Newsletters.love - The Personal Web Stack. For fun, misc newsletters that I come across. https://app.newsletters.love/collections/aORq36Ke75lOxAK5GC7PxYA868ekbOGE The Personal Web Stack. For fun, misc newsletters that I come across. computers are bad: avalanche technology >> https://www.ko-fi.com/jbcrawford <<< ║ ╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝ If you make an antenna that is a small loop, and then put a nonlinear device like a p-n diode in it, you end up with an antenna that behaves asymmetrically with regards to the phase of the radio wave passing over it. Intuitively, we can say that energy freely flows one way around the antenna, but not the other. The energy going that way becomes trapped, and gets re-emitted at at a harmonic frequency to the one that excited the device. This general principle is known as non-linear junction detection, and it has all kinds of interesting applications in fields like technical security, but its most common application is as one of the common types of retail anti-theft tagging. RECCO is basically a retail loss prevention system aimed at the ground. RECCO tags, called "reflectors" in RECCO parlance, are a simple foil antenna and diode, which makes them cheap and durable. They are so cheap, and compact, that some brands of alpine gear (especially in Europe) build RECCO tags right into products like snow pants and ski boots. Dainese even offers a bicycle helmet with one. The RECCO detector emits a powerful and very directional RF field in an ISM band, and then monitors for the characteristic harmonics emitted by an excited tag. This technology is *not* RFID, although it is conceptually similar, and has some of the same downsides such as a tendency for tags to be undetectable if they fall in the wrong point in the phase of the exciting field. For that reason, RECCO recommends that you have two reflectors at different locations on your person. The other main downside of RECCO is that it shifts most of the complexity into the detector, so they are relatively large and expensive. That's not so bad when you consider that detectors only need to be carried by ski patrol and SAR organizations. Rescuers basically aim the detector around until it picks up a signal, and then walk that way until they are aiming the detector straight down. That's where they dig. RECCO has even designed a detector that can be underslung by a helicopter, although its 100 meter range will require some sporty flying. The RECCO system is generally much more popular in Europe than in the US, but penetration is increasing here, and RECCO publishes a list of SAR organizations with detectors [link 3] that now includes a number of helicopters in the US and many major ski areas. I view RECCO as having a bit of a belt-and-suspenders relationship with traditional avalanche beacons. Avalanche beacons are more common, and all beacons also function as receivers, so "buddy rescue" by a bystander is far more likely with beacon technology. On the other hand, RECCO is usable over a longer range (although not *radically* longer) and the detectors are more directional and potentially faster to use. Most avalanche centers seem to recommend that you carry both, although the traditional avalanche beacon is more important. Finally, let's consider a couple of other pieces of avalanche safety equipment, which will lead us to consider efficacy. The core avalanche PPE consists of a probe and a shovel, and both are available in collapsible form for portability. Besides locating technologies, though, the major innovation in avalanche safety is the avalanche airbag. These are backpacks that you wear with a parachute-like ripcord. When you pull it, the bag inflates into a big airbag behind you. There are two ways this is helpful: first, the airbag will tend to float on moving snow, making it less likely that you are buried. Second, if you do become buried, you can deflate the airbag to leave you with a void in the snow. This gives you more air to breath, and room to move, making it more likely that you can dig yourself out. Avalanche airbags remind me a bit of the motorcycle airbags, as far as being very cutting-edge but also, you know, kind of questionable when it comes to efficacy. Manufacturers of airbags often advertise a 50% reduction in fatalities, but we have to take those numbers with a grain of salt. One of the problems with safety technology for extreme risks is that the actual risk event just doesn't happen very often. In less abstract terms, people are not caught in avalanches all that often, so the total number of people who have been caught in an avalanche while wearing an avalanche airbag just isn't that big. This limits the confidence we can have in efficacy findings. Well, I tracked down the paper that the 50% number comes from, and it's not actually that bad. They identified 424 people caught in severe avalanches, roughly half of which had avalanche airbags, and found that the airbags reduced mortality by 50% for people who successfully deployed them, and 41% overall given that there were various situations where they were not triggered or failed. The sample size is not huge, but it's bigger than I expected, and even at the bottom of the 95% confidence interval you still see a meaningful mortality reduction of around 10%. So, avalanche airbags seem to work, but they do cost around $1,500, so make of that what you will. Another interesting number from that paper is actually a bit of an aside: of the sample of people considered, 99% had avalanche beacons! A basic avalanche beacon can be had for about $250, which is pretty similar to cheap satellite messenger or very basic PLB [^3]. On the other hand, the passive nature of RECCO tags translates to a price advantage: a standalone reflector that you can clip to your pack only costs $30, which frankly still feels like a ripoff considering the simplicity of the design. I wonder if a RECCO detector would pick up enough RF EAS tags sewn into your clothing. Or shoplifted. One of the amusing things, though, is that despite being the cheap option (or perhaps beacuse of it), RECCO is relatively poorly backed by data. The number of actual rescues using RECCO remains small, although the development of the helicopter-based detector will probably lead to more successful uses. Or, you know, just stay out of the mountains. They may be calling, but you don't *have* to go. [^1]: Researching SNOTEL's history starts getting you into military R&D reports and formerly classified documents pretty quickly, and it's clear that both the US and other militaries have used meteor scatter for communications in the past. Possibly they still do today. If I were to place a wager, I'd say that SNOTEL is likely smaller than or on par with the military network that its equipment seems to have been adapted from. Unfortunately there is very little information in public about this military application (one of the reasons to suspect that meteor scatter is still relevant in the military context), so I can only speculate. [^2]: This is at least vaguely similar to a common safety device employed on the towers of ski lifts, where a brittle metal bar is placed under the sheaves that support the rope. The lift's safety loop is passed through the bar. If the lift badly deropes at the tower (that is, the cable falls off of the sheaves), it falls on the bar, snapping it. That interrupts the loop of wire that runs from the drive end to the opposite end and back, which shuts off the motor and releases magnetic brakes. [^3]: PLBs, or Portable Locator Beacons, are beacons made specifically for detection by the COSPAS-SARSAT satellite constellation. They are probably the gold standard in general search and rescue technology, and since they rely on a system operated as an international joint venture there are no service fees or subscriptions involved. Oddly, though, PLBs are actually pretty expensive. Here's the reason: authorities that mandate PLBs in various situations (e.g. the Coast Guard) have also specified rather exacting standards for service life, waterproofing, shock resistance, etc. This has the counter-intuitive result that two-way satellite messengers like Spot X or Garmin InReach can actually be cheaper to buy, but you will have to pay a service fee, and they are unlikely to survive the kind of "plane crash/sinking boat/car wreck" physical abuse that PLBs are tested for. As successive generations of more sophisticated COSPAS-SARSAT satellite payloads have launched, the system has also become very reliable, and in most circumstances PLBs are more likely to work than other types of satellite communicators. What I'm saying is that if you recreate in the middle of nowhere, you should consider buying a PLB, even though a good one can cost $500. At a five year rated lifespan, that's cheaper than a Spot or InReach plan even without the hardware purchase. Links: 1: https://computer.rip/2022-07-21-preventing-loss-dot-jpeg.html 2: https://computer.rip/2022-08-22-preventing-loss-dot-jp2.html 3: https://recco.