong but ends pedestrian.) Brunel’s unusual last name came from his French father, Marc Brunel; his even more unusual middle name came from his English mother, Sophia Kingdom; and his most unusual first name descends from some Frankish warrior of old.[7] The elder Brunel came from a prosperous Norman farming family. A second son, he was to be educated for the priesthood, but rebelled against that vocation and instead joined the navy in 1786. Forced to flee France in 1793 due to his activities in support of the royalist cause, he worked for a time as a civil engineer in New York before moving to England in 1799 to develop a mechanized process for churning out pulley blocks for the British navy with one of the great rising engineers of the day, Henry Maudslay.[8] The most famous image of Brunel, in front of the chains of his (and the world’s) largest steamship design in 1857. Young Isambard was born in 1806, began working for his father in 1822, and got the railroad bug after riding the Liverpool and Manchester line in 1831.  The Great Western Railway (GWR) company named Brunel as chief engineer in 1833, when he just twenty-seven years old. The GWR originated with a group of Bristol merchants who saw the growth of Liverpool, and feared that without a railway link to central Britain they would lose their status as the major entrepôt for British trade with the United States. It spanned the longest route of any railway to date, almost 120 miles from London to Bristol, and under Brunel’s guidance the builders of the GWR leveled, bridged, and tunneled that route at unparalleled cost). Brunel insisted on widely spaced rails (seven feet apart) to allow a smooth ride at high speed, and indeed GWR locomotives achieved speeds of sixty miles-per-hour, with average speeds of over forty miles-per-hour over long distances, including stops. Though the broad-gauge rails Brunel stubbornly fought for are long gone, the iron-ribbed vaults of the train sheds he designed for each terminus—Paddington Station in London and Temple Meads in Bristol—still stand and serve railroad traffic today.[9] The Great Western Railway " data-medium-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fhf3soIAhhg2rN0oqVUZMO0J_BSv" data-large-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fijn2JZJiY1iiPlxXFJdkKowbSRt?w=739" loading="lazy" width="1024" height="640" src="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FhOeLf78Au4ONW9H2uRKenokq84m" alt="" class="wp-image-14501" srcset="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FhOeLf78Au4ONW9H2uRKenokq84m 1024w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fi_GgFaxxSyF_JLeBaV4adatJV4f 150w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fhf3soIAhhg2rN0oqVUZMO0J_BSv 300w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Ft7LTlTqReE0HzUJR2_XF8PFniC4 768w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fijn2JZJiY1iiPlxXFJdkKowbSRt 1154w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px">An engraving of Temple Mead, Bristol terminus of the Great Western Railway. According to legend, Brunel’s quest to build a transatlantic steamer began with an off-hand quip at a meeting of the Great Western directors in October 1835.[10] Someone grumbled over the length of the railway line, Brunel said something to the effect of: “Why not make it longer, and have a steamboat to go from Bristol to New York?” Though perhaps intended as a joke, Brunel’s remark spoke to the innermost dreams of the Bristol merchants, to be the indispensable link between England and America.  One of them, Thomas Guppy, decided to take the idea seriously, and convinced Brunel to do the same. Brunel, never lacking in self-confidence, did not doubt that his heretofore landbound engineering skills would translate to a watery milieu, but just in case he pulled Christopher Claxton (a naval officer) and William Patterson (a shipbuilder) in on the scheme. Together they formed a Great Western Steam Ship Company.[11] The Race to New York Received opinion still held that a direct crossing by steam from England to New York, of over 3,000 miles, would be impossible without refueling. Dionysius Lardner took to the hustings of the scientific world to pronounce that opinion. Dionysius Lardner, Brunel’s nemesis. One of the great enthusiasts and promoters of the railroad, Lardner was nonetheless a long-standing opponent of Brunel’s: in 1834 he had opposed Brunel’s route for the Great Western railway on the grounds that the gradient of Box Hill tunnel would cause trains to reach speeds of 120 miles-per-hour and thus suffocate the passengers.[12] He gave a talk to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in August 1836 deriding the idea of a Great Western Steamship, asserting that “[i]n proportion as the capacity of the vessel is increased, in the same ratio or nearly so must the mechanical power of the engines be enlarged, and the consumption of fuel augmented,” and that therefore a direct trip across the Atlantic would require a far more efficient engine than had ever yet been devised.[13] The Dublin-born Lardner much preferred his own scheme to drive a rail line across Ireland and connect the continents by the shortest possible water route: 2,000 miles from Shannon to Newfoundland. Brunel, however, firmly believed that a large ship would solve the fuel problem. As he wrote in a preliminary report to the company in 1836, certainly drawing on Beaufoy’s work: “…the tonnage increases as the cubes of their dimensions, while the resistance increases about as their squares; so that a vessel of double the tonnage of another, capable of containing an engine of twice the power, does not really meet with double the resistance.”[14] He, Patterson and Claxton agreed to target a 1400 ton, 400 horsepower ship. They would name her, of course, Great Western. In the post-Watt era, Britain boasted two great engine-building firms: Robert Napier’s in Glasgow in the North, and Maudslay’s in London in the south. After the death of Henry Maudslay, Marc Brunel’s former collaborator, in 1831, the business’ ownership passed to his sons. But they lacked their father’s brilliance; the key to  the firm’s future lay with the partner he had also bequeathed  to them, Joshua Field. Brunel and his father both had ties to Maudslay, and so they tapped Field to design the engine for their great ship. Field chose a “side-lever” engine design, so-called because a horizontal beam on the side of the engine rocking on a central pivot delivered power from the piston to the paddle wheels. This was the standard architecture for large marine engines, because it allowed the engine to be mounted deep in the hull, avoiding deck obstructions and keeping the ship’s center of gravity low. Field, however, added several novel features of his own devising. The most important of them was the spray condenser, which recycled some of the engine’s steam for re-use as fresh water for the boiler. This ameliorated the second-most pressing problem for long-distance steamships: the build-up of scale in the engine from saltwater.[15] The 236-foot-long, 35-foot-wide hull sported iron bracings to increase its strength (a contribution of Brunel), and cabins for 128 passengers. The extravagant, high-ceiling grand saloon provided a last, luxurious Brunel touch. By far the largest steamship yet built, Great Western would have towered over most other ships in the London docks where she was built.[16] The competing group around Junius Smith had not been idle. Smith, an American-born merchant who ran his business out of London had dreamed of a steam-powered Atlantic crossing ever since 1832, when while idling on a fifty-four day sail from England to New York; almost twice the usual duration. He formed the British and American Steam Navigation Company, and counted among his backers Macgregor Laird, the Scottish shipbuilder of the Niger River expedition. Their 1800-ton British Queen would boast a 500-horsepower engine, built by the Maudslay company’s Scottish rival, Robert Napier.[17] But Smith’s group fell behind the Brunel consortium (this despite the fact that Brunel still led the engineering on the not-yet-completed Great Western Railway); the Great Western would launch first. In a desperate stunt to be able to boast of making the first Atlantic crossing, British and American launched the channel steamer Sirius on April 4, 1838 from Cork on the west coast of Ireland, laden with fuel and bound for New York. Great Western left Bristol just four days later, with fifty-seven crew (fifteen of them just for stoking coal) to serve a mere seven passengers, each paying the princely sum of 35 guineas for passage.[18] The Steamer Great Western. H.R. Robinson. PAH8859 " data-medium-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FjhWpIE1aFlqt2GYL0Hc-SWJMgY9" data-large-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Flj-dfOyg0Ro7Cz2Hb7HjGMwK6WT?w=739" loading="lazy" width="1024" height="730" src="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fu9OpVwe0NXae4jdZHJyPyuWk0m9" alt="" class="wp-image-14505" srcset="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fu9OpVwe0NXae4jdZHJyPyuWk0m9 1024w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FuVJjI8esdiqejo2CGzqD47Y3gkI 150w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FjhWpIE1aFlqt2GYL0Hc-SWJMgY9 300w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FnNNJhcavKPniiW0ouC1ntqj7v0o 768w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Flj-dfOyg0Ro7Cz2Hb7HjGMwK6WT 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px">A Lithograph of the Great Western. Despite three short stops to deal with engine problems and a near-mutiny by disgruntled coal stokers working in miserable conditions, Great Western nearly overtook Sirius, arriving in New York just twelve hours behind her. In total the crossing took less than sixteen days—about half the travel time of a fast sailing packet—with coal to spare in the bunkers. The ledger was not all positive: the clank of the engine, the pall of smoke and the ever-present coating of soot and coal dust drained the ocean of some of its romance; as historian Stephen Fox put it, “[t]he sea atmosphere, usually clean and bracing, felt cooked and greasy.” But sixty-six passengers ponied up for the return trip: “Already… ocean travelers had begun to accept the modernist bargain of steam dangers and discomforts in exchange for consistent, unprecedented speed.”[19] In that first year, Great Western puffed alone through Atlantic waters. Itmade four more round trips In 1838, eking out a small profit. The British Queen launched at last in July 1839, and British and American launched an even larger ship, SS President, the following year. Among the British Queen’s first passengers on its maiden voyage to New York was Samuel Cunard, a name that would resonate in ocean travel for a century to come, and an object lesson in the difference between technical and business success. In 1840 his Cunard Line began providing transatlantic service in four Britannia-class paddleships. Imitation Great Westerns (on a slightly smaller scale), they stood out not for their size or technical novelty but for their regularity and uniformity of service. But the most important factor in Cunard’s success was outmaneuvering the Great Western Steam Company in securing a contract with the Admiralty for mail service to Halifax. This provided a steady and reliable revenue stream—starting at 60,000 pounds a year—regardless of economic downturns. Moreover, once the Navy had come to depend on Cunard for speedy mail service it had little choice but to keep upping the payments to keep his finances afloat.[20] Thanks to the savvy of Cunard, steam travel from Britain to America, a fantasy in 1836 (at least according to the likes of Dionysius Lardner), had become steady business four years later. Brunel, however, had no patience for the mere making of money. He wanted to build monuments; creations to stand the test of time, things never seen or done before. So, when, soon after the launching of the Great Western, he began to design his next great steam ship, he decided he would build it with a hull of solid iron.

