6 Dec
2017
6 Dec
'17
12:33 a.m.
From the tuhs web site:
"This is a set of addenda to Seventh Edition Unix, possibly put out by the
Labs."
and
"The identity of the person who donated them is unknown."
Two questions: Was this put out by the Labs?
Second: There was recently a discussion about a tape found at some public
location during an early Unix user group meeting. Is this that tape?
Warner
6 Dec
6 Dec
1:07 a.m.
On Tue, Dec 05, 2017 at 05:33:02PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
From the tuhs web site:
"This is a set of addenda to Seventh Edition Unix, possibly put out by
the Labs."
and
"The identity of the person who donated them is unknown."
Two questions: Was this put out by the Labs?
Second: There was recently a discussion about a tape found at some
public location during an early Unix user group meeting. Is this that
tape?
Warner
No. I had to search my own archives. From this list in 2002:
The mythical `50 bugs' tape, described in Peter Salus' book `A Quarter
Century of UNIX' has been found lurking in the Unix Archive. You can
find it in Applications/Spencer_Tapes/unsw3.tar.gz as the file
usr/sys/v6unix/unix_changes.
And here is the relevant paragraphs from QCU:
Lou Katz’s version is a bit different:
A large number of bug fixes was collected, and rather than
issue them one at a time, a collection tape (”The 50 fixes”)
was put together by Ken. Some of the fixes were quite important,
though I don't remember any in particular. I suspect
that a significant fraction of the fixes were actually done by
non-Bell people. Ken tried to send it out, but the lawyers kept
stalling and stalling and stalling.
Finally, in complete disgust, someone "found a tape on
Mountain Avenue” which had the fixes. [The address of Bell
Labs is 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ.]
When the lawyers found out about it, they called every
licensee and threatened them with dire consequences if they
didn’t destroy the tape, after trying to find out how they got
the tape. I would guess that no one would actually tell them
how they came by the tape (I didn’t).
Cheers, Warren
4:11 p.m.
On Tue, Dec 5, 2017, at 20:07, Warren Toomey wrote:
Ken tried to send it out, but the lawyers kept
stalling and stalling and stalling.
When the lawyers found out about it, they called every
licensee and threatened them with dire consequences if they
didn’t destroy the tape, after trying to find out how they got
the tape. I would guess that no one would actually tell them
how they came by the tape (I didn’t).
I have a question, if anyone has any idea... is there any recorded
knowledge about *who was driving*? That is, beyond "the lawyers", who on
the business side of AT&T was making the policy decisions that led to
the various sometimes bizarre legal actions that caused problems for the
Unix world, and to what end (was there some way they expected to profit?
liability concerns?)
In other words, what was the basis of the legal department's mandate to
try to shut these things down? (This question is also something I've
wondered for some non-Unix stuff like the E911 document, but that's not
relevant to this list)
4:15 p.m.
Random832 writes:
On Tue, Dec 5, 2017, at 20:07, Warren Toomey wrote:
Can't answer your question directly, but I think that some of this was
the result of the prior consent decree banning them from being in the
data business. I seem to recall that it was technically illegal for
them to sell SW and don't know how giving it away would have been viewed.
Ken tried to send it out, but the lawyers kept
stalling and stalling and stalling.
When the lawyers found out about it, they called every
licensee and threatened them with dire consequences if they
didn’t destroy the tape, after trying to find out how they got
the tape. I would guess that no one would actually tell them
how they came by the tape (I didn’t).
I have a question, if anyone has any idea... is there any recorded
knowledge about *who was driving*? That is, beyond "the lawyers", who on
the business side of AT&T was making the policy decisions that led to
the various sometimes bizarre legal actions that caused problems for the
Unix world, and to what end (was there some way they expected to profit?
liability concerns?)
In other words, what was the basis of the legal department's mandate to
try to shut these things down? (This question is also something I've
wondered for some non-Unix stuff like the E911 document, but that's not
relevant to this list) 
6:39 p.m.
On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:15 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
Random832 writes:
I really think Jon is correct here. The behavior was all left over from
the 1956 consent decree, which settled the 1949 anti-trust case against
AT&T.
As the recipients of the AT&T IP, we used to refer the behavior as "UNIX
was abandoned on your doorstep." Throughout the 60s and 70s, the AT&T sr
management from the CEO on down, were terrified of another anti-trust
case. And of course they got one and we all know what judge Green did to
resolve that in 1980.
I described the activities/actions in detail in my paper: *"**UNIX: A View
from the Field as We Played the Game" *which I gave last fall in Paris.
The proceeding are supposed to go on line at some point. Send me email if
you want the details and I'll send you a PDF. I'm holding off cutting and
pasting here for reasons of brevity. For an legal analysis I also
recommend: *“AT&T Divestiture & the Telecommunications Market”,* John
Pinheiro, Berkeley Technical Law Journal, 303, September 1987, Volume 2,
Issue 2, Article 5 which I cite in my paper.