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/reccodetectorsworldwide20251211.pdf sincerely, j. b. crawford me@computer.rip * * * Did you notice that I have a new feature where I can put some text down here? I'm usually using it for image credits, but some pieces that are more thoroughly researched than this one will get a little further reading list in the future. ================================================================================ Unsubscribe notify+trBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q@b.newsletters.love from this list: https://maleman.computer.rip/unsub/notify%2BtrBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q%40b.newsletters.love/dJTXHwuHBpTaMuJV Read online, tell your friends, submit to webrings, etc: https://computer.rip/ Questions? Problems? Lingering doubts? Just reply to this email. CAN-SPAM says I have to tell you if I'm a cop: COMPUTERS ARE BAD Seventh Standard LLC 1 (877) 456-4340 PO Box 26924 Albuquerque, NM 87125-6924 USA]]> Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:44:10 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/tavdsBGicJM5pQ6tixnj1y9VDE3qtRmi/p/tavdsBGicJM5pQ6tixnj1y9VDE3qtRmi computers are bad: the figure of the earth >> https://www.ko-fi.com/jbcrawford <<< ║ ╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝ Still, the realities of measuring long survey lines in the North Atlantic were a challenge. One veteran of an Air Force geodetic squadron tells of hours spent flying a modified B-50 Superfortress out of Florida to make line crossings along the North Atlantic Tie. The B-50 was used because it already had SHORAN equipment installed and plenty of room for the operators, but the distances involved in the island hops challenged the range of SHORAN and they had to fly as high as possible to improve their chances of receiving the reply pulses. The B-50 was a heavy aircraft not designed for high altitudes, and so they thundered high over the Atlantic, engines at maximum power, losing altitude with every turn and then waiting to slowly regain it. A film camera, called a reconnaissance recorder, took repeated photographs of the SHORAN instrument's display as operators adjusted the receiver and logged weather and signal conditions for later use in making corrections. The aircraft was essentially war surplus, not in its top condition, and the heat went out. You can imagine this group of unlucky airmen, flying back and forth over the ocean in an aircraft that was coming to match the outside air at 60 below Fahrenheit. With difficult reception conditions, atmospheric effects became more significant, leading to error. It took repeated crossings of every line to reach a target statistical confidence level in the result. Back and forth, colder and colder, freezing hands struggling to write out logs, until they got the okay to come back home. They had measured the distance between a ground station in Scotland, I believe in the outer Hebrides, and Iceland—over 550 miles. This was, at the time, the longest distance measurement ever taken by such direct means. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The North Atlantic Tie was completed in 1955. These are hard to judge, in part due to the intrinsic complexity of geodesy. Many measurements were taken of each line, multiple lines were measured between different ground stations, and multiple ground stations were set up on each island or continent. Some measurements were almost certainly accurate to within ten feet. On the other hand, the final trilateration network, after least-squares fitting, left a troubling large inconsistency in the distance between Norwegian reference stations that suggested some uncaught error. The North Atlantic Tie was one part of a variety of data used for the computation of the World Geodetic System of 1960, or WGS60, the first global datum. WGS60 is a direct ancestor of WGS84, the datum used by the Global Positioning System and thus the de facto datum of global geodesy today. We now know so much more of the figure of the Earth. WGS84 models the planet as an ellipsoid with semi-major and semi-minor axes of 6,378,137 and 6,356,752.314245 meters and an inverse flattening factor of 298.257223563. These three precise figures describe only the abstract reference plane, a utilitarian simplification of a geoid that we know to be so complex in its shape that the polynomial approximations used today, if fully expanded from the functions that generate them, would have millions of terms. These approximations are accurate enough to be their undoing; they become outdated as the shape of the planet physically changes from year to year. WGS60 was the beginning of global geodesy, but it was also the end of global trilateration. By the time the computation of WGS60 was complete, satellite Vanguard 1 had reached orbit. Phase and Doppler measurements of its radio transponder could be used to indirectly determine the position of a ground station relative to the satellite, and then by extension to another ground station. Some of these measurements were incorporated into WGS60, and its fast-following revision WGS66 was heavily corrected based on satellite measurements. The space age had come, and with it, the era of long-distance surveying had gone. The old school of geodesy had one last hurrah: WGS84 incorporated data prepared for NAD83, which heavily used the Transcontinental Traverse, a 1961-1976 effort that physically measured the United States by headings and distances. This was likely the last large-scale physical survey in the world. By the time it was completed, networks of satellite ground stations had been incorporated into various national geodetic systems, grounding the datums ironically in space. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Geodesy is a complicated field with many fascinating stories. For the sake of simplicity, I have left so many details out of this sketch of the first trilateration of the globe. Today, we take accurate geospatial information for granted, and military secrecy around geodesy is mostly a thing of the past. Our maps were hard-won, though, the result of decades of ingenuity and hard effort to answer questions that have troubled scientific thinkers for centuries. Magellan sailed around the globe, but he didn't know how far he'd gone. Hotine retired from the army to help found the Directorate of Overseas Surveys, for which he explored the world again... this time, counting every mile. ╔══════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ https://computer.rip/static/img/shoran/2.png ║ ║ "Portrait of Hotine" ║ ╚══════════════════════════════════════════════╝ sincerely, j. b. crawford me@computer.rip * * * images: - "Canadian Shoran Project," J. E. R. Ross, Symposium on Distance Measuring Equipment (1959) - "Shoran-A Precision Five Hundred Mile Yardstick," S. W. Seeley, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 105:4 (1961) - "Horizontal Control Network of the United States June 1931", NOAA archives - Portrait from an obituary in "Survey Review," 17:130 ================================================================================ Unsubscribe notify+trBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q@b.newsletters.love from this list: https://maleman.computer.rip/unsub/notify%2BtrBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q%40b.newsletters.love/dJTXHwuHBpTaMuJV Read online, tell your friends, submit to webrings, etc: https://computer.rip/ Questions? Problems? Lingering doubts? Just reply to this email. CAN-SPAM says I have to tell you if I'm a cop: COMPUTERS ARE BAD Seventh Standard LLC 1 (877) 456-4340 PO Box 26924 Albuquerque, NM 87125-6924 USA]]> Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:23:15 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/lDJ8et1pZJgOstFaHvN8HjNGOHnpyDrB/p/lDJ8et1pZJgOstFaHvN8HjNGOHnpyDrB This is All New This is All New
and I need to apologize  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌
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]]> Sat, 22 Aug 2026 16:01:19 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/hsWMcmlDfjPFV2KjeJpJgI40G9GNbN4d/p/hsWMcmlDfjPFV2KjeJpJgI40G9GNbN4d computers are bad: telephones caught in between From the genesis of the Bell System, telephones were considered just as much part of the telephone system as the central office equipment that supported them. Despite some early uncertainty, AT&T quickly settled on a pattern in which most telephone users paid a single monthly rate that included local calling, maintenance of the local loop to their premises (which we might call "access"), and the telephone itself. When you signed up for service, Ma Bell sent someone to install your phone. When you had trouble, they sent someone again to fix it. When you canceled, or fell delinquent on the bill, they sent someone by to take the phone away [link 1]. >From our modern perspective of the telephone as "consumer electronics," it's hard to picture paying rent on one. There were a number of reasons for leasing, which varied in prominence over time. Some of the uglier parts of the early 1980s involved disputes over which of these motives really mattered. Phones, we will see, were leased to consumers for many of the same reasons that early computers were mostly leased to businesses. This reflects a parallel shift in the computer industry, from "computer centers" to "personal computing," that happened around the same time and in a similar context. Before we get there, though, we need to understand how it came to be that telephones were "Bell System Property—Not For Sale." First, we need to understand the nature of telephones and telephone wiring when the practice of telephone leasing was established. Consider, for example, that the first phones in common use were not yet "common battery"—they had local batteries, a wooden box full of big dry cells that required regular changes. Telephones were much more maintenance-intensive, and those maintenance requirements produced a troubling question of responsibility. Most people, if they attempted a telephone call and couldn't understand the other party, would blame the phone company. They'd blame the phone company even if it was the fault of the caller or callee, for not changing their phone batteries. Consider these two facts: telephones required regular service, and if they didn't receive it, the result would reflect poorly on the reputation of the phone company. For both consumer convenience and the integrity of the telephone system, it made sense for the phone company to take responsibility for the end-user's equipment. Consider also the issue of compatibility. The type of telephone to be installed, the wiring conventions, and the configuration of the "network" of electronics in the phone could all depend on the type of exchange office it was connected to. Up until around 1970, party lines were very common (the majority of all telephones in the mid-century). They remained in use here and there into the 2000s. The problem was even more acute for party line customers: there were a half dozen fundamentally different selective ringing systems for party-line phones [^1], and different basic wiring schemes to match. One of the dominant discussion topics in telephone collecting circles is how to wire and re-wire vintage phones to work with specific equipment. Bell System Practices told technicians which wires