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Internet Ascendant, Part 2: Going Private and Going Public

In the summer of 1986, Senator Al Gore, Jr., of Tennessee introduced an amendment to the Congressional Act that authorized the  budget of the National Science Foundation (NSF). He called for the federal government to study the possibilities for “communications networks for supercomputers at universities and Federal research facilities.” To explain the purpose of this legislation, Gore called on a striking analogy: One promising technology is the development of fiber optic systems for voice and data transmission. Eventually we will see a system of fiber optic systems being installed nationwide. America’s highways transport people and materials across the country. Federal freeways connect with state highways which connect in turn with county roads and city streets. To transport data and ideas, we will need a telecommunications highway connecting users coast to coast, state to state, city to city. The study required in this amendment will identify the problems and opportunities the nation will face in establishing that highway.1In the following years, Gore and his allies would call for the creation of an “information superhighway”, or, more formally, a national information infrastructure (NII). As he intended, Gore’s analogy to the federal highway system summons to mind a central exchange that would bind together various local and regional networks, letting all American citizens communicate with one another. However, the analogy also misleads – Gore did not propose the creation of a federally-funded and maintained data network. He envisioned that the information superhighway, unlike its concrete and asphalt namesake, would come into being through the action of market forces, within a regulatory framework that would ensure competition, guarantee open, equal access to any service provider (what would later be known as “net neutrality”), and provide subsidies or other mechanisms to ensure universal service to the least fortunate members of society, preventing the emergence of a gap between the information rich and information poor.2Over the following decade, Congress slowly developed a policy response to the growing importance of computer networks to the American research community, to education, and eventually to society as a whole. Congress’ slow march towards an NII policy, however, could not keep up with the rapidly growing NSFNET, overseen by the neighboring bureaucracy of the executive branch. Despite its reputation for sclerosis, bureaucracy was created exactly because of its capacity, unlike a legislature, to respond to events immediately, without deliberation. And so it happened that, between 1988 and 1993, the NSF crafted the policies that would determine how the Internet became private, and thus went public. It had to deal every year with novel demands and expectations from NSFNET’s users and peer networks. In response, it made decisions on the fly, decisions which rapidly outpaced Congressional plans for guiding the development of an information superhighway. These decisions rested largely in the hands of a single man – Stephen Wolff.Acceptable UseWolff earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Princeton in 1961 (where he would have been a rough contemporary of Bob Kahn), and began what might have been a comfortable academic career, with a post-doctoral stint at Imperial College, followed by several years teaching at Johns Hopkins. But then he shifted gears, and took a position  at the Ballistics Research lab in Aberdeen, Maryland. He stayed there for most of the 1970s and early 1980s, researching communications and computing systems for the U.S. Army. He introduced Unix into the lab’s offices, and managed Aberdeen’s connection to the ARPANET.3In 1986, the NSF recruited him to manage the NSF’s supercomputing backbone – he was a natural fit, given his experience connecting Army supercomputers to ARPANET. He became the principal architect of NSFNET’s evolution from that point until his departure in 1994, when he entered the private sector as a manager for Cisco Systems. The original intended function of the net that Wolff was hired to manage had been to connect researchers across the U.S. to NSF-funded supercomputing centers. As we saw last time, however, once Wolff and the other network managers saw how much demand the initial backbone had engendered, they quickly developed a new vision of NSFNET, as a communications grid for the entire American research and post-secondary education community.However, Wolff did not want the government to be in the business of supplying network services on a permanent basis. In his view, the NSF’s role was to prime the pump, creating the initial demand needed to get a commercial networking services sector off the ground. Once that happened, Wolff felt it would be improper for a government entity to be in competition with viable for-profit businesses. So he intended to get NSF out of the way by privatizing the network, handing over control of the backbone to unsubsidized private entities and letting the market take over.This was very much in the spirit of the times. Across the Western world, and across most of the political spectrum, government leaders of the 1980s touted privatization and deregulation as the best means to unleash economic growth and innovation after the relative stagnation of the 1970s. As one example among many, around the same time that NSFNET was getting off the ground, the FCC knocked down several decades-old constraints on corporations involved in broadcasting. In 1985, it removed the restriction on owning print and broadcast media in the same locality, and two year later it nullified the fairness doctrine, which had required broadcasters to present multiple views on public-policy debates. From his post at NSF, Wolff had several levers at hand for accomplishing his goals. The first lay in the interpretation and enforcement of the network’s acceptable use policy (AUP). In accordance with NSF’s mission, the initial policy for the NSFNET backbone, in effect until June 1990, required all uses of the network to be in support of “scientific research and other scholarly activities.” This is quite restrictive indeed, and would seem to eliminate any possibility of commercial use of the network. But Wolff chose to interpret the policy liberally. Regularly mailing list postings about new product releases from a corporation that sold data processing software – was that not in support of scientific research? What about the decision to allow MCI’s email system to connect to the backbone, at the urging of Vint Cerf, who had left government employ to oversee the development of MCI Mail. Wolff rationalized this – and other later interconnections to commercial email systems such as CompuServe’s – as in support of research by making it possible for researchers to communicate digitally with a wider range of people that they might need to contact in the pursuit of their work. A stretch, perhaps. But Wolff saw that allowing some commercial traffic on the same infrastructure that was used for public NSF traffic would encourage the private investment needed to support academic and educational use on a permanent basis. Wolff’s strategy of opening the door of NSFNET as far as possible to commercial entities got an assist from Congress in 1992, when Congressman Rick Boucher, who helped oversee NSF as chair of the Science Subcommittee, sponsored an amendment to the NSF charter which authorized any additional uses of NSFNET that would “tend to increase the overall capabilities of the networks to support such research and education activities.” This was an ex post facto validation of Wolff’s approach to commercial traffic, allowing virtually any activity as long as it produced profits that encouraged more private investment into NSFNET and its peer networks.  Dual-Use NetworksWolff also fostered the commercial development of networking by supporting the regional networks’ reuse of their networking hardware for commercial traffic. As you may recall, the NSF backbone linked together a variety of not-for-profit regional nets, from NYSERNet in New York to Sesquinet in Texas to BARRNet in northern California. NSF did not directly fund the regional networks, but it did subsidize them indirectly, via the money it provided to labs and universities to offset the costs of their connection to their neighborhood regional net. Several of the regional nets then used this same subsidized infrastructure to spin off a for-profit commercial enterprise, selling network access to the public over the very same wires used for the research and education purposes sponsored by NSF. Wolff encouraged them to do so, seeing this as yet another way to accelerate the transition of the nation’s research and education infrastructure to private control. This, too, accorded neatly with the political spirit of the 1980s, which encouraged private enterprise to profit from public largesse, in the expectation that the public would benefit indirectly through economic growth. One can see parallels with the dual-use regional networks in the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which defaulted ownership of patents derived from government-funded research to the organization performing the work, not to the government that paid for it. The most prominent example of dual-use in action was PSINet, a for-profit company initially founded as Performance Systems International in 1988. William Schrader and Martin Schoffstall, the co-founder of NYSERNet and one of vice presidents’, respectively, created the company. Schofstall, a former BBN engineer and co-author of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) for managing the devices on an IP network, was the key technical leader. Schrader, an ambitious Cornell biology major and MBA who had helped his alma mater set up its supercomputing center and get it connected to NSFNET, provided the business drive. He firmly believed that NYSERNet should be selling service to businesses, not just educational institutions. When the rest of the board disagreed, he quit to found his own company, first contracting with NYSERNet for service, and later raising enough money to acquire its assets. PSINet thus became one of the earliest commercial internet service providers, while continuing to provide non-profit service to colleges and universities seeking access to the NSFNET backbone.4Wolff’s final source of leverage for encouraging a commercial Internet lay in his role as manager of the contracts with the Merit-IBM-MCI consortium that operated the backbone. The initial impetus for change in this dimension came not from Wolff, however, but from the backbone operators themselves.  