Clem
On Tue, Dec 5, 2017, at 20:07, Warren Toomey
wrote:
Can't answer your question directly, but I think that some of this was
the result of the prior consent decree banning them from being in the
data business. I seem to recall that it was technically illegal for
them to sell SW and don't know how giving it away would have been viewed.
Ken tried to send it out, but the lawyers kept
stalling and stalling and stalling.
When the lawyers found out about it, they called every
licensee and threatened them with dire consequences if they
didn’t destroy the tape, after trying to find out how they got
the tape. I would guess that no one would actually tell them
how they came by the tape (I didn’t).
I have a question, if anyone has any idea... is there any recorded
knowledge about *who was driving*? That is, beyond "the lawyers", who on
the business side of AT&T was making the policy decisions that led to
the various sometimes bizarre legal actions that caused problems for the
Unix world, and to what end (was there some way they expected to profit?
liability concerns?)
In other words, what was the basis of the legal department's mandate to
try to shut these things down? (This question is also something I've
wondered for some non-Unix stuff like the E911 document, but that's not
relevant to this list)
6:49 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
Clem Cole writes:
On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:15 AM, Jon Steinhart
<jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
There's another aspect of this that I think that many people misunderstand
which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew
that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their
monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the
rest of us, not so good.
Some of us remember the days in which phones were reliable and you could
understand the person on the other end. Or when your phone lasted 60+
years. Or the current debate about whether it's ok to eliminate exchange
powered phones that work in an emergency.
During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone
and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought
"Yeah, give me more of that. It's 60 years old, still works better than
what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still
work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split."
Not to mention it ended one of the best research labs in history.
Jon
Can't answer your question directly, but
I think that some of this was
the result of the prior consent decree banning them from being in the
data business. I seem to recall that it was technically illegal for
them to sell SW and don't know how giving it away would have been viewed.
I really think Jon is correct here. The behavior was all left over from the
1956 consent decree, which settled the 1949 anti-trust case against AT&T.
As the recipients of the AT&T IP, we used to refer the behavior as "UNIX was
abandoned on your doorstep." Throughout the 60s and 70s, the AT&T sr
management from the CEO on down, were terrified of another anti-trust case.
And of course they got one and we all know what judge Green did to resolve that
in 1980.
I described the activities/actions in detail in my paper: "UNIX: A View from
the Field as We Played the Game" which I gave last fall in Paris. The
proceeding are supposed to go on line at some point. Send me email if you want
the details and I'll send you a PDF. I'm holding off cutting and pasting
here
for reasons of brevity. For an legal analysis I also recommend: “AT&T
Divestiture & the Telecommunications Market”, John Pinheiro, Berkeley Technical
Law Journal, 303, September 1987, Volume 2, Issue 2, Article 5 which I cite in
my paper.
Clem
6:53 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone
and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought
"Yeah, give me more of that. It's 60 years old, still works better than
what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still
work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split."
We traded reliability for cat videos and any kind of porn you'd ever want
(and sever you wouldn't!)
Warner
6:58 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
Warner Losh writes:
On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Jon Steinhart
<jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
Exactly. I remember Dick Hause (?) doing a nice graphical demo on the Glance
G that showed how the phone system routed around faults and was able to because
of the "there shall be a minimum of three paths out of any exchange" rule. A
while back my long distance went out because someone hit a phone pole 40 miles
away. Couldn't even call to report it because support was in Seattle and there
was no path there from here; that was the only route.
Something to keep in mind with the internet. While TCP/IP is great for routing
around trouble it can only do so when there are alternate routes. Seem to be
fewer and fewer of these.
Jon
During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone
and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought
"Yeah, give me more of that. It's 60 years old, still works better than
what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still
work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split."
We traded reliability for cat videos and any kind of porn you'd ever want
(and sever you wouldn't!)
Warner
6:54 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 1:49 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
There's another aspect of this that I think that many people misunderstand
which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew
that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their
monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the
rest of us, not so good.
Some of us remember the days in which phones were reliable and you could
understand the person on the other end. Or when your phone lasted 60+
years. Or the current debate about whether it's ok to eliminate exchange
powered phones that work in an emergency.
During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone
and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought
"Yeah, give me more of that. It's 60 years old, still works better than
what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still
work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split."
Not to mention it ended one of the best research labs in history.
Amen brother Jon....
7:20 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
Clem Cole wrote:
On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 1:49 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com
<mailto:jon@fourwinds.com>> wrote:
There's another aspect of this that I think that many people
misunderstand
which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted.
AT&T knew
that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade
their
monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked.
For the
rest of us, not so good.