to connect to which terminals, and which terminals to strap to which other terminals, to get a standard phone model to work in a given situation. Some scenarios required add-on boards, external cabinets, or modifications. This could all be true even of simple single-line phones, but the moment a business or large residence wanted a more complex system (e.g. with intercom calling), the complexity multiplied. What was even worse, especially in the case of party lines, is that a single malfunctioning or incorrectly installed phone could impact service along the entire phone line. In the worst case, even a humble single-party line could sap the capacity of the exchange's switching equipment if it stuck off hook. I should also make sure to emphasize the way that telephones were connected. Today, all telephones use "modular connectors" that simply plug into a wall socket. We shouldn't take modular wiring for granted; telephones were usually hard-wired to screw terminals until the 1960s, and even once connectorized the connectors were not standardized until 1974. In 1980, as a dark storm rose over the horizon, many telephones were still hard-wired, some still to complicated wall ringers or terminal boxes. Considering all these factors, it makes sense that telephones were professionally installed: it would have been difficult to instruct most telephone users on correct installation, and if they did it wrong you might have to send someone to urgently fix it anyway. Since telephone wiring of the era could physically pass through multiple residences, and telephones could impact the function of other parts of the system, the telephone company viewed access to customer premises and their equipment as a necessity to ensure good service. When it came to third-party equipment, well, nothing made Ma Bell more nervous. Western Electric telephones were carefully manufactured, thoroughly tested, and precisely adjusted for reliable and compatible operation. At the first sign of trouble with a telephone, the company would swap it out for a good one. If consumers connected equipment that *didn't* belong to the phone company, they would lose the ability to maintain and repair a key part of their product. Besides, people liked it, or at least so the phone companies argued. Technology was quickly improving. If your local exchange went from pulse dialing to touch-tone, for example, it was convenient that the phone was leased and would be changed out for a new one at the telephone company's expense [^2]. When Western Electric introduced new, compact designs like the Princess and Trimline, customers had the option of upgrading their bulky phone to a slick modern one, for only a modest increase in their monthly rate (the Princess phone, introduced 1959, is also a late example of a phone that required a special wiring arrangement to power the lighted dial). When a customer redecorated, they could contact the phone company and ask that their phone be changed out for one of a different color—usually at no cost at all. Up until the 1970s, when telephone leasing started to show weakness, most of these services were accomplished by sending a technician straight to the customer's home. As you can imagine, this level of service wasn't exactly cheap. The cost of leasing the phone was incorporated into your phone bill. If you wanted more phones, called extensions, you paid more—even if they were on a single line. If you wanted a fancier phone, you paid more. By the 1960s, leasing had clear downsides. Telephones were manufactured by Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T just like the operating companies, so any need to send a technician to service a phone was a hit to the shared bottom line. Western Electric emphasized reliability above all else, leading to phones that were fairly expensive to manufacture but could easily last 25 years in service. Bell operating companies, looking to cut costs, shifted towards a retail model in the 1970s in which customers were highly encouraged to take their phone to a PhoneCenter for exchange, rather than waiting for a technician to visit their home. The adoption of modular connectors was motivated in good part by the development of PhoneCenters. If a telephone was something that you could pick up at a store, and then take home and plug in yourself, did it really make sense to lease? Did consumers have any reason to lease phones besides Ma Bell giving them no other option? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AT&T was never a stranger to antitrust action. The Department of Justice filed a suit in 1949, alleging illegal monopolization under the Sherman act. It was generally acknowledged that telephone service was a "natural monopoly," meaning that the cost of installing and maintaining the outside plant made it inevitable (and, on grounds of economic efficiency, preferable) that a single company would dominate each market. The Sherman act and the Department of Justice did not necessarily object to this form of monopoly. The problem, what Justice considered anti-competitive behavior, was when the phone companies used their natural monopoly on phone service to force customer's hands in markets that might otherwise be competitive. One of the tricky problems, even in 1949, was interconnection of equipment. A vast and increasingly global electronics industry had come up with all kinds of new ways to use communications lines, but telephone customers could only use the equipment their phone company provided, and at rates set by the phone company. A fervent argument ended in the conclusion that AT&T had valid reasons to require customers to lease telephones, but that the anti-competitive impacts needed to be mitigated. This case, the first of a series of challenges to the Bell System, ended in a consent decree that shaped the future of both AT&T and, I do not think it is unfair to say, the entire American electronics and communications industry. AT&T would continue as a monopoly telephone carrier under state regulation (the principle of "common carrier"), but it would be prohibited from entering any industries in which it was not regulated. In other words: telephone service was a regulated industry, with rates and service terms set by state public utility commissions, and the system of regulation was felt to be sufficient to temper AT&T's desire for domination. On the other hand, if AT&T entered an unregulated industry, there would be no public commission to slow them down—and they would inevitably use their foothold as a regulated monopoly to promote, perhaps even mandate, use of their unregulated service. I have so far described the settlement in abstract terms, but even at the time it had an obvious practical implication: "computers," in the modern sense, had only just been conceived. But they were rapidly advancing, and AT&T's considerable leadership in electronics, massive R&D center (Bell Laboratories), and integrated manufacturing (Western Electric) made the telephone company an obvious contender for the nation's leading manufacturer of computers. Too bad: computers were an unregulated industry, so AT&T had to keep their hands off. The consent decree forbade AT&T selling general-purpose computers, broadly limiting their involvement in the electronics industry to telephone switching equipment and government contracts. AT&T mainframes never happened; instead we got IBM. The capability was still there, though, and complex needs of the telephone kept AT&T a leader in computer technology even with zero sales. Consider, for example, UNIX: perhaps the single most influential operating system ever developed, but a product of a company that was expressly prohibited from selling computers. In an era where software was virtually always bundled with hardware sales, that put AT&T in a very odd position, and forced the odd licensing terms of UNIX that allowed it to proliferate and organically grow. The 1949 consent decree held for decades, but it was always a bit uncomfortable. By the 1970s, AT&T's key regulator, the FCC, came to feel that it no longer made sense. The computer industry was much larger than before, interconnection of computers via telephone was becoming a common practice, and it was apparent that computers could both provide a communications service and be users of a communications service. AT&T built and used computers extensively, and one could argue that a telephone on an Electronic Switching System (ESS) was akin to a terminal on a mainframe computer. The first time-sharing services, such as BBN's introduced in 1962, might use the telephone network for communications but could also offer communications themselves in the form of electronic mail. Was the telephone system a computer service? Was time sharing a communications service? These were important questions that the existing regulatory and legal framework did not comfortably address, and they were only becoming more important as both AT&T and its competitors signaled a desire to try out the other side of the fence. Moreover, the FCC was concerned that the regulatory environment was holding the industry back. AT&T's complete control over the phone system had already started to crumble, first when an appeals court overruled the FCC to allow the use of non-electrical third-party telephone accessories in *Hush-A-Phone v. United States* in 1956, and then again when the FCC's own *Carterfone* decision extended the privilege to even electrical equipment in 1968. While the Carterfone itself was a special-purpose device, the decision set a precedent that was immediately leveraged by third-party telephone manufacturers. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Given the dominance that AT&T has held in this discussion so far, and that it holds in telephone history in general, "third-party telephone manufacturers" might come as a surprise. Of course there were telephones made overseas, for example by Ericsson, and some were imported to the US. But the US had its own competitive telephone industry: Automatic Electric was the Western Electric of GTE, AT&T's main competitor, and manufactured the telephones they leased. GTE looked at the possibility of selling telephones to AT&T's much larger customer base and saw green. Railroads and independent telephone companies needed equipment, and while they did buy from Western Electric, they also supported other manufacturers like ITT. Enterprising retailers started selling telephones from these companies outright (it is hard to tell who was first, but new department store chain Target was early to the game). The Bell System, in response, introduced harsh rules: customers could use third-party equipment, but only by connecting it to a device called a Protective Connecting Arrangement (PCA) leased from AT&T. The PCA was about as expensive as a telephone and installed the same way, requiring a separate PCA for each extension and preventing customers (or their chosen contractors) doing any work on the inside wiring, which remained Bell System property. This in-between state technically opened the telephone set market to competition, but in practice the rules and fees around PCAs were so onerous that few consumers were better off owning their own equipment. Pressure from telephone manufacturers and consumer groups, and no doubt some fear of another appeals court loss after *Carterfone's* clear precedent, the FCC promulgated new rules for third-party telephones in 1975. These are basically the same rules we follow today: the customer owns inside wiring past the network interface device (often called a demarcation point for this reason), and can do whatever they want with it, subject to a requirement that interconnected electrical equipment be certified as compliant with Bell System technical rules and registered with the FCC. This was the true beginning of the customer-owned telephone era: many customers would sign up for telephone service, buy a phone, and then simply report the FCC registration number of their own telephone to the phone company. That was all that was required to have service connected. Yet it creates a strange situation. You would have two options: you could pay the rate advertised by the phone company and receive a phone on lease, or you could buy your own phone and pay a somewhat lower rate. The latter was almost certainly a better deal, especially as the sudden creation of a retail telephone market drove prices radically lower. The former could *look* like a better deal, though, since the phone was "free" and its cost partially concealed in the phone bill. It could easily become even more confusing: let's say that you leased a phone from the phone company for years, and then went to check out this newfangled Target and set your eyes on a slick new ITT telephone. You buy it, take it home, and if you are lucky enough to have modularized connectors, you plug it right in (post-1975 wiring conversion kits were also readily available). Now you have a phone that you own, but you're still paying for the one that you leased, perhaps without even knowing. Hopefully you kept it: when you notice the overpayment and call the phone company to cancel the lease, they will expect you to return the phone, or otherwise pay them back for it. And thus came the first blow to telephone leasing: state regulators increasingly required telephone companies to separately itemize the cost of a telephone lease on bills. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- At the same time that *Carterfone* and its consequences shook up the rules around third-party equipment, the FCC initiated a more radical rework of telephone regulation. The computer had raised many questions, and especially the rise of time-sharing services and the nascent field of "information services" seemed to create a second, shadow communications industry that was unregulated (and thus competitive) but incredibly vulnerable to the whims of the regulated (and thus monopolized) telephone industry that provided the actual wiring. In keeping with the political winds, the FCC strongly favored market competition. It feared that AT&T had become "too big to regulate" and would use its chokehold on the nation's primary communications infrastructure to stamp out computer-based competition before it could bloom. To consider this thorny problem, the Commission had opened a broad docket called the *Computer inquiry* in 1966. Among the conclusions of that multi-year series of working papers and hearings was a new regulatory framework that differentiated between "communications" and "data processing" as industries. "Communications" was a natural monopoly like the phone system, and would carry on under regulation. "Data processing" was an increasingly competitive industry with lower barriers to entry, so it would remain unregulated. The FCC's largest concern, as in the 1949 Sherman act case, was what would happen when one company drove in both lanes—as AT&T still wanted to do. Such a company could probably use its regulated monopoly services to subsidize its competitive service (even if regulators tried to stop it, since accounting for what investment went where would be very difficult), unfairly blocking the efforts of competitors and driving up prices for consumers that had no other choice. On the other hand, completely prohibiting regulated common carriers from participating in competitive markets was, by this time, clearly having a negative impact on the development of computer technology. AT&T was a major center of expertise in computers that had to keep most of that expertise to itself, and innovative computer companies like Tymshare were nervous about offering communications features (and sometimes prohibited or arbitrarily limited them) for fear of straying into common carrier territory and, ironically, being forced to abandon their original unregulated services. The FCC attempted to address this conundrum through a rule of separation. One company would be allowed to participate in both regulated and unregulated markets if, and only if, the two activities were strictly separated into two different entities (one presumably a subsidiary of the other) with accounting and policy firewalls between them. In practice, the *Computer inquiry* was a mess. The information services industry was still in its infancy in the 1960s, so the FCC was writing rules without knowing very much at all about the companies they would apply to. The negative FCC acknowledged that there remained a clear gray area between "communications" and "data processing" (with, once again, electronic mail as the clearest example) but still wrote the rules around "pure communications" and "pure data processing" as two separate domains. The existence of a "hybrid" category was acknowledged but little discussed. One of the key problems related to the actual technical implementation of computer networks: telephone networks all used circuit-switching of analog signals and so there was, at the very least, a logical fiction that all information passed through unmodified. Computer networks, on the other hand, were adopting more sophisticated architectures that often involved rewriting, modifying, or converting messages along the way. Indeed, the lack of standardization of computer communications prior to their domination by the Internet meant that some amount of protocol conversion was practically required for widely-available services. And yet, this type of manipulation of messages appeared to be data processing, not communications. In practice, almost everything turned out to be "hybrid." This is why the *Computer inquiry* is now widely known as *Computer I*: it was almost completely replaced by the *second Computer inquiry*, or *Computer II*, in in 1976. *Computer II* kept the same basic principles as *Computer I* except that it completely redefined the two categories in terms of functionality, rather than technology. The *Computer II* categories are "basic services" and "enhanced services." Enhanced services were those that involved manipulation or storage of data, but the FCC made that determination from the perspective of a user rather than an engineer. If the *purpose* of a service, or the *activity* in the FCC's words, was manipulation, storage, or retrieval of data, it was an enhanced service. If not, it was a basic service, even if the technical implementation involved some degree of manipulation, storage, and retrieval. This had the effect of making the telephone network a basic service, and computer networks an enhanced service [^3]. The separation rule remained the same: one company could offer both basic and enhanced services, but only under terms of strict separation. To the FCC, *Computer II* seemed a relatively elegant solution to one of their major problems. Under the definitions adopted, basic services were limited to the actual communications network. Just about everything else would be an enhanced service, firewalled away from any benefit from the regulated monopoly. Simultaneously with *Computer II*, the advent of retail telephone sales (remember, despite appearances, this is actually an article about telephone leasing) triggered several lawsuits and petitions to the FCC. The general theory was the telephone companies used their monopoly status to do everything possible to steer customers towards leasing phones, even requiring at least one leased phone in some cases. The FCC recognized that this issue was not totally unrelated to the *Computer* inquiries: *Computer II* in particular had led to consideration of very similar problems around modems and the ability of basic service providers to restrict enhanced services over their network (during this period, for example, you could either lease a modem from the telephone company or buy one from IBM—they were functionally identical, but it was not always clear which option was more legally appropriate). More than one court ruled that, to settle the antitrust problem, the telephone monopoly needed to get out of the leasing business. The FCC agreed in principle and, even better, in practice: it was a simple and obvious step to sweep "provision of terminal equipment" under the same rug as "enhanced services." Telephones, like enhanced services, were a competitive industry with lower barriers to entry. Therefore, like enhanced services, the FCC ruled that a regulated telephone company could only lease terminal equipment through a strictly separated subsidiary. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the two threads of computer-related antitrust action and telephone leasing converge, in the curious form of the short-lived American Bell. Immediately following the conclusion of *Computer II* in 1980, AT&T disclosed to the FCC that it intended to take advantage of the new rules by forming a strictly separated subsidiary just as the FCC had contemplated (this was no surprise, as AT&T had been extensively involved in the inquiries). The mechanics were tricky, as AT&T had to come up with the capital to start a completely new subsidiary, with its own offices, support functions, equipment, etc., all without the appearance of subsidizing it with funds from their regulated business. Negotiations between the FCC and AT&T over these details delayed the incorporation of the subsidiary until 1982, when it emerged under the brand name American Bell. American Bell had two different divisions, in a way that seems quite incongruous without the lengthy regulatory context I have just unloaded on you: Advanced Information Systems, a computer and information services company widely expected to rival the likes of IBM, and Consumer Products, which manufactured and sold telephones. As a result of the strict separation rules, American Bell would have to replace the telephone leasing functions of the Bell Operating Companies (which were, in 1982, still part of AT&T). The storefronts the BOCs had opened to handle phones, the PhoneCenters, were quickly rebranded from the BOC logos to American Bell. AT&T also launched an expansion campaign that saw, for example, a PhoneCenter as a department in every Sears. They even sold phones wholesale to retailers, where erstwhile Western Electric products sat alongside those from ITT, AE, and the new bevy of imported Asian products [^4]. Most consumers, when they signed up for telephone service, would just go to a PhoneCenter or any other store and buy a phone. In fact, starting in 1982, leasing might not even be an option: the FCC had agreed to soften the blow to AT&T's balance sheet by allowing the BOCs to continue to sell or lease the telephones they already had in inventory. It was clear that this was a temporary accommodation only, though, as the FCC ordered that the BOCs could not purchase any additional inventory of customer premises equipment, and ordered state regulators to begin the process of removing telephone leases from the tariffs. Telephone company representatives told newspapers across the country that, starting in 1982, they would still "provide" a phone if they had one—but they might not, and customers couldn't be picky about the color. Some predicted their inventory would run out during 1983, and then customers would truly be on their own. Of course, customers didn't take this as hard as the phone companies did: retail phones were quite popular, and leasing numbers had been in decline since the late 1970s. We should finally talk about prices. From New York Telephone in 1983, as an example, you could lease a 500-style rotary dial phone for $3.03 a month. Purchasing the same phone at a PhoneCenter cost $45—so if you expected to have the phone for two years, you were better off buying. And we must keep in mind that Western Electric phones, while not totally immune to cost engineering, were still built to very high standards and came with a price tag to match. A more inexpensive phone, say one imported from Asia, was available at Radio Shack for $15. AT&T representatives discouraged the use of these cheap and ostensibly lower-quality phones, but struggled to say anything negative about a phone from, say, ITT, given that they were built to the same standards and sometimes to the exact same designs. The phone was no longer part of the telephone system. It was merely a consumer device, subject to the same forces as every other. But what of the many leased telephones *already in service*? The FCC referred to these as "embedded" phones, and had a very hard time deciding what to do about them. Because local telephone companies were prohibited from the leasing business, and the phones had always been handled under the auspices of Western Electric anyway, all of the leased phones They could simply require the telephone companies to stop leasing and take them back, but that would leave the telephone companies with a huge financial loss as they wrote off millions of phones they were no longer allowed to sell. They could require the telephone companies to offer customers a buy-out offer, but that created most of the same problems as having the companies lease them in the first place. Who would set the price? presumably the regulator, but how? Would they come with a warranty? For the time being, the FCC settled on a temporary solution: the embedded leased telephones would be left as-is. AT&T stridently objected. They were being told three things in the same breath: that they needed to come up with the money to fund a new independent subsidiary to sell telephones, that they had to keep servicing the existing fleet of leased phones, and that in no way could money from the latter be used for the former. AT&T suggested that the FCC should instead let them offer a buy-out on all leased phones, and then use the revenue to bankroll American Bell Consumer Products. The FCC brought back the question of how to set the price, especially given that some of these leased phones were very old. Would they need to be appraised? This stalemate lasted long enough for the ground to once again shake under the feet of the telephone industry. In 1974, as *Computer II* was just about to begin, the Department of Justice had decided to take action for the same reasons as the FCC. The monopoly questions around the telephone market, mitigated but not totally addressed by the consent decree in the 1949 case, had become clearer and more urgent. Here is where the story of telephone deregulation falls apart, and where I introduce the character we all know best: *United States v. AT&T*, the second one, a Sherman act antitrust case that ran in parallel to, but almost completely independent from, *Computer II*. Judge Harold Greene would have to answer the same questions as the FCC, and he did not answer them the same way. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The breakup of the Bell System is a fairly well known topic, so I will keep my explanation brief. The main outcome of the later *United States v. AT&T*, set in a 1982 settlement called the *Modified Final Judgment* (MFJ), was a requirement that AT&T divest itself of the local operating companies. This was a very different outcome from *Computer II*, but the reasoning along the way was similar: the two inquiries were just looking at different aspects of the problem. *Computer II* was motivated mostly by the up-and-coming world of computerized information services, so the FCC focused on AT&T's use of the telephone network to bolster its information services business. The MFJ, on the other hand, was mostly motivated by the rise of competitive long-distance carriers like Sprint and MCI. That problem caused the court to draw a different distinction: local telephone service was deemed a natural monopoly, because of the massive outside plant required. On the other hand, the development of microwave and fiber optic technology had radically reduced the cost of long-distance connections. Through products like Execunet, AT&T's competitors were already proving the viability of competitive long-distance services that interconnected with the Bell System at the local exchange. While the story of *United States v. AT&T* is a complex one, it goes roughly like this: the court initially favored a solution that seems more similar to that of *Computer II*, by ordering AT&T to separate itself from its vertically integrated but non-regulated components. That would mean separating AT&T's local and long-distance telephone operations from Western Electric and likely Bell Laboratories, probably by spin-out into a completely independent company. Ironically, this was the ultimate (and perhaps foreseeable) outcome, but nonetheless AT&T fervently opposed the loss of the division that would lead it into the computer future. Instead, AT&T got a very different outcome: if local service was the real problem, the antitrust problem could be addressed by breaking out local service instead. AT&T seems to have preferred this route, but it was no less traumatic. The MFJ set a timeline of two years to implement the judgment: On January 1, 1984, the Bell Operating Companies became independent of their former corporate parent. AT&T was prohibited from local telephone service, but in exchange, was permitted to continue its long-distance business with few compromises—besides the big one, that it would now face competition. For the parallel story of leased telephones, this was a huge wrench in the gears. Leased telephones had always fallen under the purview of Western Electric (which operated the service centers, for example), and local telephone companies were now prohibited from leasing phones anyway, so embedded leased telephones had been moved under the American Bell Consumer Products brand. But American Bell would now be not just a separate subsidiary from the telephone company, but a separate subsidiary of another company that the telephone company just paid for long distance service. Closely following state regulator decisions about separating phone lease billing, they became even more separate: starting in 1984, consumers with leased telephones would receive two completely separate bills, one from the bell operating company and one from American Bell. But there was another problem: The "Bell System" as it was known *was* the AT&T monopoly, and the court made sure to take it from AT&T with the rest of the monopolized service. Among the terms of the 1982 MFJ was a prohibition on AT&T using the Bell trademark and name (except in limited circumstances), a rule that the still-new American Bell directly violated. Beginning in 1984, American Bell was rebranded once again to AT&T Technologies, with AT&T Information Systems as one subsidiary and AT&T Consumer Products as another. The signs of over a thousand PhoneCenters were swapped out yet again [^5]. Ironically, the local operating companies, prohibited from leasing telephones since 1982, actually regained that ability post-divestiture. Since they were completely separate companies from AT&T in 1984, they were free to form their own "strictly separated" subsidiaries to offer unregulated services. You will notice the overlapping timelines: the *Computer II*-era prohibition on leasing took effect in 1982, the same year that the MFJ was signed. When the BOCs were telling newspapers that they didn't know how long their phones would last, they already knew that they would be permitted to resume leasing operations in 1984, they just weren't sure if they would. This did little for consumer confidence in leasing telephones. In practice, as a business decision, most of the BOCs never leased telephones again. The market was already going downhill, and they would have to try to sign up customers against the competition of *both* cheap retail phones and existing lease arrangements with AT&T Consumer Products. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Along the way, state regulators had slowly come up to speed with the FCC's rulings on leasing. The details here are very hard to tell, in part because they seem to have been different across both jurisdictions (different state regulators took different approaches) and markets (different Bell operating companies lobbied their regulators for different approaches). Further confusing things, some states seem to have adopted an approach to embedded leased telephones before 1984, and others after. These decisions were made in very different contexts and led to different outcomes. It shook out along these lines: starting in 1982, the FCC required AT&T to keep supporting leased phones for at least 18 months. AT&T offered to continue leasing services indefinitely, which was ultimately permitted. Still, the FCC was making (halting) efforts to implement *Computer II*, and pushed states to disposition the embedded leased phones. Most states did so by requiring, or perhaps more accurately allowing (since it had been their preference to begin with) AT&T to offer buy-outs to existing lease customers. Most of these buy-outs had to settle by 1984 as divestiture radically complicated the servicing of leased phones—sending a technician to repair or even retrieve one now required a complicated cost-sharing arrangement between the local operating company (which employed the technicians) and AT&T, all closely scrutinized by the FCC. Quite a few customers took the buy-out offers, but many did not, and by around 1985 the buy-out programs had faded away. For those customers who had leased telephones, and did not respond to mailings about the buy-out option, they simply remained lease customers of AT&T Consumer Products which issued a separate quarterly bill. And this is where the long twilight of the leased telephone begins. ╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ I put a lot of time into writing this, and I hope that you enjoy reading ║ ║ it. If you can spare a few dollars, consider supporting me on Ko-Fi. You'll ║ ║ receive an occasional extra, subscribers-only post, and defray the costs of ║ ║ providing artisanal, hand-built world wide web directly from Albuquerque, ║ ║ New Mexico. ║ ║ ║ ║ >>> https://www.ko-fi.com/jbcrawford <<< ║ ╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝ The 1982 *Computer II* restrictions and the 1984 *United States v. AT&T* restrictions came in rapid succession and, it was quickly observed, seemed to contradict each other in goals. You could be either a local telephone company or a long-distance telephone company but not both... or you could be a regulated company or an unregulated company but not both. The original goal of separating monopoly telephone service from "enhanced services" had effectively happened twice, by requiring AT&T to form a separate subsidiary for unregulated services and then two years later requiring them to divest most of the regulate services that had prompted the separate subsidiary to begin with. AT&T was mad, of course, but even the FCC came to agree that their attempts to promote free market competition had probably actually undermined it by taking away AT&T's ability to meaningfully compete. In 1986, a series of comparatively minor FCC decisions rolled back some of *Computer II's* implications, including the strict separation rule for AT&T. Free of the regulatory requirement for the business complexity (which had led to frustrations like the famous exclusion of AT&T Technologies employees from the Bell Laboratories library), AT&T reabsorbed its separate subsidiary. AT&T Consumer Products was once again just another division of the faltering giant. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AT&T's computer ambitions were ill-fated. Despite the introduction of the 3B line of UNIX-powered minicomputers, and even a line of PCs, AT&T never achieved meaningful success as a computer company. AT&T entered a broad financial decline after the breakup, and the faltering computer business wasn't helping. Still, AT&T Technologies—the division made up mostly of the former Western Electric and Bell Laboratories business units—had potential, or at least they liked to think so. In 1996, AT&T Technologies once again spun out, this time into a completely independent company called Lucent Technologies. Lucent became the home of the manufacturing and research operations, but because of the circuitous history of AT&T Consumer Products, the embedded leased telephones came along for the ride. There were, as best I can find, approximately one million telephones still under lease when Lucent became the lessor. As an accommodation for billing and to reduce consumer confusion, AT&T granted Lucent a license to continue to use the name "AT&T Consumer Products" for leasing. Lucent didn't do all that much better than AT&T had, and it was more or less stripped for parts over the following decade, leading to a 2006 acquisition by French communications technology Alcatel—creating Alcatel-Lucent, later part of Nokia. The leased phones took a different path, though. The consumer telephone business was not profitable for Lucent, and the PhoneCenters closed in 1995. In 1996, the division took on the name Lucent Consumer Products and shifted its focus to wholesale, although it continued to use AT&T branding in connection to leasing. In 2000, it all had to go. Lucent eliminated almost the entirety of its manufacturing capability, mostly as Avaya which produced networking products and business telephone systems. The consumer products division mostly went to the well-established Hong Kong manufacturer VTech, which continued Lucent's consumer products under the name Advanced American Telephones. But there was an exception: the lease contracts. In the year 2000, there were still several hundred thousand. That is where the story becomes especially difficult to follow. Lucent sold the phone leasing business to what Wikipedia calls "Consumer Phone Services," although I am now quite confident this company was properly called North Street Consumer Phone Services LLC. I do not know the meaning of "North Street," and I have found conflicting information on whether the company was based in New York, Miami, or somewhere in New Jersey. It probably moved around a bit. North Street seems to have incorporated in 1999, suggesting it may have been formed for this purpose. Further confusing things, as late as 2004 the leasing program was still "managed by" Lucent. I am unclear on what "managed" meant, but newspaper articles about phone leases in the era often feature statements from Lucent spokespeople despite the sale. At the least, Lucent was allowing North Street Consumer Phone Services to continue to use the AT&T name under license. Around 2006, perhaps in connection to Lucent's sale to Alcatel, the "managed by" relationship apparently ended. In 2008, North Street Consumer Phone Services was replaced by QLT Consumer Lease Services. I know very little about this company, I am not even sure if it is a descendant of North Street Consumer Phone Services or a result of another sale of the lease contracts. There can't be very many lease contracts left. Considering that most marketing for phone leases ended in 1982, anyone still leasing a phone today has most likely been making payments for the last 45 years. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Are leased telephones a scam? Perhaps, even probably. By the mid-1990s, the FCC and Federal Trade Commission realized that an inadvertent effect of the 1980s regulatory chaos was that consumers who had dutifully paid their phone bills but not otherwise paid much attention were likely still making lease payments. That probably described most telephone customers who had started service before '82, but by the mid-'90s leased telephones were already becoming a distant memory for most Americans. How many people had a leased phone that they had forgotten about? How many people had a leased phone that they had replaced with one they bought, but never returned? In theory the separate billing rules mitigated the problem, but it was clear that not everyone read their bills closely. The fact that the Bell Operating Companies and American Bell Consumer Products had switched to billing on separate days was intended to reduce confusion by making sure the bills arrived completely separately, but especially after phone leases switched to quarterly billing (due to their small amounts) it probably made it more likely that people would think *both* were the phone bill and simply not notice that they were getting two different sets. In 1996, the FCC and FTC issued a press release warning consumers to check their phone bills for forgotten lease payments. An accusation was made that Lucent Consumer Products was functionally exploiting the elderly, since older people were more likely to have had the same telephone service for decades and probably less likely to critically consider a $15 quarterly lease bill. When you did the math, it was easy to find customers who had had the same leased phone for the last 20 years and paid over one thousand dollars for