A For-Profit BackboneMCI and its peers in the telecommunications industry had a strong incentive to find or create more demand for computer data communications. They had spent the 1980s upgrading their long-line networks from coaxial cable and microwave – already much higher capacity than the old copper lines – to fiber optic cables. These cables, which transmitted laser light through glass, had tremendous capacity, limited mainly by the technology in the transmitters and receivers on either end, rather than the cable itself. And that capacity was far from saturated. By the early 1990s, many companies had deployed OC-48 transmission equipment with 2.5 Gbps of capacity, an almost unimaginable figure a decade earlier. An explosion in data traffic would therefore bring in new revenue at very little marginal cost – almost pure profit.5The desire to gain expertise in the coming market in data communications helps explains why MCI was willing to sign on to the NSFNET bid proposed by Merit, which massively undercut the competing bids (at $14 million for five years, versus the $40 and $25 millions proposed by their competitors6), and surely implied a short-term financial loss for MCI and IBM. But by 1989, they hoped to start turning a profit from their investment. The existing backbone was approaching the saturation point, with 500 million packets a month, a 500% year-over-year increase.7 So, when NSF asked Merit to upgrade the backbone from 1.5 Mbps T1 lines to 45Mbps T3, they took the opportunity to propose to Wolff a new contractual arrangement.T3 was a new frontier in networking – no prior experience or equipment existed for digital networks of this bandwidth, and so the companies argued that more private investment would be needed, requiring a restructuring that would allow IBM and Merit to share the new infrastructure with for-profit commercial traffic – a dual-use backbone. To achieve this, the consortium would from a new non-profit corporation, Advanced Network & Services, Inc. (ANS), which would supply T3 networking services to NSF. A subsidiary called ANS CO+RE systems would sell the same services at a profit to any clients willing to pay. Wolff agreed to this, seeing it as just another step in the transition of the network towards commercial control. Moreover, he feared that continuing to block commercial exploitation of the backbone would lead to a bifurcation of the network, with suppliers like ANS doing an end-run around NSFNET to create their own, separate, commercial Internet. Up to that point, Wolff’s plan for gradually getting NSF out of the way had no specific target date or planned milestones. A workshop on the topic held at Harvard in March 1990, in which Wolff and many other early Internet leaders participated, considered a variety of options without laying out any concrete plans.8 It was ANS’ stratagem that triggered the cascade of events that led directly to the full privatization and commercialization of NSFNET.It began with a backlash. Despite Wolff’s good intentions, IBM and MCI’s ANS maneuver created a great deal of disgruntlement in the networking community. It became a problem exactly because of the for-profit networks attached to the backbone that Wolff had promoted. So far they had gotten along reasonably with one another, because they all operated as peers on the same terms. But with ANS, a for-profit company held a de-facto monopoly on the backbone at the center of the Internet.9 Moreover, despite Wolff’s efforts to interpret the AUP loosely, ANS chose to interpret it strictly, and refused to interconnect the non-profit portion of the backbone (for NSF traffic) with any of their for-profit networks like PSI, since that would require a direct mixing of commercial and non-commercial traffic. When this created an uproar, they backpedaled, and came up with a new policy, allowing interconnection for a fee based on traffic volume.PSINet would have none of this. In the summer of 1991, they banded together with two other for-profit Internet service providers – UUNET, which had begun by selling commercial access to Usenet before adding Internet service; and the California Education and Research Federation Network, or CERFNet, operated by General Atomics – to form their own exchange, bypassing the ANS backbone. The Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) consisted at first of just a single routing center in Washington D.C. which could transfer traffic among the three networks. They agreed to peer at no charge, regardless of the relative traffic volume, with each network paying the same fee to CIX to operate the router. New routers in Chicago and Silicon Valley soon followed, and other networks looking to avoid ANS’ fees also joined on.DivestitureRick Boucher, the Congressman whom we met above as a supporter of NSF commercialization, nonetheless requested an investigation of the propriety of Wolff’s actions in the ANS affair by the Office of the Inspector General. It found NSF’s actions precipitous, but not malicious or corrupt. Nevertheless, Wolff saw that the time had come to divest control of the backbone. With ANS + CORE and CIX privatization and commercialization had begun in earnest, but in a way that risked splitting the unitary Internet into multiple disconnected fragments, as CIX and ANS refused to connect with one another. NSF therefore drafted a plan for a new, privatized network architecture in the summer of 1992, released it for public comment, and finalized it in May of 1993. NSFNET would shut down in the spring of 1995, and its assets would revert to IBM and MCI. The regional networks could continue to operate, with financial support from the NSF gradually phasing out over a four year period, but would have to contract with a private ISP for internet access.But in a world of many competitive internet access providers, what would replace the backbone? What mechanism would link these opposed private interests into a cohesive whole? Wolff’s answer was inspired by the exchanges already built by cooperatives like CIX – NSF would contract out the creation of four Network Access Points (NAPs), routing sites where various vendors could exchange traffic. Having four separate contracts would avoid repeating the ANS controversy, by preventing a monopoly on the points of exchange. One NAP would reside at the pre-existing, and cheekily named, Metropolitan Area Ethernet East (MAE-East) in Vienna, Virginia, operated by Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS). MAE-West, operated by Pacific Bell, was established in San Jose, California; Sprint operated another NAP in Pennsauken, New Jersey, and Ameritech one in Chicago. The transition went smoothly10, and NSF decommissioned the backbone right on schedule, on April 30, 1995.11The Break-upThough Gore and others often invoked the “information superhighway” as a metaphor for digital networks, there was never serious consideration in Congress of using the federal highway system as a direct policy model. The federal government paid for the building and maintenance of interstate highways in order to provide a robust transportation network for the entire country. But in an era when both major parties took deregulation and privatization for granted as good policy, a state-backed system of networks and information services on the French model of Transpac and Minitel was not up for consideration.12Instead, the most attractive policy model for Congress as it planned for the future of telecommunication was the long-distance market created by the break-up of the Bell System between 1982 and 1984. In 1974, the Justice Department filed suit against AT&T, its first major suit against the organization since the 1950s, alleging that it had engaged in anti-competitive behavior in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Specifically, they accused the company of using its market power to exclude various innovative new businesses from the market – mobile radio operators, data networks, satellite carriers, makers of specialized terminal equipment, and more. The suit thus clearly drew much of its impetus from the ongoing disputes since the early 1960s (described in an earlier installment), between AT&T and the likes of MCI and Carterfone.When it became clear that the Justice Department meant business, and intended to break the power of AT&T, the company at first sought redress from Congress. John de Butts, chairman and CEO since 1972, attempted to push a “Bell bill” – formally the Consumer Communications Reform Act – through Congress. It would have enshrined into law AT&T’s argument that the benefits of a single, universal telephone network far outweighed any risk of abusive monopoly, risks which in any case the FCC could already effectively check. But the proposal received stiff opposition in the House Subcommittee on Communications, and never reached a vote on the floor of either Congressional chamber. In a change of tactics, in 1979 the board replaced the combative de Butts – who had once declared openly to an audience of state telecommunications regulators the heresy that he opposed competition and espoused monopoly – with the more conciliatory Charles Brown. But it was too late by then to stop the momentum of the antitrust case, and it became increasingly clear to the company’s leadership that they would not prevail. In January 1982, therefore, Brown agreed to a consent decree that would have the presiding judge in the case, Harold Greene, oversee the break-up of the Bell System into its constituent parts.The various Bell companies that brought copper to the customer’s premise, which generally operated by state (New Jersey Bell, Indiana Bell, and so forth) were carved up into seven blocks called Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs). Working clockwise around the country, they were NYNEX in the northeast, Bell Atlantic, Bell South, Southwestern Bell, Pacific Telesis, US West, and Ameritech. All of them remained regulated entities with an effective monopoly over local traffic in their region, but were forbidden from entering other telecom markets. AT&T itself retained the “long lines” division for long-distance traffic. Unlike local phone service, however, the settlement opened this market to free competition from any entrant willing and able to pay the interconnection fees to transfer calls in and out of the RBOCs. A residential customer in Indiana would always have Ameritech as their local telephone company, but could sign up for long-distance service with anyone.However, splitting apart the local and long-distance markets meant forgoing the subsidies that AT&T had long routed to rural telephone subscribers, under-charging them by over-charging wealthy long-distance users. A sudden spike in rural telephone prices across the nation was not politically tenable, so the deal preserved these transfers via a new organization, the non-profit National Exchange Carrier Association, which collected fees from the long-distance companies and distributed them to the RBOCS.   The new structure worked. Two major competitors entered the market in the 1980s, MCI and Sprint, and cut deeply into AT&T’s market share. Long-distance prices fell rapidly. Though it is arguable how much of this was due to competition per se, as opposed to the advent of ultra-high-bandwidth fiber optic networks, the arrangement was generally seen as a great success for de-regulation and a clear argument for the power of market forces to modernize formerly hidebound industries. This market structure, created ad hoc by court fiat but evidently highly successful, provided the template from which Congress drew in the mid-1990s to finally resolve the question of what telecom policy for the Internet era would look like. Second Time Isn’t The CharmPrior to the main event, there was one brief preliminary. The High Performance Computing Act of 1991 was important tactically, but not strategically. It advanced no new major policy initiatives. Its primary significance lay in providing additional funding and Congressional backing for what Wolff and the NSF already were doing and intended to keep doing – providing networking services for the research community, subsidizing academic institutions’ connections to NSFNET, and continuing to upgrade the backbone infrastructure.  