For AT&T (which no longer is a company since the current AT&T is really
AT&T in name only.
SBC Communications bought AT&T Corp. on November 18, 2005, and changed
its name to AT&T Inc. (The real AT&T
is no longer...)
Some of us remember the days in which phones were
reliable and you
could
understand the person on the other end. Or when your phone lasted 60+
years. Or the current debate about whether it's ok to eliminate
exchange
powered phones that work in an emergency.
During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial
phone
and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought
"Yeah, give me more of that. It's 60 years old, still works
better than
what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still
work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split."
Not to mention it ended one of the best research labs in history.
Amen brother Jon....
And it also helped cause the end of a number of computer companies,
including NCR, DEC, Pyramid Technologies...
The bad decisions AT&T made once they got into the computer hardware
business were legendary.
They had product support problems (replaced a significant quantity of
6300 motherboards on their PC for an MS-DOS clock problem they
introduced by clearing the seconds in the RTC chip at each boot)... They
had issues with their Field Service techs being unwilling to work on
Pyramid OS/x boxes under Unix (AT&T System 7000) because that was system
software and they were only willing to work with a (nonexistant on
Pyramid) offline diagnostics set.
An AT&T Union tech walkout from Pyramid classes was averted on that
one... They were not too successful selling Alliant FX/1 and FX/8 boxes
as AT&T machines as well. I worked for both computer companies in
service and training and saw this first hand.AT&T was to hand AT&T
Business cards to Alliant Service personnel to handle the customers.
They tried to sell the 3b20 simplex box against the Vax into scientific
markets only to find that although the integer performance was
superior... Scientific use really needs hardware floating point. The
later 3b line got much better but the first entry was frightenening
Unfortunately, half of Pyramid's sales were through OEM's
(Siemens-Nixdorf and AQT&T mostly) so the ton of business dropped
immediately once the NCR deal took hold. It happened just as Pyramid
moved to DCOS/x (Their SVR4 port to MIPS). This killed a ton of growth
and the deal to move the US Internal Revenue from System III based Zilog
Zeus boxes to Pyramid...
Sometimes you can't always get what you want. Sometimes when you get it
you screw yourself into the ground.
AT&T, I was told, couldn't figure out how MCI could undercut them in
long distance. The experts said -- we have the network in place and
paid for and there's no way we could do it for under 10c per minute...
They didn't figure MCI (later LDDS) could cook the books to make the
numbers look better.
Back in '84 DEC was to train me as a Unix admin and act as the outsource
contractor supplier to AT&T. This would've had one source of service
and support for all their Vaxes and eliminated the large collection of
Sysadmin and Operator suppliers. Pre-IBM Global Services type stuff.
The wife was at the Labs at the time and they supposedly announced it.
Rumor says a DEC and AT&T merger about the same time fell apart.
Perhaps the history is buried in the DEC Archives now in the Computer
Museuum. I was told I was in on the deal in Oct/Nov 1983 or
84 and it fell apart the next January or so.
Bill
7 Dec
7 Dec
2:26 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
Ø For AT&T (which no longer is a company since the current AT&T is really
AT&T in name only.
SBC Communications bought AT&T Corp. on November 18, 2005, and changed its name to
AT&T Inc. (The real AT&T
is no longer...)
Well SBC was one of the RBOCs so while it wasn’t the post-Greene ATT, it is a decent chunk
of the original monopoly. Not only the old BellSouth but also Illinois, Inndiana,
Michigan, Ohio, Pacific, Southwestern and Pacific Bells. They did acquire the old long
lines AT&T and wireless sytem. Of course AT&T and already spun out what we
would have called Western Electric in the days (and hence the UNIX heritage).
6 Dec
6 Dec
7:23 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
Well, sure in 1963 the T1 carrier was a huge pipe. It was a huge pipe in 1970. It was
also a huge pipe in 1980 for business. (Not so for the telcos, as ATT had Metrobus in
the 80’s and the telcos had SONET in the 90’s—-completely inaccessible but to the largest
corporations)
However, today, I have Fios with nearly 1 Gigabit up and down for a small fee.
Thank you Judge Greene!
(Let’s not forget, I now have access to a working v7 for free where the license previously
cost $28,000.)
Bill Corcoran
On Dec 6, 2017, at 1:49 PM, Jon Steinhart
<jon@fourwinds.com<mailto:jon@fourwinds.com>> wrote:
Clem Cole writes:
On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:15 AM, Jon Steinhart
<jon@fourwinds.com<mailto:jon@fourwinds.com>> wrote:
Can't answer your question directly, but I think that some of this was
the result of the prior consent decree banning them from being in the
data business. I seem to recall that it was technically illegal for
them to sell SW and don't know how giving it away would have been viewed.