it. As time passed, more and more of those customers didn't even have the phone any more, but they still got the bills, and they still paid. When asked, many thought the prominently AT&T-branded lease bill was for long-distance calling (it didn't help that Lucent seems to have used some very non-specific language on the bill like "equipment fee"). In 2002, lawsuits in several states were combined into a national class action case that alleged that AT&T and its various successors had scammed vulnerable Americans out of many millions of dollars by simply continuing to bill them. While no one involved admitted fault, they did settle by creating a fund of up to $300 million to reimburse customers who filed claims that they were paying a lease for a phone they did not use. The reimbursement program ultimately paid out less than $10 million due to lack of claims, which consumer advocates quickly criticized on the grounds that people who did not realize they were paying a lease bill probably weren't following developments closely enough to find out about a class action settlement they needed to apply to. Interestingly, even the composition of the settlement fund was complex. The billing at issue had happened under multiple companies, and many of the rounds of divestiture and acquisitions had come with contractual allocations of liability. AT&T (the original parent company) and Lucent (the spinoff) ended up bearing most of it, but amusingly, National Cash Register was hit for a few million dollars because of liability assignments during the brief period that it was part of AT&T Technologies (the spinoff of Lucent included NCR, and assigned part of AT&T Technologies' liability to NCR that conveyed with the company when Lucent spun it out again). NCR basically caught a stray for a business they were never involved in. And yet this is still going—in 2004, 2005, 2008, it's easy to find newspaper articles, cable news segments, and AARP columns recounting mostly elderly people who had paid thousands of dollars in lease fees for telephones they no longer had. AT&T, Lucent, and QLT have never had much to say in their defense. In the late '90s, Lucent pointed out that phone lessees got all kinds of fringe benefits, not only the ability to exchange their phone for a different color but a "lease rewards" discount program. QLT offers the same discount program today, the same type of pharmacy discount and coupon card that you can get dozens of other ways. It's very hard to find much information on QLT, although they're clearly still alive and issuing a charming thrice-yearly newsletter called *Lease News & Views*, presumably as a bill insert. Well, I say still alive, but the Spring 2026 issue is late and it seems like Summer 2026 ought to come out any day now. I have a lot of basic questions about QLT. For one, what does QLT mean? Well, I figured that one out: it doesn't mean anything, it's just supposed to sound like "quality" when said out loud. I can't find this clearly stated anywhere, but my assumption is that either AT&T revoked the license agreement to the AT&T brand or QLT independently decided that it was better to stop using it—either way, in response to the press coverage and lawsuits that attributed consumer confusion to the phone company branding on bills. I also wonder how many customers they have. In 2012, QLT responded to a CBS article on yet another elderly person paying for a leased phone for 30 years by noting that they have over 300,000 customers. How many of them are still paying, 14 years further on? QLT has "11-50 employees" per LinkedIn, several of which have been with the operation since divestiture. In response to a 2019 article on elderly people still paying phone leases, QLT "Our customer research data shows that approximately three quarters of our surveyed leasing customers also have at least one purchased phone in their home." To me, this seems to undermine QLT by suggesting that many of their customers are making lease payments for no reason, but they spin it by positing that these customers demand the reliability of a leased phone as a backup option. What I can tell you is this: If you want a Western Electric 500, or really a Cortelco 2500, they're only $5.95 a month from QLT in touch-tone. Or $45 to buy outright. [^1]: Contrary to the impressions of many, selective ringing was common on party lines, especially in more urban areas. These systems allowed the central office to ring only a single telephone on the line, instead of all of them, making party lines a lot more convenient to the user. It was also technically quite complex: a common scheme involved sending different A/C ringing frequencies to carefully-tuned solenoids that would only travel far enough to strike the bells when made resonant. [^2]: Of course, this "feature" is much undermined if you remember that telephone companies of the era usually charged more for touch-tone service. This is one of many ways that the story of leased telephones is nuanced and full of conflict. [^3]: At least for most things you would consider a "computer network." It's sort of difficult to draw a clear line here even today, so we can sympathize with the FCC's difficulty in the 1970s. [^4]: A consequence of this shift was the separation of the telephone manufacturing business from Western Electric, one of many cuts that put America's greatest manufacturer into terminal decline. As with so many other parts of this story, though, the telephones themselves lived on. Many of the original Western Electric designs are still manufactured today by Cortelco, actually a descendant of Kellog via ITT, which had purchased manufacturing licenses for WE's designs going back to the 1950s. [^5]: I am not confident that I am describing the corporate structure entirely correctly, because in practice AT&T went through several rounds of reorganization. AT&T Technologies is sometimes described as a subsidiary of AT&T Information Systems, for example, the opposite of how I put it. I suspect that more than one version was correct over time. Links: 1: https://computer.rip/2026-06-14-hookswitch-to-grave.html sincerely, j. b. crawford me@computer.rip ================================================================================ Unsubscribe notify+trBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q@b.newsletters.love from this list: https://maleman.computer.rip/unsub/notify%2BtrBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q%40b.newsletters.love/dJTXHwuHBpTaMuJV Read online, tell your friends, submit to webrings, etc: https://computer.rip/ Questions? Problems? Lingering doubts? Just reply to this email. 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]]> Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:30:34 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/ACScA3tTWvrsfFnKFW97sW2vKWYhjGx3/p/ACScA3tTWvrsfFnKFW97sW2vKWYhjGx3 computers are bad: email encryption Aspects of an asymmetric key management scheme to support the above features are provided by the directory system authentication framework, described in Recommendation X.509. The directory stores certified copies of public keys for MHS users which can be used to provide authentication and to facilitate key exchange for use in data confidentiality and data integrity mechanisms. The certificates can be read from the directory using the directory access protocol described in Recommendation X.519. > > Recommendations for other types of key management schemes, including symmetric encryption, to support the security features are for further study. End-to-end encrypted email requires two basic parts: First, there must be a technical format for moving encrypted messages through the message transfer system. X.400 handily resolves this by the use of ASN.1 definitions that allow for encrypted messages bodies, thus making most of that someone else's problem. X.400 actually contemplated a lot more when it comes to security features, things like non-repudiation of delivery, that required more complexity in message transfer but didn't make it to the modern day. We'll just ignore those for now. Second, there has to be a key infrastructure. You need some way of obtaining a public key for the person you want to send a message, and of being sure that it really belongs to them. This is important both for encrypting outbound email and for authenticating inbound email, since end-to-end encryption is usually deployed alongside end-to-end authentication using the same cryptographic infrastructure. In the case of X.400, that whole problem is deferred to the X.500 family of protocols. What is X.500? It's our old friend, directory access protocol [link 3]. The X.500 directory standards are the comparison by which LDAP is "lightweight," and there is a parallel story: LDAP is the scrappy internet protocol that won against the X.500 Goliath. So the gist of X.400 email security is this: use the directory to look up the recipient's public key, and then encrypt the body of the ASN.1 message object to that key. In actuality, the details are different and more complicated, but that goes for everything OSI and the simplified sketch here is enough to get the gist. It's straightforward. There are just two problems: ASN.1 as a format for messages did not succeed, and the concept of a global directory never materialized. To the extent that X.400 succeeded, its security features were actually a big motivation. The ISODE Consortium, which had created something like a reference implementation of much of the OSI application suite, is still around today as Isode Ltd and still sells a message handling system. There are a few other maintained X.400 descendants as well. One of the largest customer bases is military: while less common in the US (keep in mind that *internet email* was originally developed under the aegis of the US military), a number of European countries adopted X.400 as their secure messaging solution and still have extensive reliance on it in military and intelligence organizations. Other enduring strongholds of X.400 include global aviation (ICAO's messaging system is X.400-based) and electronic data interchange, or EDI, a standardized system of financial and supply chain messaging between ERPs. It is