Then came the accession of the 104th Congress in January 1995. Republicans took control of both the Senate and the House for the first time in forty years, and they came with an agenda to fight crime, cut taxes, shrink and reform government, and uphold moral righteousness. Gore and his allies had long touted universal access as a key component of the National Information Infrastructure, but with this shift in power the prospects for a strong universal service component to telecommunications reform diminished from minimal to none. Instead, the main legislative course would consist of regulatory changes to foster competition in telecommunications and Internet access, with a serving of bowdlerization on the side. The market conditions looked promising. Circa 1992, the major players in the telecommunications industry were numerous. In the traditional telephone industry there were the seven RBOCs, GTE, and three large long distance companies – AT&T, MCI, and Sprint – along with many smaller ones. The new up-and-comers included Internet service providers, such as UUNET, and PSINET as well as the IBM/MCI backbone spin-off, ANS; and other companies trying to build out their local fiber networks, such as Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS). BBN, the contractor behind ARPANET, had begun to build its own small Internet empire, snapping up some of the regional networks that orbited around NSFNET – Nearnet in New England, BARRNet in the Bay area, and SURANet in the southeast of the U.S. To preserve and expand this competitive landscape would be the primary goal of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the only major rewrite of communications policy since the Communications Act of 1934. It intended to reshape telecommunications law for the digital age. The regulatory regime established by the original act siloed industries by their physical transmission medium – telephony, broadcast radio and television, cable TV; in each in its own box, with its own rules, and generally forbidden to meddle in each other’s business. As we have seen, sometimes regulators even created silos within silos, segregating the long-distance and local telephone markets. This made less and less sense as media of all types were reduced to fungible digital bits, which could be commingled on the same optical fiber, satellite transmission, or ethernet cable. The intent of the 1996 Act, shared by Democrats and Republicans alike, was to tear down these barriers, these “Berlin Walls of regulation”, as Gore’s own summary of the act put it.13 A complete itemization of the regulatory changes in this doorstopper of a bill is not possible here, but a few examples provide a taste of its character. Among other things it:allowed the RBOCs to compete in long-distance telephone markets,lifted restrictions forbidding the same entity from owning both broadcasting and cable services,axed the rules that prevented concentration of radio station ownership.The risk, though, of simply removing all regulation, opening the floodgates and letting any entity participate in any market, was to recreate AT&T on an even larger scale, a monopolistic megacorp that would dominate all forms of communication and stifle all competitors. Most worrisome of all was control over the so-called last mile – from the local switching office to the customer’s home or office. Building an inter-urban network connecting the major cities of the U.S. was expensive but not prohibitive, several companies had done so in recent decades, from Sprint to UUNET. To replicate all the copper or cable to every home in even one urban area, was another matter. Local competition in landline communications had scarcely existed since the early wildcat days of the telephone, when tangled skeins of iron wire criss-crossed urban streets. In the case of the Internet, the concern centered especially on high-speed, direct-to-the-premises data services, later known as broadband. For years, competition had flourished among dial-up Internet access providers, because all the end user required to reach the provider’s computer was access to a dial tone. But this would not be the case by default for newer services that did not use the dial telephone network. The legislative solution to this conundrum was to create the concept of the “CLEC” – competitive local exchange carrier. The RBOCs, now referred to as “ILECs” (incumbent local exchange carriers), would be allowed full, unrestricted access to the long-distance market only once the had unbundled their networks by allowing the CLECs, which would provide their own telecommunications services to homes and businesses, to interconnect with and lease the incumbents’ infrastructure. This would enable competitive ISPs and other new  service providers to continue to get access to the local loop even when dial-up service became obsolete – creating, in effect, a dial tone for broadband. The CLECs, in this model, filled the same role as the long-distance providers in the post-break-up telephone market. Able to freely interconnect at reasonable fees to the existing local phone networks, they would inject competition into a market previously dominated by the problem of natural monopoly. Besides the creation of the CLECS, the other major part of the bill that affected the Internet addressed the Republicans’ moral agenda rather than their economic one. Title V, known as the Communications Decency Act, forbade the transmission of indecent or offensive material – depicting or describing “sexual or excretory activities or organs”, on any part of the Internet accessible to minors. This, in effect, was an extension of the obscenity and indecent rules that governed broadcasting into the world of interactive computing services. How, then, did this sweeping act fare in achieving its goals? In most dimensions it proved a failure. Easiest to dispose with is the Communications Decency Act, which the Supreme Court struck down quickly (in 1997) as a violation of the First Amendment. Several parts of Title V did survive review however, including Section 230, the most important piece of the entire bill for the Internet’s future. It allows websites that host user-created content to exist without the fear of constant lawsuits, and protects the continued existence of everything from giants like Facebook and Twitter to tiny hobby bulletin boards. The fate of the efforts to promote competition within the local loop took longer to play out, but proved no more successful than the controls on obscenity. What about the CLECs, given access to the incumbent cable and telephone infrastructure so that they could compete on price and service offerings? The law required FCC rulemaking to hash out the details of exactly what kind of unbundling had to be offered. The incumbents pressed the courts hard to dispute any such ruling that would open up their lines to competition, repeatedly winning injunctions on the FCC, while threatening that introducing competitors would halt their imminent plans for bringing fiber to the home. Then, with the arrival of the Bush Administration and new chairman Michael Powell in 2001, the FCC became actively hostile to the original goals of the Telecommunications Act. Powell believed that the need for alternative broadband access would be satisfied by intermodal competition among cable, telephone, power communications networks, cellular and wireless networks. No more FCC rules in favor of CLECs would be forthcoming. For a brief time around the year 2000, it was possible to subscribe to third-party high-speed internet access using the infrastructure of your local telephone or cable provider. After that, the most central of the Telecom Act’s  pro-competitive measures became, in effect, a dead letter. The much ballyhooed fiber-to-the home only began to actually reach a significant number of homes after 2010, and the only with reluctance on the part of the incumbents.14 As author Fred Goldstein put it, the incumbents had “gained a fig leaf of competition without accepting serious market share losses.”15During most of the twentieth century, networked industries in the U.S. had sprouted in a burst of entrepreneurial energy and then been fitted into the matrix of a regulatory framework as they grew large and important enough to affect the public interest. Broadcasting and cable television had followed this pattern. So had trucking and the airlines. But with the CLECs all but dead by the early 2000s, the Communications Decency Act revoked, and other attempts to control the Internet such as the Clipper chip16 stymied, the Internet would follow an opposite course. Having come to life under the guiding hand of the state, it would now be allowed to develop in an almost entirely laissez-faire fashion. The NAP framework established by the NSF at the hand-off of the backbone would be the last major government intervention in the structure of the Internet. This was true at both the transport layer – the networks such as Verizon and AT&T that transported raw data, and the applications layer – software services from portals like Yahoo! to search engines like Google to online stores like Amazon.  In our last chapter, we will look at the consequences of this fact, briefly sketching the evolution of the Internet in the U.S. from the mid-1990s onward. [Previous] [Next]Quoted in Richard Wiggins, “Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet” 2000.“Remarks by Vice President Al Gore at National Press Club“, December 21, 1993.Biographical details on Wolff’s life prior to NSF are scarce – I have recorded all of them that I could find here. Notably I have not been able to find even his date and place of birth.Schrader and PSINet rode high on the Internet bubble in the late 1990s, acquiring other businesses aggressively, and, most extravagantly, purchasing the naming rights to the football stadium of the NFL’s newest expansion team, the Baltimore Ravens. Schrader tempted fate with a 1997 article entitled “Why the Internet Crash Will Never Happen.” Unfortunately for him, it did happen, bringing about his ouster from the company in 2001 and PSINet’s bankruptcy the following year.To get a sense of how fast the cost of bandwidth was declining – in the mid-1980s, leasing a T1 line from New York to L.A. would cost $60,000 per month. Twenty years later, a OC-3 circuit with 100 times the capacity cost only $5,000, more than a thousand-fold reduction in price per capacity. See Fred R. Goldstein, The Great Telecom Meltdown, 95-96. Goldstein states that the 1.55 mpbs T1/DS1 line has 1/84th the capacity of OC-3, rather than 1/100th, a discrepancy I can’t account for. But this has little effect on the overall math.Office of Inspector General, “Review of NSFNET,” March 23, 1993.Fraser, “NSFNET: A Partnership for High-Speed Networking, Final Report”, 27.Brian Kahin, “RFC 1192: Commercialization of the Internet Summary Report,” November 1990.John Markoff, “Data Network Raises Monopoly Fear,” New York Times, December 19, 1991.Though many other technical details had to be sorted out, see  Susan R. Harris and Elise Gerich, “Retiring the NSFNET Backbone Service: Chronicling the End of an Era,” ConneXions, April 1996.The most problematic part of privatization proved to have nothing to do with the hardware infrastructure of the network, but instead with handing over control over the domain name system (DNS). For most of its history, its management had depended on the judgment of a single man – Jon Postel. But businesses investing millions in a commercial internet would not stand for such an ad hoc system. So the government handed control of the domain name system to a contractor, Network Solutions. The NSF had no real mechanism for regulatory oversight of DNS (though they might have done better by splitting the control of different top-level domains (TLDs) among different contractors), and Congress failed to step in to create any kind of regulatory regime. Control changed once again in 1998 to the non-profit ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but the management of DNS still remains a thorny problem.The only quasi-exception to this focus on fostering competition was a proposal by Senator Daniel Inouye to reserve 20% of Internet traffic for public use: Steve Behrens, “Inouye Bill Would Reserve Capacity on Infohighway,” Current, June 20, 1994. Unsurprisingly, it went nowhere. Al Gore, “A Short Summary of the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996”.Jon Brodkin, “AT&T kills DSL, leaves tens of millions of homes without fiber Internet,” Ars Technica, October 5, 2020.Goldstein, The Great Telecom Meltdown, 145.The Clipper chip was a proposed hardware backdoor that would give the government the ability to bypass any U.S.-created encryption software.Further ReadingJanet Abatte, Inventing the Internet (1999)Karen D. Fraser “NSFNET: A Partnership for High-Speed Networking, Final Report” (1996)Shane Greenstein, How the Internet Became Commercial (2015)Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (2018)Rajiv Shah and Jay P. Kesan, “The Privatization of the Internet’s Backbone Network,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (2007)Share this: Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Like Loading...