I really think Jon is correct here. The behavior was all left over from the
1956 consent decree, which settled the 1949 anti-trust case against AT&T.
As the recipients of the AT&T IP, we used to refer the behavior as "UNIX was
abandoned on your doorstep." Throughout the 60s and 70s, the AT&T sr
management from the CEO on down, were terrified of another anti-trust case.
And of course they got one and we all know what judge Green did to resolve that
in 1980.
I described the activities/actions in detail in my paper: "UNIX: A View from
the Field as We Played the Game" which I gave last fall in Paris. The
proceeding are supposed to go on line at some point. Send me email if you want
the details and I'll send you a PDF. I'm holding off cutting and pasting
here
for reasons of brevity. For an legal analysis I also recommend: “AT&T
Divestiture & the Telecommunications Market”, John Pinheiro, Berkeley Technical
Law Journal, 303, September 1987, Volume 2, Issue 2, Article 5 which I cite in
my paper.
Clem
There's another aspect of this that I think that many people misunderstand
which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew
that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their
monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the
rest of us, not so good.
Some of us remember the days in which phones were reliable and you could
understand the person on the other end. Or when your phone lasted 60+
years. Or the current debate about whether it's ok to eliminate exchange
powered phones that work in an emergency.
During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone
and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought
"Yeah, give me more of that. It's 60 years old, still works better than
what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still
work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split."
Not to mention it ended one of the best research labs in history.
Jon
8:30 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 07:23:00PM +0000, William Corcoran wrote:
Well, sure in 1963 the T1 carrier was a huge pipe.
It was a huge pipe in 1970. It was also a huge pipe in 1980 for business. (Not so for
the telcos, as ATT had Metrobus in the 80’s and the telcos had SONET in the
90’s—-completely inaccessible but to the largest corporations)
However, today, I have Fios with nearly 1 Gigabit up and down for a small fee.
Thank you Judge Greene!
(Let’s not forget, I now have access to a working v7 for free where the license
previously cost $28,000.)
But that was the flip side of being allowed to maintain a monopoly --
you could get phone service damn near anywhere, while getting FiOS
service is possible only in geographic regions small enough to be a
rounding error compared to POTS penetration. Near-universal service was
the burden AT&T was required to bear. Now, nobody is bearing it.
The current state of bandwidth is great if you're in the right place at
the right time. For everyone else in the US nothing is getting better.
Even 100mbit service is unavailable to the majority of the nation, let
alone laughably bizarre requests like "reliability."
khm
11:59 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
The capital investment regime changed. AT&T like all the other telcos
used utility scale funding options, to buy asset with a 50+ year life
and then reaped the benefits against the long tail of payment on the
investment funding to make it.
Fast forward to the 1970s and people decided they'd rather sweat an
asset fast, make a huge Return on Investment, and let dumb schmucks
from their parents generation dig holes to earn low interest income
for 50 years. Who wants to live forever! Cocaine on aisle three, Junk
bond finance, speculation, deregulation... Pretty much everything
we're using right now, right down the food chain comes from that
decision. My laptop is in a three year depreciation cycle. My ISP is
desperately trying not to have to spend money every 5-10 years
re-engineering the switching and routing logic behind my
fibre-to-the-home. The glass in the ground will last 50 years, but the
government expects funding to complete its capital cost debt return
inside 5. (insane)
Admittedly, given the rate of change in technology, I think there was
some coupling. If you had just invested in a strowger exchange and
somebody showed you a transistor, if you were smart your heart was
sinking: Kid was in meccano, not in mechanical switching any more...
On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 6:30 AM, Kurt H Maier <khm(a)sciops.net> wrote:
On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 07:23:00PM +0000, William
Corcoran wrote:
Well, sure in 1963 the T1 carrier was a huge
pipe. It was a huge pipe in 1970. It was also a huge pipe in 1980 for business. (Not
so for the telcos, as ATT had Metrobus in the 80’s and the telcos had SONET in the
90’s—-completely inaccessible but to the largest corporations)
However, today, I have Fios with nearly 1 Gigabit up and down for a small fee.
Thank you Judge Greene!
(Let’s not forget, I now have access to a working v7 for free where the license
previously cost $28,000.)
But that was the flip side of being allowed to maintain a monopoly --
you could get phone service damn near anywhere, while getting FiOS
service is possible only in geographic regions small enough to be a
rounding error compared to POTS penetration. Near-universal service was
the burden AT&T was required to bear. Now, nobody is bearing it.
The current state of bandwidth is great if you're in the right place at
the right time. For everyone else in the US nothing is getting better.
Even 100mbit service is unavailable to the majority of the nation, let
alone laughably bizarre requests like "reliability."
khm
7 Dec
7 Dec
2:03 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
T1 wasn't cheap nor ubiquitous. I ran the networking for the degree granting
public colleges in NJ (which on the whole is a fairly metropolitan area) but there were
places we couldn't get it.