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The Computer as a Communication Device

Over the first half of the 1970s, the ecology of computer networking diversified from its original ARPANET ancestry along several dimensions. ARPANET users discovered a new application, electronic mail, which became the dominant activity on the network. Entrepreneurs spun-off their own ARPANET variants to serve commercial customers. And researchers from Hawaii to l’Hexagone developed new types of network to serve needs or rectify problems not addressed by ARPANET. Almost everyone involved in this process abandoned the ARPANET’s original stated goal of allowing computing hardware and software to be shared among a diverse range of research sites, each with its own specialized resources. Computer networks became primarily a means for people to connect to one another, or to remote systems that acted as sources or sinks for human-readable information, i.e. information databases and printers. This was a possibility foreseen by Licklider and Robert Taylor, though not what they had intended when they launched their first network experiments. Their 1968 article,”The Computer as a Communication Device” lacks the verve and timeless quality of visionary landmarks in the history of computing such as Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” or Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Nonetheless, it provides a rather prescient glimpse of a social fabric woven together by computer systems. Licklider and Taylor described a not-to-distant future in which1 You will not send a letter or a telegram; you will simply identify the people whose files should be linked to yours and the parts to which they should be linked-and perhaps specify a coefficient of urgency. You will seldom make a telephone call; you will ask the network to link your consoles together. …Available within the network will be functions and services to which you subscribe on a regular basis and others that you call for when you need them. In the former group will be investment guidance, tax counseling, selective dissemination of information in your field of specialization, announcement of cultural, sport, and entertainment events that fit your interests, etc. The first and most important component of this computer-mediated future – electronic mail – spread like a virus across ARPANET in the 1970s, on its way to taking over the world. Email To understand how electronic mail developed on ARPANET, you need to first understand an important change that overtook the network’s computer systems in the early 1970s.  When ARPANET was first conceived in the mid-1960s, there was almost no commonality among the hardware and operating software running at each ARPA site. Many sites centered on custom, one-off research systems, such Multics at MIT, the TX-2 at Lincoln Labs, and the ILLIAC IV, under construction at the University of Illinois. By 1973, on the other hand, the landscape of computer systems connected to the network had acquired a great deal of uniformity, thanks to the wild success of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in penetrating the academic computing market.2 DEC designed the PDP-10, released in 1968, to provide a rock-solid time-sharing experience for a small organization, with an array of tools and programming languages built-in to aid in customization. This was exactly what academic computing centers and research labs were looking for at the time. Look at all the PDPs! BBN, the company responsible for overseeing the ARPANET, then made the package even more attractive by creating the Tenex operating system, which added paged virtual memory to the PDP-10. This greatly simplified the management and use of the system, by making it less important to exactly match the set of running programs to the available memory space. BBN supplied the Tenex software free-of-charge to other ARPA sites, and it soon became the dominant operating system on the network. But what does all of this have to do with email? Electronic messaging was already familiar to users of time-sharing systems, most of which offered some kind of mailbox program by the late 1960s. They provided a form of digital inter-office mail; their reach extended only to other users of the same computer system. The first person to take advantage of the network to transfer mail from one machine to another was Ray Tomlinson, a BBN engineer and one of the authors of the Tenex software. He had already written a SNDMSG program for sending mail to other users on a single Tenex system, and a CPYNET program for sending files across the network. It required only a leap of imagination for him to see that he could combine the two to create a networked mail program. Previous mail programs had only required a user name to indicate the recipient, so Tomlinson came up with the idea of combining that local user name and the (local or remote) host name with an @ symbol3, to create an email address that was unique across the entire network. Ray Tomlinson in later years, with his signature “at” sign Tomlinson began testing his new program locally in 1971, and in 1972 his networked version of SNDMSG was bundled into the Tenex release, allowing Tenex mail to break the bonds of a single site and spread across the network. The plurality of machines running Tenex made Tomlinson’s hybrid program available instantly to a large proportion of ARPANET users, and it became an immediate success. It did not take long for ARPA’s leaders to integrate email into the core of their working life. Stephen Lukasik, director of ARPA, was an early adopter, as was Larry Roberts, still head of the agency’s computer science office. The habit inevitably spread to their subordinates, and soon email became a basic fact of life of the culture of ARPANET. Tomlinson’s mail software spawned a variety of imitations and elaborations from other users looking to improve on its rudimentary functionality. Most of the early innovation focused on the defects of the mail reading program. As email spread beyond a single computer, the volume of mail received by heavy users scaled with the size of the network, and the traditional approach of treating the mailbox as a raw text file was no longer effective. Larry Roberts himself, unable to deal effectively with the deluge of incoming messages, wrote his own software to manage his inbox called RD. By the mid-1970s, however, the most popular program by far was MSG, written by John Vittal of USC. We take for granted the ability to press a single button to fill out the title and recipient of outgoing message based on an incoming one. But it was Vittal’s MSG that first provided this killer “answer” feature in 1975; and it, too, was a Tenex program. The diversity of efforts led to a need for standards. This marked the first, but far from the last, time that the computer networking community would have to develop ex post facto standards. Unlike the basic protocols for ARPANET, a variety of email practices already existed in the wild prior to any standard setting. The inevitable result was controversy and political struggle, centering around the main email standard documents, RFC 680 and 720. In particular, non-Tenex users expressed a certain prickly resentment about the Tenex-centric assumptions built into the proposals. The conflict never grew terribly hot – everyone on ARPANET in the 1970s was still part of the same, relatively small, academic community and the differences to be reconciled were not large. But it provided a taste of larger struggles to come. The sudden success of email represented the most important development of the 1970s in the application layer of the network, the level most abstracted from the physical details of the network’s layout. At the same time, however, others had set out to redifine the foundational “link” layer, where bits flowed from machine to machine. ALOHA In 1968, Norman Abramson arrived at the University of Hawaii from California to serve a combined appointment as electrical engineering and computer science professor. The University he joined consisted of a main campus in Oahu as well as a secondary Hilo campus, and several other community colleges and research sites spread across Oahu, Kauai, Maui, and Hawaii. In between lay hundreds of miles of water and mountainous terrain. A brawny IBM 360/65 powered computer operations at the main campus, but ordering up an AT&T dedicated line to link a terminal to it from one of the community colleges was not so simple a matter as on the mainland. Abramson was an expert in radar systems and information theory who did a stint as an engineer for Hughes Aircraft in Los Angeles. This new environment, with all the physical challenges it presented to wireline communications, seems to have inspired Abramson to a new idea – what if radio were actually a better way of connecting computers than the phone system, which after all was designed with the needs of voice, not data, in mind? Abramson secured funding from Bob Taylor at ARPA to test this idea, with a system he called ALOHAnet. In its initial incarnation, it was not a computer network at all, but rather a medium for connecting remote terminals to a single time-sharing system, designed for the IBM machine at the Oahu campus. Like ARPANET, it had a dedicated minicomputer for processing packets sent and received by the 360/65 – Menehune, the Hawaiian equivalent of the IMP. ALOHAnet, however, dealt away with all the intermediate point-to-point routing used by ARPANET to get packets from one place to another. Instead any terminal wishing to send a message simply broadcast it into the ether in the allotted transmission frequency. ALOHAnet in its full state of development later in the 1970s, with multiple computers The traditional way for a radio engineer to handle a shared transmission band like this would have been to carve it up into time or frequency-based slots, and assign each terminal to its own slot. But to handle hundreds of terminals in such a scheme would mean limiting each to a small fraction of the available bandwidth, even though only a few might be in active use at any given moment. Instead, Abramson decided to do nothing to prevent more than one terminal from sending at the same time. If two or more messages overlapped they would become garbled, but the central computer would detect this via error-correcting codes, and would not acknowledge those packets. Failing to receive their acknowledgement, the sender(s) would try again after some random interval. Abramson calculated that this simple protocol could sustain up to a few hundred simultaneously active terminals, whose numerous collisions would still leave about 15% of the usable bandwidth. Beyond that, though, his calculations showed that the whole thing would collapse into a chaos of noise. The Office Of The Future Abramson’s “packet broadcasting” concept did not make a huge splash, at first. But it found new life a few years later, back on the mainland. The context was Xerox’s new Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), opened in 1970 just across from Stanford University, in a region recently dubbed “Silicon Valley.” Some of Xerox’s core xerography patents stood on the verge of expiration, and  the company risked being trapped by its own success, unable or unwilling to adapt to the rise of computing and integrated circuits. Jack Goldman, head of research for Xerox, had convinced the bigwigs back East that a new lab – distanced from the influence of HQ, nestled in an attractive climate, and with premium salaries on offer – would attract the talent needed to keep Xerox’s edge, by designing the information architecture of the future. PARC certainly succeeded in attracting top computer science talent, due not only to the environment and the generous pay, but also the presence of Robert Taylor, who had set the ARPANET into motion as head of ARPA’s Information Processing Technology Office in 1966. Robert Metcalfe, a prickly and ambitious young engineer and computer scientist from Brooklyn, was one of many wooed to PARC via an ARPA connection. He joined the lab in June 1972 after working part-time for ARPA a a Harvard graduate student, building the interface to connect MIT to the network. Even after joining PARC, he continued to work as an ARPANET ‘facilitator’, traveling around the country to help new sites get started on the network, and on the preparations for ARPA’s coming out party at the 1972 International Conference on Computer Communications. Among the projects percolating at PARC when Metcalfe arrived was a plan by Taylor to link dozens, or even hundreds, of small computers via a local network.  