It was also expensive. Old school copper T1 required repeaters every quarter mile or so.
Debugging could be fun. At least our telco (NJ Bell) back then could move the loop
back around while I did tests to tell them where the line was failing.
And yeah, I live in one of those backwaters now. No cable, no fiber optic anything. I
use two DSL lines to get an aggregate 20M down 1.5M up. That's the best the vesiges
of the old GTE telco down here can do.
ATT has fiber in communities down the road but we're too sparse to attract their
interest. Comcast won't even pull in a local drop from the main road.
3:34 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
Oh, yes! I remember the copper T1’s eventually traveled over a single pair using ADSL at
high voltage. In our metropolitan area, the copper plant had loading coils
everywhere—undocumented. If your copper T1 had the misfortune of having a loading coil
somewhere in its path then your circuit was doomed. Plus, these little Pairgain’s would
literally explode inside the manholes. Copper and T1s should have been outlawed.
Especially, since using fiber for everything but the last foot (TLF, lol) was far more
reliable.
I do hope that the archivists view the delivery mechanisms like the T1, POTS, and so on as
having historical significance and are inextricably linked to UNIX. Talking to anyone
that worked on the Bell System (and later telcos) always reveal great stories. Many are
worthy of preservation.
Incidentally, I had a similar issue with a staffer needing remote access. There were no
viable wired solutions. However, surprisingly, 4G MIFI with an unlimited data plan
actually was a stable solution—-and she even received a dedicated IP.
Bill Corcoran
On Dec 7, 2017, at 9:04 AM, Ron Natalie
<ron@ronnatalie.com<mailto:ron@ronnatalie.com>> wrote:
T1 wasn't cheap nor ubiquitous. I ran the networking for the degree granting
public colleges in NJ (which on the whole is a fairly metropolitan area) but there were
places we couldn't get it.
It was also expensive. Old school copper T1 required repeaters every quarter mile or so.
Debugging could be fun. At least our telco (NJ Bell) back then could move the loop
back around while I did tests to tell them where the line was failing.
And yeah, I live in one of those backwaters now. No cable, no fiber optic anything. I
use two DSL lines to get an aggregate 20M down 1.5M up. That's the best the vesiges
of the old GTE telco down here can do.
ATT has fiber in communities down the road but we're too sparse to attract their
interest. Comcast won't even pull in a local drop from the main road.
5:08 a.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
William Corcoran writes:
Well, sure in 1963 the T1 carrier was a huge pipe.
It was a huge pipe in
1970. It was also a huge pipe in 1980 for business. (Not so for the telcos,
as ATT had Metrobus in the 80’s and the telcos had SONET in the
90’s—-completely inaccessible but to the largest corporations)
However, today, I have Fios with nearly 1 Gigabit up and down for a small fee.
Thank you Judge Greene!
(Let’s not forget, I now have access to a working v7 for free where the license
previously cost $28,000.)
Bill Corcoran
Well yes, the consent degree made that possible. But remember that a whole pile
of the technology came from BTL and that sort of stuff isn't getting done at the
same level without research funding.
And lucky you. I pay $450/month for a T1 which is the best that I can get where
I live because there is no universal service.
3:09 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 09:08:20PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
And lucky you. I pay $450/month for a T1 which is the
best that I can get where
I live because there is no universal service.
For you folks with crappy net connections, first I have felt your pain,
my condolences. I live in the Santa Cruz mountains in a rural area even
for the mountains. So no cable, no reliable DSL.
But what we do have is line of sight to a tower on Loma Prieta. I worked
a deal with Etheric where I get 8Mbit down and up guaranteed and they let
it burst to available space on the radio. I average about 20 down/up, it
sometimes goes lower but that's the average. Just tried now and 25 down/up.
I worked a 5 year prepaid deal with them and got them down to $130/month.
It's point to point wifi and works really well. See if you can get some
of that.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
11 Dec
11 Dec
6:17 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
There's another aspect of this that I think that many people misunderstand
which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew
that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their
monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the
rest of us, not so good.
Except that the new AT&T, liberated from the regulatory chains of the
Bell operating companies, never learned how to compete in the free
market. They got their clock cleaned by the competition. In
desperation they bought Olivetti and only managed to run it into the
ground.
-Paul W.
6:39 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 1:17 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com>
wrote:
To be fair you are both right. I think at the time Charlie Brown and Team
at AT&T wanted to make a go at IBM and DEC (*i.e.* large systems) and
Paul's right, they missed.
But Jon is right that they had realized that it going to be a data centric
business and he and his team felt that the current consent decree we going
to keep them from being players in it.
To me there were a couple of issues. The Phone System and 'TPC' was
centrally controlled (a lot like a communist country). Where it worked,
it was fine. But... the problem was that anything outside their view of
reality was a threat. It's funny as the time, IBM, DEC et al were trying
to build centrally managed (closed garden networks) too, just like the
phone system, so it was not a stretch for them the think that way.
IP and datagrams were very much built on no central control, which was
something TPC thought was bad and fought. I remember so, so many of those
fights at the time and trying to explain that IP was going to win. In
the end, it was MetCalfe's law (which was formulated on observations about
the phone system) that caused IP to win, along with "Clark's Observation"
making everything a "network of networks" instead if a single managed
system - which made the plumbing work.
So while I find it sad to see Comcast, Current version of AT&T, Verizon
et al, all want to see the net neutrality go away, I do not find it
surprising. Its the same behavior as before.
What would have happened if Judge Green had not broken them up? I do
think broadband would be more universal, but .... I suspect AT&T would
have fought it and tried to use things that dreamed up (ATM, ISDN, et al).
My 2 cents....
Clem
There's another aspect of this that I think that many people
misunderstand
which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly
what they wanted. AT&T knew
that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their
monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the
rest of us, not so good.
Except that the new AT&T, liberated from the regulatory chains of the
Bell operating companies, never learned how to compete in the free
market. They got their clock cleaned by the competition. In
desperation they bought Olivetti and only managed to run it into the
ground 
12 Dec
12 Dec
12:27 a.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
I don't dispute anything you said, but I think there is another
element. It was simply an element of faith that to send voice you
needed to have a guaranteed rate of speed. Thus the interest in
time-division multiplexing. Deeply built into the Bell System
mentality was the notion that you shouldn't offer service unless it is
good service. Thus the dial tone -- if the network was jammed, they
didn't let you make a call. But the ones that got through ran with
no problems...
Recently I've been attempting to Skype on a group call with 5 people
in Europe. I would LOVE to have a guaranteed bandwidth for my
call. For "ordinary", non-time critical things, I'd be happy to
fight for bits on an equal footing with everybody else. Maybe the
best solution is two networks...
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From:
"Clem Cole" <clemc(a)ccc.com>
To:
"Paul Winalski" <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>
Cc:
"TUHS main list" <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:
Mon, 11 Dec 2017 13:39:44 -0500
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 1:17 PM, Paul Winalski
<paul.winalski(a)gmail.com [1]>
wrote:
On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com [2]> wrote:
There's another aspect of this that I think that many people
misunderstand
which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what
they wanted.
AT&T knew
that in the future the money was in data and were
willing to trade
their
monopoly for that business. From their perspective,
it worked.
For the
rest of us, not so good.
Except that the new AT&T, liberated from the regulatory chains of the
Bell operating companies, never learned how to compete in the free
market. They got their clock cleaned by the competition. In
desperation they bought Olivetti and only managed to run it into the
ground
To be fair you are both right. I think at the time Charlie Brown
and Team at AT&T wanted to make a go at IBM and DEC (_i.e._ large
systems) and Paul's right, they missed.
But Jon is right that they had realized that it going to be a data
centric business and he and his team felt that the current consent
decree we going to keep them from being players in it.
To me there were a couple of issues. The Phone System and 'TPC' was
centrally controlled (a lot like a communist country). Where it
worked, it was fine.
But... the problem was that anything outside their view of reality was
a threat. It's funny as the time, IBM, DEC et al were trying to
build centrally managed (closed garden networks) too, just like the
phone system, so it was not a stretch for them the think that way.
IP and datagrams were very much built on no central control, which
was something TPC thought was bad and fought. I remember so, so
many of those fights at the time and trying to explain that IP was
going to win. In the end, it was MetCalfe's law (which was
formulated on observations about the phone system) that caused IP to
win, along with "Clark's Observation" making everything a "network of
networks" instead if a single managed system - which made the plumbing
work.
So while I find it sad to see Comcast, Current version of AT&T,
Verizon et al, all want to see the net neutrality go away, I do not
find it surprising. Its the same behavior as before.
What would have happened if Judge Green had not broken them up? I
do think broadband would be more universal, but .... I suspect AT&T
would have fought it and tried to use things that dreamed up (ATM,
ISDN, et al).
My 2 cents....
Clem
Links:
------
[1] mailto:paul.winalski@gmail.com
[2] mailto:jon@fourwinds.com
1:05 a.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ] [ and besides it's "Addendum" ]
"Steve Johnson" writes:
I don't dispute anything you said, but I think
there is another element. It
was simply an element of faith that to send voice you needed to have a
guaranteed rate of speed. Thus the interest in time-division multiplexing.
Deeply built into the Bell System mentality was the notion that you shouldn't
offer service unless it is good service. Thus the dial tone -- if the network
was jammed, they didn't let you make a call. But the ones that got through ran
with no problems...