Year after year, computers continued to decrease in price and size, as if bending to the indomitable will of Gordon Moore. The forward-looking engineers at PARC foresaw a not-far-distant future when every office worker would have his own computer. To that end, they designed and built a personal computer called Alto, a copy of which would be supplied to every researcher in the lab. Taylor, who had only become more convinced of the value of networking over the previous half-decade, also wanted these computers to be interconnected. The Alto. The computer per se was housed in the cabinet at bottom, about the size of a mini-fridge. On arriving at PARC, Metcalfe took over the task of connecting up the lab’s PDP-10 clone to ARPANET, and quickly acquired a reputation as the “networking guy”. Therefore when Taylor asked for an Alto network, his peers turned to Metcalfe. Much like the computers on ARPANET, the Altos at PARC didn’t have much to say to one another. The compelling application for the network, once again, was in enabling human communication – in this case in the form of word and images printed by laser. The core idea behind the laser printer did not originate at PARC, but back East, at the original Xerox research lab in Webster, New York. There a physicist named Gary Starkweather proved that the coherent beam of a laser could be used to deactivate the electrical charge of a xerographic drum, just like the diffuse light used in photocopying up to that point. Properly modulated, the beam could paint a image of arbitrary detail onto the drum, and thus onto paper (since only the uncharged areas of the drum picked up toner). Controlled by a computer, such a machine could produce any combination of images and text that a person might conceive, rather than merely reproducing existing documents like the photocopier. Starkweather received no support for these wild ideas from his colleagues or management in Webster, however, so he got himself transferred to PARC in 1971, where he found a far more receptive audience. The laser printer’s ability to render arbitrary images dot-by-dot provided the perfect mate for the Alto workstation, with its bit-mapped monochrome graphics. With a laser printer, the half-million pixels on a user’s display could be directly rendered onto paper with perfect fidelity. The bit-mapped graphics experience on the Alto. Nothing like this had been seen on a computer display before. Within about a year Starkweather, with the help of several other PARC engineers, had overcome the main technical challenges and built a working prototype of a laser printer, based on the chassis of the workhorse Xerox 7000 printer. It produced pages at the same rate – one per second – at 500 dots per linear inch. A character generator attached the printer crafted text from pre-defined fonts. Free-form imagery (other than what could be generated with custom fonts) was not yet supported, so the network did not need to carry the full 25 million bits-per-second or so required to feed the laser; nonetheless, a tremendous of amount of bandwidth would be needed to keep the printer busy at a time when the 50,000 bits-per-second ARPANET represented the state-of-the-art. PARC’s second generation “Dover” laser printer, from 1976 The Alto Aloha Network How would Metcalfe bridge this huge gap in speed? Finally, we come back to ALOHAnet, for it turns out that Metcalfe knew packet broadcasting better than anyone. The previous summer, while staying in Washington with Steve Crocker on ARPA business, Metcalfe had pulled down volume of the proceedings of the Fall Joint Computer Conference, and came across Abramson’s ALOHAnet paper. He immediately realized that the basic idea was brilliant, but the implementation under-baked. With a few tweaks in the algorithm and assumptions – notably having senders listen for a clear channel before trying to broadcast, and exponentially increasing the re-transmission interval in response to congestion – he could achieve a bandwidth utilization of 90%, rather than the 15% calculated by Abramason. Metcalfe took a short leave from PARC to visit Hawaii, where he integrated his ideas about ALOHAnet into a revised version of his PhD thesis, after Harvard had rejected the original due to a lack of theoretical grounding. Metcalfe originally called his plan to bring packet broadcasting to PARC the “ALTO ALOHA network”. Then, in a memo in May 1973, he rechristened it as Ether Net, invoking the luminiferous ether which nineteenth-century physicists had suposed to carry all electromagnetic radiation. “This will keep things general,” he wrote, “and who knows what other media will prove better than cable for a broadcast network; maybe radio or telephone circuits, or power wiring or frequency-multi-plexed CATV, or microwave environments, or even combinations thereof.” A sketch from Metcalfe’s 1973 Ether Net memo. Starting in June 1973, Metcalfe worked with another PARC engineer, David Boggs, to turn his theoretical concepts for a new high-speed network into a working system. Rather than sending signals over the air like ALOHA, they would bind the radio spectrum within the confines of a coaxial cable, greatly increasing the available bandwidth from the limited radio band allocated to the Menehune. The transmission medium itself was entirely passive, requiring no switching equipment at all for routing messages. It was cheap and easy to connect it hundreds of workstations – PARC engineers just ran coax cable through the building and added taps as needed – and it could handle three million bits per second. Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs in the 1980s, several years after Metcalfe founded 3Com to sell Ethernet technology By the fall of 1974, the complete prototype of the office of the future was up and running in Palo Alto, California – the initial batch of thirty altos with drawing, email, and word processing software, Starkweather’s prototype printer, and Ethernet to connect it all together. A central file server for storing data too large for the Alto’s local disk provided the only other shared resource. PARC originally offered the Ethernet controller as an optional accessory on the Alto, but once the system went live it became clear that it was essential, as the coax coursed with a steady flow of messages, many of them emerging from the printer as technical reports, memos, or academic papers. Simultaneously with the development of the Alto, another PARC project attempted to carry the resource-sharing vision forward in a new direction. The PARC On Line Office System (POLOS), designed and implemented by Bill English and other refugees from Doug Engelbart’s oN-Line System (NLS) project at Stanford Research Institute, consisted of a network of Data General Nova minicomputers. Rather than dedicating each machine to a particular user’s needs, however, POLOS would shuttle work around among them, in order to serve the needs of the system as a whole as efficiently as possible. One machine might be rendering displays for several users, while another handled ARPANET traffic, and yet another ran word processing software. The complexity and coordination overhead of this approach proved unmanageable, and the scheme collapsed under its own weight. Meanwhile, nothing more clearly showed Taylor’s emphatic rejection of the resource-sharing approach to networking than his embrace of the Alto. Alan Kay, Butler Lampson, and the other minds behind the Alto had brought all the computational power a user might need onto an independent computer at their desk, intended to be shared with no one. The function of the network was not to provide access to a heterogeneous set of computer resources, but to carry messages among these islands, each entire of itself, or perhaps to deposit them on some distant shore – for printing or long-term storage. While both email and ALOHA developed under the umbrella of ARPA, the emergence of Ethernet was one of several signs in the first half of the 1970s that computer networking had become something too large and diverse for a single organization to dominate, a trend that we’ll continue to follow next time. [Previous] [Next] Further Reading Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning (1999) James Pelty, The History of Computer Communications, 1968-1988 (2007) [http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/] M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine (2001)    

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The Unraveling, Part 2

After authorizing private microwave networks in the Above 890 decision, the FCC might have hoped that they could leave those networks penned in their quiet little corner of the market and forget about them. But this quickly proved impossible. New challengers continued to press against the existent regulatory framework. They proposed a variety of new ways to use or sell telecommunications services, and claimed that the telecommuncations incumbents were obstructing their path. The FCC responded by steadily slicing away portions of AT&T’s monopoly, allowing competitors into various parts of the telecommunications market. AT&T responded with actions and rhetoric designed to counter, or at least mitigate the effects of, the new competition: publicly propounding their opposition to further FCC action, and setting new rates that sliced profits to the bone. From within the company, these seemed like natural responses to new competitive threats, but from the outside they only served as evidence that stronger measures would be needed to curb an insidious monopoly. When regulators pushed for telecom competition, they did not mean to encourage a struggle between for dominance between contending parties, and may the best company win. Their intent was to create and support lasting alternatives to AT&T. AT&T’s efforts to escape the net closing around it thus only served to ensnare it more deeply.1 The new threats came at both the edge and the the center of AT&T’s network, tearing away AT&T’s control over the terminal equipment attached to its lines by customers, and over the long-distance lines that interlinked the whole United States into a single telephone system. Each of these threats started with lawsuits by two small, seemingly insignificant upstarts: Carter Electronics and Microwave Communications, Incorporated (MCI), respectively. But the FCC not only favored the upstarts, but chose to interpret their cases expansively, as representing the needs of a whole new class of competitor which AT&T would have to accept and respect. Yet, in terms of the legal framework of regulation, nothing had changed since the Hush-a-Phone case of the 1950s. At that time the FCC had firmly rejected the claims of a far more innocuous challenger than Carter or MCI. The same 1934 Communications Act that had created the FCC in the first place still governed its actions in the 1960s and 70s. The shift in FCC policy did not come from new congressional action, but from a change in political philosophy within the commission. That change, in turn, was prompted to a large degree by the rise of the electronic computer. The emerging hybridization between computers and communication networks helped to set the conditions of its own further development. An Information Society For decades, the FCC had seen its main responsibility as maximizing access and fairness within a relatively stable and uniform telecommunications system. From the mid-1960s, however the FCC staff developed a different idea of their mission, and increasingly focused on maximizing innovation within a dynamic and diverse market. In large part this change can be attributed to the emergence of the new, though relatively tiny, market in data services. The data service industry originally had nothing to do with the telecommunications business at all. Its origins lay in service bureaus – companies that did data-processing on behalf of clients, then shipped them the results, a concept that in predated the modern computer by decades. IBM, for example, had offered on-demand processing for clients who couldn’t afford to lease their own mechanical tabulating equipment since the 1930s. In 1957, as part of an anti-trust deal with the U.S. Justice Department, they spun this business off into its a separate subsidiary, the Service Bureau Corporation, by that time running on modern electronic computers. Likewise, Automatic Data Processing (ADP), began as a manual payroll processing business in the late 1940s before computerizing in the late 1950s. In the 1960s, however, the first on-line data services began to appear, which allowed users to interact with a remote computer by terminal over a private, leased telephone line. Most famous of these was SABRE, a