Recently I've been attempting to Skype on a group call with 5 people in
Europe. I would LOVE to have a guaranteed bandwidth for my call. For
"ordinary", non-time critical things, I'd be happy to fight for bits on
an
equal footing with everybody else. Maybe the best solution is two networks...
Steve
Well, many of us pine for the days in which one could get a quality voice call.
I agree with Steve that Bell did quality. But I'm not sure that the relationship
between bandwidth and dial tone is correct. It's my recollection that, because
they were more expensive than other parts of the exchange especially back in the
relay days, that the number of incoming registers was determined statistically.
The incoming register was the thing that showed up on your line, gave you dial
tone, accepted your dialing, hooked you up to the designated recipient, and then
went away to service another line. In other words, they were transient resources.
Theoretically every circuit on an exchange could be connected to another because
it was a switched circuit system. But there were only so many of the machines
available to make the connections. That's why it was hard to get dial tone in
an emergency; everybody was trying to dial at the same time and had to wait for
an incoming register to show up on their line. That's also why you get a busy
signal if you don't dial quickly enough; the incoming register times out, hooks
your line up to a busy tone generator, and goes off to do work for another line.
Note that that's all independent from whether or not there were available circuits
for toll calls between exchanges. I believe that it was the same general setup in
the good old (hackable) common-control days; you just didn't get to hear the key
pulse sender in operation.
Funny story on that which is when the SS1 (slave switch one) was being developed
which was possibly the first all digital exchange, Carl had a coding error that
forgot to send the ST pulse and took every key pulse sender out of service at the
Berkeley Heights exchange. I recall that the KP units don't time out and that
some very angry person over there had to go in and manually reset all of them.
But hey, they were the phone company and so were we so what could one do?
For those of you that don't know about the SS1 project, which you wouldn't know
about unless you were there, it was the first application of the digital filtering
work done by Jim Kaiser and Hal Alles. It used a pair of PDP-11/10s. Tried to
use LSI-11s but their idiotic memory refresh mechanism made them useless for real
time work. It might have been Heinz created MERT for this project.
Jon
1:45 a.m.
New subject: MERT?
Do we have those sources?
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
13 Dec
13 Dec
5:09 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
I pay for QOS from Asia to the USA. I’m super bottom tier, but it’s a heck of a lot better
than ‘normal let the bits fly’ type service. Some of those VPNs out there have private
data centre backhauls which can actually make things smoother. For a while I was looking
at doing one through Azure or Amazon but it was far less hassle to just go to my telco and
upgrade my internet to business class, and get onto a direct connection to a trans pacific
connection to San Francisco vs a shared line that went through Japan.
Sent from Mail for Windows 10
From: Steve Johnson
Sent: Tuesday, 12 December 2017 8:28 AM
To: Clem Cole; Paul Winalski
Cc: TUHS main list
Subject: Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
I don't dispute anything you said, but I think there is another element. It was
simply an element of faith that to send voice you needed to have a guaranteed rate of
speed. Thus the interest in time-division multiplexing. Deeply built into the Bell
System mentality was the notion that you shouldn't offer service unless it is good
service. Thus the dial tone -- if the network was jammed, they didn't let you make a
call. But the ones that got through ran with no problems...
Recently I've been attempting to Skype on a group call with 5 people in Europe. I
would LOVE to have a guaranteed bandwidth for my call. For "ordinary", non-time
critical things, I'd be happy to fight for bits on an equal footing with everybody
else. Maybe the best solution is two networks...
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From:
"Clem Cole" <clemc(a)ccc.com>
To:
"Paul Winalski" <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>
Cc:
"TUHS main list" <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:
Mon, 11 Dec 2017 13:39:44 -0500
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 1:17 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
There's another aspect of this that I think that many people misunderstand
which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew
that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their
monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the
rest of us, not so good.
Except that the new AT&T, liberated from the regulatory chains of the
Bell operating companies, never learned how to compete in the free
market. They got their clock cleaned by the competition. In
desperation they bought Olivetti and only managed to run it into the
ground
To be fair you are both right. I think at the time Charlie Brown and Team at AT&T
wanted to make a go at IBM and DEC (i.e. large systems) and Paul's right, they
missed.
But Jon is right that they had realized that it going to be a data centric business and he
and his team felt that the current consent decree we going to keep them from being players
in it.
To me there were a couple of issues. The Phone System and 'TPC' was centrally
controlled (a lot like a communist country). Where it worked, it was fine. But... the
problem was that anything outside their view of reality was a threat. It's
funny as the time, IBM, DEC et al were trying to build centrally managed (closed garden
networks) too, just like the phone system, so it was not a stretch for them the think that
way.
IP and datagrams were very much built on no central control, which was something TPC
thought was bad and fought. I remember so, so many of those fights at the time and
trying to explain that IP was going to win. In the end, it was MetCalfe's law
(which was formulated on observations about the phone system) that caused IP to win, along
with "Clark's Observation" making everything a "network of
networks" instead if a single managed system - which made the plumbing work.
So while I find it sad to see Comcast, Current version of AT&T, Verizon et al, all
want to see the net neutrality go away, I do not find it surprising. Its the same
behavior as before.
What would have happened if Judge Green had not broken them up? I do think broadband
would be more universal, but .... I suspect AT&T would have fought it and tried to use
things that dreamed up (ATM, ISDN, et al).
My 2 cents....
Clem
5:05 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
It absolutely was too late. By 1984 IBM had pushed out the AT, and although from there,
we had PC stagnation until 1987, in those three years the rise of the IBM PC Clone was so
insurmountable that IBM couldn’t push the PS/2 on anyone. IBM had utterly lost momentum
and the Compaq Deskpro 386 with Windows/386 had setup the world in which we live in
today.
It’s crazy how seeming short that window was, and yet a company the size of IBM or
AT&T couldn’t compete.
Sent from Mail for Windows 10
From: Clem Cole
Sent: Tuesday, 12 December 2017 2:41 AM
To: Paul Winalski
Cc: TUHS main list
Subject: Re: [TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 1:17 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/6/17, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
There's another aspect of this that I think that many people misunderstand
which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew
that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their
monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the
rest of us, not so good.
Except that the new AT&T, liberated from the regulatory chains of the
Bell operating companies, never learned how to compete in the free
market. They got their clock cleaned by the competition. In
desperation they bought Olivetti and only managed to run it into the
ground
To be fair you are both right. I think at the time Charlie Brown and Team at AT&T
wanted to make a go at IBM and DEC (i.e. large systems) and Paul's right, they
missed.
But Jon is right that they had realized that it going to be a data centric business and he
and his team felt that the current consent decree we going to keep them from being players
in it.
To me there were a couple of issues. The Phone System and 'TPC' was centrally
controlled (a lot like a communist country). Where it worked, it was fine. But... the
problem was that anything outside their view of reality was a threat. It's
funny as the time, IBM, DEC et al were trying to build centrally managed (closed garden
networks) too, just like the phone system, so it was not a stretch for them the think that
way.
IP and datagrams were very much built on no central control, which was something TPC
thought was bad and fought. I remember so, so many of those fights at the time and
trying to explain that IP was going to win. In the end, it was MetCalfe's law
(which was formulated on observations about the phone system) that caused IP to win, along
with "Clark's Observation" making everything a "network of
networks" instead if a single managed system - which made the plumbing work.
So while I find it sad to see Comcast, Current version of AT&T, Verizon et al, all
want to see the net neutrality go away, I do not find it surprising. Its the same
behavior as before.
What would have happened if Judge Green had not broken them up? I do think broadband
would be more universal, but .... I suspect AT&T would have fought it and tried to use
things that dreamed up (ATM, ISDN, et al).
My 2 cents....
Clem
11 Dec
11 Dec
8:11 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
While I am no fan of how AT&T ran its business, and the diminution of Bell Labs is
a capital crime to humanity, it must be noted that AT&T was competing with MCI, who
was cooking the books. “How can they offer phone calls for $0.01/minute?” The answer:
they couldn’t, but did anyway.
BTW, there are still good people doing good work at Bell Labs. But it certainly isn’t
what it used to be.
On 11Dec 2017, at 1:17 PM, Paul Winalski
<paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Except that the new AT&T, liberated from the regulatory chains of the
Bell operating companies, never learned how to compete in the free
market. They got their clock cleaned by the competition. In
desperation they bought Olivetti and only managed to run it into the
ground.
-Paul W.
11:26 p.m.
New subject: V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]
On 12/11/2017 3:11 PM, William Cheswick wrote:
While I am no fan of how AT&T ran its business,
and the diminution of
Bell Labs is
a capital crime to humanity, it must be noted that AT&T was competing
with MCI, who
was cooking the books. “How can they offer phone calls for
$0.01/minute?” The answer:
they couldn’t, but did anyway.
As I recall, MCI was also passing calls into Canada, routing them back
to the US and avoiding all sorts of fees. They were doing it to the US
Govt, I'm not sure if they did that to regular people.
art .k
2334
days inactive
2341
days old
27 comments
16 participants
participants (16)
-
Arthur Krewat -
Clem Cole -
George Michaelson -
Jason Stevens -
Jon Steinhart -
Kurt H Maier -
Larry McVoy -
Paul Winalski -
Random832 -
Ron Natalie -
Steve Johnson -
Warner Losh -
Warren Toomey -
William Cheswick -
William Corcoran -
William Pechter