derivative of SAGE, designed to handle reservations for American Airlines using IBM computers. Just as with the first time-sharing systems, however, once you had multiple users talking to the same computer, it was a small step to letting those users talk to each other. It was this new way of using computers, as a mailbox, that brought computers to the attention of the FCC. In 1964, Bunker-Ramo2, a company best known as a defense contractor, decided to diversify into data services by acquiring Teleregister. Among Teleregister’s lines of business was a service called Telequote, which had provided stock information to brokers over telephone lines since 1928. Teleregister, however, was not itself a regulated common carrier. It relied on private lines leased from Western Union for communications between its users and its data center. Bunker-Ramo Telequote III terminal. It could display information about requested stocks, as well as market summary data. " data-medium-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FgXKyn3jmYrb3JR4kL9Y5Z8Bu2y4?w=300" data-large-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FgXKyn3jmYrb3JR4kL9Y5Z8Bu2y4?w=472" loading="lazy" class=" size-full wp-image-13324 aligncenter" src="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FgXKyn3jmYrb3JR4kL9Y5Z8Bu2y4?w=739" alt="102716113.01.01.lg_" srcset="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FgXKyn3jmYrb3JR4kL9Y5Z8Bu2y4 472w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FgXKyn3jmYrb3JR4kL9Y5Z8Bu2y4?w=150&h=135 150w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FgXKyn3jmYrb3JR4kL9Y5Z8Bu2y4?w=300&h=269 300w" sizes="(max-width: 472px) 100vw, 472px">Bunker-Ramo Telequote III terminal. It could display information about requested stocks, as well as market summary data. Telequote’s state-of-the-art system in the 1960s, Telequote III, allowed users to use a terminal with a tiny CRT to screen to punch up the price of a stock stored on Telequote’s remote computer. In 1965, Bunker-Ramo proposed the next iteration, Telequote IV, with the additional feature of allowing brokers in different offices to submit buy or sell orders to one another via their terminals. Western Union, however, refused to allow their lines to be used for this purpose. They claimed that using the computer to transmit messages between users would turn a purported private line into a de facto common carrier message-switching service (not unlike Western Union’s own telegraph service), and requiring the operator (Bunker-Ramo) to be regulated by the FCC. The FCC decided to turn this dispute into an opportunity to answer a broader question – how should the growing contingent of on-line data services be treated, vis-a-vis telecommunications regulation? The resulting investigation is now known simply as the Computer inquiry. The ultimate conclusions of that inquiry are less important for us at this point than their effects on the mentality of the FCC staff. Long-established boundaries and definitions seemed liable to be redrawn or abandoned, and this shake-up conditioned the FCC’s mindset for the challenges to come. Every so often, over the previous decades, a new communications technology had emerged. Each developed independently and acquired its own distinct character and its own regulatory rules: telegraphy, telephony, radio, television. But with the emergence of the computers these distinct lines of development began to converge on the imagined horizon into an intertwined information society. Not just the FCC, but the intelligentsia in general anticipated major changes afoot. Sociologist Daniel Bell wrote of the coming “post-industrial society”, management expert Peter Drucker spoke of “knowledge workers” and the “age of discontinuity.” Books, papers, and conferences abounded in the second half of the 1960s on the topic of a coming world based in information or knowledge rather than material production. The authors of these works referred often to emergence of high-speed, general-purpose computers, and the new ways that they would allow data to be transmitted and processed within communications networks in the coming decades. Some of the newer FCC commissioners, appointed by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, were themselves active in these intellectual circles. Kenneth Cox and Nicholas Johnson both participated in a Brookings Institute symposium on “Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest,” whose chair imagined “a national or regional communication network that connects video and computer facilities at universities to homes and classrooms in local communities …The citizenry could be students ‘from cradle to coffin…” Johnson later wrote a book on the prospect of using computers to transform broadcast TV into an interactive medium, entitled How to Talk Back to Your Television Set. Beyond these general intellectual currents that were pushing communications regulation in new directions, one man in particular had a particular interest in steering regulation onto a new course, and played a major role in shifting the FCC’s attitudes. Bernard Strassburg belonged to the layer of the FCC bureaucracy just below the seven politically-appointed commissioners. The career civil servants who populated most of the FCC were divided into bureaus based on the technological area that they regulated. The commissioners relied on the legal and technical expertise of the bureaus to guide them in the rulings process. The domain of the Common Carrier Bureau, to which Strassburg belonged, lay in the wireline telephone and telegraph industry, consisting primarily of AT&T and Western Union. Strassburg joined the Common Carrier Bureau during World War II, rose to become its Chairman by 1963, and played a major role in pushing the FCC to chip away at AT&T’s dominance over the following decade. His distrust of AT&T originated with the anti-trust suit that the Justice Department launched against the company in 1949. At issue, as we’ve mentioned before, was the question of whether Western Electric, AT&T’s manufacturing arm, inflated its prices in order to allow AT&T, in turn, to artificially inflate its profits. Strassburg became convinced during the investigation that it was simply impossible to answer the question, given AT&T’s near-total monopsony in telephone equipment. There was no telephone equipment market to compare against to determine what constituted reasonable prices. AT&T was simply too large and powerful to effectively regulate, he concluded3. Much of his advice to the Commission in the coming years could be traced to this belief that competition needed to be forced into AT&T’s world, to weaken it sufficiently to make it regulable. Challenge at the Center: MCI The first serious challenge to AT&T’s long distance network, since its inception at the turn of the twentieth century, began with an unlikely man. John Goeken was a salesman and small businessman with at least as much enthusiasm as good sense. Like many boys of his time, he had developed an interest in radio equipment as a youth. He joined the Army out of high school as a microwave radio technicia, and, after completing his active service, he went into radio sales for General Electric (GE) in Illinois. His day job didn’t fill his need for entrepreneurship, however, so he also developed a side business with a group of friends, selling more GE radios in other parts of Illinois outside of his assigned territory. Goeken in the mid-90s, when he was working on an in-flight telephone When GE got wind of the operation and shut it down in 1963, Goeken began to look for other ways to supplement his income. He decided to build a microwave line from Chicago to St. Louis, selling radio access to the line to truckers, bargemen, flower delivery vans, and other small businesses along the route who had a need for inexpensive, mobile communications. He believed that AT&T’s private-line service was “gold-plated” – over-staffed and over-engineered – and that by being leaner and more cost-conscious he could provide lower prices and better service to the smaller users neglected by Ma Bell. Goeken’s concept did not conform to then-current FCC rules – the Above 890 ruling had authorized private companies to build microwave systems for their own use. Under pressure from smaller businesses without the wherewithal to build and maintain a whole system, a 1966 ruling had allowed multiple entities to share a single private microwave systems. But this still did not authorize them to become common carriers themselves, retailing service to third parties. Moreover, the reason that AT&T’s prices appeared excessive was not due to gilded wastefulness, but regulated cost-averaged rates. AT&T charged for private line service according to the distance and number of lines leased, whether those lines lay along the high-density Chicago-St. Louis route or a low-density route with little traffic across the Great Plains. Regulators and telephone companies had intentionally devised this structure to level the playing field between areas with differing population densities. MCI was thus proposing to engage in a form of arbitrage – taking advantage of the differential between the market and the regulated price on a high-traffic route to extract guaranteed profits. AT&T called this cream-skimming, a term that served as their primary rhetorical touchstone in the debates to come. It’s not clear whether Goeken did not initially know these facts, or chose blithely to ignore them. In any case, he went after his new idea with gusto, on a shoestring budget funded mainly by credit cards. He and his partners, all of similarly modest means, nonetheless dared to form a company to take on the over-mighty AT&T, which they called Microwave Communications, Inc . Goeken flew around the country looking for investors with deeper pockets, with little success. He had better luck, however, arguing MCI’s case before the FCC. The first hearings on the case began in 1967. Strassburg was intrigued. He saw in MCI an opportunity to achieve his goal of weakening AT&T, by further prying open the market for private lines. But he wavered at first about whether to follow through. Goeken did not impress him as a serious and effective businessman. MCI, he worried, might not be the best test case. He was nudged off the fence by an economist from the University of New Hampshire named Manley Irwin. Irwin had a steady consulting gig with the Common Carrier Bureau, and had helped to formulate the terms of the Computer inquiry. He convinced Strassburg that the nascent on-line data service market revealed by that inquiry needed companies like MCI that would provide new offerings; that AT&T alone would never be able to fulfill all the potential of the coming information society. Strassburg later reflected that “the ‘fallout’ from the Computer Inquiry… substantiated MCI’s claim that its entry into the specialized intercity market would be in the public interest.”4 With the blessings of the Common Carrier Bureau in-hand, MCI breezed through the initial hearing, then squeaked by with approval before the full commission in 1968, which split 4-3 along party lines. All the Democrats (Cox and Johnson included) voted in favor of approving MCI’s license. The Republicans, led by the chair, Rosel Hyde, dissented. The Republicans did not want to disrupt a well-balanced regulatory system with a scheme concocted by fly-by-night operators of questionable technical and business savvy. They pointed out that the decision, though limited on its face to a single company and a single route, carried profound implications that would transform the telecommunications market. Strassburg and the pro-approval commissioners treated the MCI case as an experiment, to see if a business could successfully operate alongside AT&T in the private line services market. But in fact it was a precedent, and, once approved, dozens of other companies would immediately come out of the woodwork to file their own applications. Reversing the experiment, the Republicans saw, would effectively be impossible. Morever, MCI and similar specialized entrants could scarcely survive with just a scattering of disconnected routes like the one from Chicago to St. Louis. They would demand interconnection with AT&T, and force the FCC to continue making changes to the regulatory structure. The land rush predicted by Hyde and the other Republicans did indeed ensue, with thirty-one companies filing 1713 separate applications for a total of 40,000 miles of microwave network within two years of the MCI decision.5 The FCC lacked the capacity to carry out individual hearings on all of these applications, and so it gathered them all together as a single docket on Specialized Common Carrier Services. In May 1971, with Hyde out, they unanimously decided to open the market fully to competition. Meanwhile, MCI, still starved for money, found a new wealthy investor to set its finances in order, William C. McGowan. McGowan was virtually Goeken’s opposite, a sophisticated and established businessman with a degree from Harvard, who had built successful consulting and venture capital businesses in New York City.  Within a few years, McGowan took effective control of MCI and pushed Goeken out. He had a very different vision for the company from that of his predecessor. He had no intention of messing around with bargemen and florists, nibbling around the periphery of the telecommunications market wherever AT&T deigned not to notice him. Instead he would go right for the heart of the regulated network, competing directly in all forms of long-distance communications. Bill McGowan in later years The stakes and implications of the original experiment with MCI thus continued to ratchet upward. Having committed itself to seeing MCI succeed, the FCC now found itself taken for a ride, as McGowan’s demands continued to broaden. Arguing (again, as predicted), that MCI could not survive as a small collection of disconnected routes, he demanded a wide variety of interconnection rights into the AT&T network; for example the right to connect to what was called a “foreign exchange,” allowing MCI’s network to connect directly into AT&T’s local telephone exchanges at the terminus of MCI private lines. AT&T’s responses to the new specialized common carriers did not help its cause. It answered the intrusion of competitors by introducing much lower rates on private lines along high-traffic routes, abandoning regulated, rate-averaged prices. If it thought this would appease the FCC by showing competitive spirit, it misconstrued the FCC’s purpose. Strassburg and his allies were not trying to help consumers by reducing communications prices, at least not directly. Instead they were trying to help new producers enter the market, thereby weakening AT&T’s power. Thus AT&T’s new competitive rates were seen by the FCC and other observers, especially at the Justice Department, as vindictive and anti-competitive, because they threatened the financial stability of new entrants like MCI. AT&T’s combative new president, John deButts, also did himself no favors with his aggressive rhetorical responses to competitive incursions. In a 1973 speech before the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, he belittled the FCC with his call for “a moratorium on further experiments in economics.” This kind of intransigence infuriated Strassburg, and further convinced him of the necessity of taking AT&T down a peg. The FCC duly ordered the interconnections requested by MCI in 1974. McGowan’s escalation climaxed with Execunet, launched the following year. Advertised as as a new kind of metered service for sharing private lines among small businesses, it gradually became apparent to both the FCC and AT&T that Execunet was in fact a competing long-distance phone network. It allowed a customer in one city to pick up a phone, dial a number, and reach arbitrary customers in another city (taking advantage of MCI’s foreign exchange connections) for a charge based on the distance and duration of the call. No dedicated point-to-point line came into the picture at all. Execunet connected MCI customers directly to any AT&T customer in any major city. At this point the FCC finally balked. It had intended to use MCI as a cudgel to beat back the complete dominance of AT&T, but this was a blow too far.  By this time, however, AT&T had other allies in the courts and the Justice Department, and continued to advance its case. The unraveling of the AT&T monopoly, once begun, was not easily stopped. Challenge at the Periphery: Carterfone While the MCI case was playing out, another threat approached. The similarities between the Carterfone and MCI stories are striking. In both cases, an upstart entrepreneur – possessed of more gumption and grit than good business sense – brought a successful challenge against the largest corporation in the United States. Both men, however – Jack Goeken and our new protagonist, Tom Carter – were shortly thereafter eased out of their companies by sharper operators and then faded into obscurity. Both men began as protagonists, but ended as pawns. Tom Carter was born in 1924 in Mabank, Texas, south east of Dallas. Another young radio enthusiast, he joined the Army at 19, becoming, like Goeken, a radio technician. He spent the latter years of World War II manning a broadcasting station in Juneau, providing news and entertainment to troops at far-flung outposts across Alaska. After the war he returned to Texas and formed Carter Electronics Corporation in Dallas, operating a two-way radio station that he leased out to other businesses – florists with delivery vans; oil companies with operators out at drilling rigs. Over and over, Carter heard requests from clients for a way to patch their mobile radios directly into the phone network, rather than having to relay messages to people in town through the base station operator. Carter devised an instrument to satisfy this need, which he called Carterfone. It consisted of a black plastic lozenge with a molded top designed to cradle a telephone handset, containing a microphone and a speaker, both wired to the radio transmitting/receiving station. To connect someone in the field with someone on the telephone, the base station operator still had to place a call manually, but then they could then rest the handset in the cradle, and the two parties could converse uninterrupted. A voice-activated switch tripped the radio’s send/receive mode, sending when the person on the telephone was speaking and receiving otherwise. He began selling the device in 1959, with a manufacturing operation that consisted of a small brick building in Dallas where senior citizens assembled Carterfones on plain wooden tables. A 1959 Caterfone. The phone handset would rest in the cradle and activate the device via the small switch at top. Carter’s invention was not entirely novel. Bell had its own mobile radio telephone service, which it first offered in St. Louis, Missouri in 1946. Twenty years later it served 30,000 customers. But there was plenty of room for a competitor like Carter – AT&T only offered the service in about a third of the United States, and the waiting list could be years long. Moreover, Carter offered a significantly cheaper price, if (large caveat) one already had a access to a radio tower: a one-time $248 purchase for the equipment, versus a $50-60 lease for a Bell mobile phone. Carterfone was, from AT&T’s point-of-view, a “foreign attachment”, a piece of third-party equipment attached to its network, a practice that it forbade. In the earlier Hush-a-Phone case, the courts had forced AT&T allow simple mechanical attachments to a telephone, but Carterfone did not fall in that category, being acoustically-coupled to the network – that is, it transmitted and received sound over the telephone line. Due to the small scale of Carter’s operations, it was two years before AT&T took notice, and started to warn retailers carrying Carterfone that their customers risked having their telephone service shut off – the same angle used to attack Hush-a-Phone over a decade earlier. With these kinds of tactics, AT&T chased Carter out of one market after another. Unable to reach any kind of deal with his antagonists, Carter decided to sue in 1965. None of the big Dallas firms would take the case, so Carter ended up at  the small office of Walter Steele, with only three lawyers to its name. One of them, Ray Besing, later painted this character portrait of the man who arrived in his office: He fancied himself a handsome man, with his side-combed white hair, which was all the whiter thanks to Grecian Formula, but his double-knit suit and cowboy boots presented a different kind of image. He was a self taught man, handy with any kind of electronic, radio, or telephone equipment. Not much of a business man. A strict family man with an equally strict wife. Yet he sought to appear a cool, successful businessman even though he was basically broke. The case came before the FCC’s preliminary examiner in 1967. AT&T and its allies (primarily the other, smaller telephone companies and the state telephone regulatory agencies) argued that Carterfone was not a simple attachment at all, but a piece of interconnection equipment, that unlawfully coupled AT&T’s network into local mobile radio networks. This violated the telephone company’s end-to-end responsibility for communications within its system. But as with MCI, the Common Carrier Bureau issued a statement decisively in favor of Carter. Once again the belief in a coming world of digital information services, simultaneously integrated and diversified, loomed in the background. How could a single monopoly supplier foresee and satisfy all the market needs for terminals and other equipment for all these coming applications? The final decision of the commission, on June 26, 1968, concurred with the CCB and found that AT&T’s foreign attachments rule was not only unlawful, but had been unlawful from its inception – therefore Carter stood eligible for back damages. AT&T, the FCC ruled, had failed to properly distinguish potentially harmful attachments (ones that might send errant control signals into the network, for example) from essentially harmless ones such as Carterfone. AT&T would have to allow Carterfones immediately, and devise technical standards for the safe interconnection of third-party devices. Shortly after the decision, Carter tried to exploit his success by going into business with two partners, including one of his lawyers, forming Carterfone Corporation. After pushing Carter out of the company, his partners made millions by selling to the British telecom giant Cable and Wireless. The Carterfone itself disappeared; the company continued on selling teletypewriters and computer terminals. Carter’s story has a curious epilogue. In 1974, he actually went into business with Jack Goeken, founding the Florist Transworld Delivery system to send flowers on demand. It was just the kind of market – using telecommunications to support small businesses – that both men had wanted to serve in the first place. Carter soon quit that company, too, however, and moved back to his roots southeast of Dallas, where, in the mid-80s, he operated a small radio telephone company called Carter Mobilefone. He remained there until his death in 1991.6 Unraveled Like Carter and Goeken, the FCC had set into motion forces it could not control or even fully understand. By the mid 1970s, Congress, the Justice Department and the courts took the debate over AT&T’s future out of the FCC’s hands. The climax of AT&T’s great unraveling, of course, came with final break-up of AT&T, carried out in 1984. But we have already gotten well ahead of the rest of our story. The world of computer networking did not feel the full implications of MCI’s victory, and the intrusion of competition into the long-distance market, until the 1990s, when private data networks began to proliferate. The decisions on terminal equipment had a more immediate effect. Acoustically coupled computer modems could now be manufactured by anyone and connected to the Bell system, under the sheltering hand of the Carterfone ruling, making them less expensive and easier to find. But the most important implication of AT&T’s unraveling lay in the big picture, rather than the particulars of individual rulings. Many of the early visionaries of the information age imagined a single, unified American computer-communications network, under the aegis of AT&T, or perhaps even the federal government itself. Instead computer networks developed piecemeal, in fragments, which were only gradually connected, or, “inter-networked.” No single overarching corporation controlled the various sub-networks as had been the case with Bell and its local operating companies; they came to one another  not as master and subordinate, but as peers. But that, too, is getting ahead of ourselves. To continue our story we must turn back to the mid-1960s, to see where computer networks came from in the first. [Previous part] Further Reading Ray G. Bessing, Who Broke Up AT&T? (2000) Philip L. Cantelon, The History of MCI: The Early Years (1993) Peter Temin with Louis Galambos, The Fall of the Bell System: A Study in Prices and Politics (1987) Richard H. K. Vietor, Contrived Competition: Regulation and Deregulation in America (1994)

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