no coincidence that these are the same kinds of applications where protocols like X.25 survived unusually late (indicating a high affinity to long-running, legacy systems) and that they are contexts where the participants and messaging are governed by a central entity. That means that a directory exists, which means that the key distribution problem is vastly simplified. It also means that the software in use, both transfer agents (e.g. servers) and clients, are standardized and usually purchased from vendors that have specifically designed them to work well in an X.400 environment. In other words, they are contexts that are very different from email, in which people exchange messages between a huge number of organizations and many users are simply on "mail providers" that are not an organization in a traditional sense. This means that there is no meaningful directory capability in the email system. Email is also used with a hugely diverse landscape of clients, imposing a steep penalty on the "complicated message encoding that requires interaction with a complicated directory system" part of the design. Since X.400 proved a nonstarter in *most* of the email world, what about encryption for the rest of us? Well, this situation gets complicated and sad. ## MIME First, it's helpful to expand a bit on the involvement of MIME, the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. MIME originated as a solution to the 8-bit problem with internet email, as a way to encode non-ASCII text and binary files in a consistent, reliable way. Along the way to achieving this aim, it introduces the concept of a "multipart" message which has multiple distinct objects as a body instead of just one string of text. We use this multipart feature heavily today, both for obvious applications like file attachments and for more subtle ones like HTML emails that provide a plaintext variant. I don't think it's totally wrong to summarize MIME as "email 2.0," because while it is limited in scope to the message format (not changing the transport protocols), MIME adds a lot of new functionality to email that we now consider basic requirements for a messaging system. The history of MIME has a lot more twists and turns than you might expect, which reflects the difficulty of making major changes to a system as distributed and heterogeneous as internet email. Still, the MIME authors seem to have had a similar view that MIME was a significant evolution of email by standardizing message bodies and paving the way for future extensions to that standard, adding new functionality. This quote from RFC 1521 (1993), the first MIME standard, is informative: > STD 11, RFC 822 defines a message representation protocol which specifies considerable detail about message headers, but which leaves the message content, or message body, as flat ASCII text. This document redefines the format of message bodies to allow multi-part textual and non-textual message bodies to be represented and exchanged without loss of information. This is based on earlier work documented in RFC 934 and STD 11, RFC 1049, but extends and revises that work. Because RFC 822 said so little about message bodies, this document is largely orthogonal to (rather than a revision of) RFC 822. In other words, existing email standards addressed how messages are conveyed between hosts, but did little to address what would actually go into those messages. MIME addresses that problem by creating a proper standard for message bodies, one that adds features while contending with the unfortunate limitations of the many pre-MIME email implementations. The many RFCs around the general topic of MIME (and other proposals for email body formats) spend a lot of time contemplating how these new message types would be handled by email clients that did not understand them. Email technology is generally easy, email standards are hard. ## PGP As these standards efforts marched on, the fast-growing field of computer cryptography had its own ideas. The first major event was cryptographer Phil Zimmerman's unceremonious 1991 release of a tool called PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy. The story of PGP is a long one, jumping from a casual release to an activist Usenet group to criminal charges to the foundation of PGP Inc to commercialize the system. The funny thing is that PGP itself is not that important to the story of PGP. Despite the corporate ambitions of the company bearing that name, PGP started as a loosely academic or activist project, and it ended up that way in the long term as the open-source clone GnuPG (GPG) displaced PGP in the marketplace. PGP Inc became part of Symantec and faded into the obscurity that most Symantec products do. Along the way, PGP and GPG implementations rode the roller coaster that was 1990s cryptography, swerving from algorithm to algorithm and growing a complex cipher selection system along the way. PGP was a general encryption tool and could be used for files or messages of any kind, but email was a key application. So how is a PGP-encrypted email actually conveyed? Well, it's not exactly pretty, but it aligns with the other messes we've already seen. PGP typically outputs ciphertext as either binary data or in a format called "ASCII-armored," which is base64 except with an optional CRC checksum trailer (which was deprecated decades ago). This is very similar to the PEM format widely used with modern cryptographic applications, and not by coincidence: PEM stands for Privacy-Enhanced Mail and is itself an artifact of a failed email encryption standard that produced quite a few RFCs. PGP's email application and PEM were under development just about simultaneously, and there was definitely cross-pollination of ideas between the two. PGP won, but not without taking parts of PEM along for the ride. In practice, ASCII-armored PGP payloads are sent one of two ways: first is "inline" format in which each part of a MIME-encoded email is separately encrypted and have otherwise usual MIME types (e.g. application/octet-stream), so that non-PGP-capable email clients will treat them as opaque files that the user can save off and process with a separate tool. The second approach is the "MIME" format in which the entire MIME-encoded email is encrypted whole and dropped into a new MIME document with the type "application/pgp-encrypted." The latter has better security properties (less metadata leakage) and tends to be more user-friendly and elegant in clients that are designed with PGP in mind, but fails very badly in non-PGP-capable clients which are not even able to separate out attachments. You can still process the email with an external PGP tool by saving off the whole body, MIME-decoding, decrypting, and MIME-decoding again, but you get a little frustrated just reading that, don't you? Today, this mess has become one of the two main criticisms of PGP. PGP is not the result of a huge, multi-party standards effort like X.400, but rather the product of a small group of people taking a pragmatic approach. Nonetheless, it grew up in the same climate and so survived with most of the same scars. From bottom to top, PGP is very complicated. Almost every part of PGP-encrypted email has multiple options, some of which are known to be insecure. Modern tools mostly follow sane defaults, but plenty of older tools remain in use. Key tools like gpg itself show their age with some of the least user-friendly interfaces ever designed. The immense difficulty faced by PGP users was the subject of seminal 1999 "usable security" paper "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt" (the paper that more or less invented the field of "usable security"), and most of the criticisms raised in that paper are still true of PGP implementations 27 years later. And that brings us to the second aspect of PGP, key distribution. We've seen, at least in sketch form, how PGP email is conveyed, the first challenge of encrypted email. But what of the second challenge—is PGP for use with a directory system? Well, the earliest examples of PGP de facto were, because they did not address key distribution at all. Very early on, though, PGP gained a novel concept called a "web of trust." The web of trust, or WOT, is simultaneously one of computer security's most intriguing and appealing concepts and one of its most inane and stupid. I'll try to explain it succinctly. You are Alice, and you want to send an email to Bob. The "why" is not important, these are timeless characters of cryptographic explanations and they have a timeless need to securely exchange messages. If you know Bob in person, say because you are colleagues at an institution, the key distribution problem is simple. You can perform calculations on a key, like a checksum, to produce a "fingerprint" which is unique to the key and short enough to not be completely impractical to read by eye. You, Alice, walk over to Bob's office and ask to see the fingerprint of his key. You write that down on a sticky note, and then in the future, you make sure to encrypt your emails to Bob using a public key that has that correct fingerprint. Easy as pie so far, but that doesn't scale well to situations where Bob is not within walking distance. And so the "web" enters: Bob may not be conveniently accessible to Alice because, say, he works somewhere else, but Alice's coworker Charlie might have been at a conference with Bob a few months ago. If Charlie took down Bob's key fingerprint, he can give Alice a copy when he gets back. Since Alice knows Charlie and believes him to be trustworthy, this is a pretty good substitute for getting the fingerprint straight from the horse's mouth. PGP's WOT model encodes this sneakernet approach to key distribution into a software implementation. A PGP user can "sign" another user's key, a way of cryptographically attesting that they believe that to be the correct key. These signatures are uploaded to public "keyservers" that allow anyone to query for a key and for the set of signatures it has received. If there are enough keys with enough signatures, you can treat the whole thing as a graph and try to find "trust paths" between Alice and Bob, even if doing so requires six degrees of separation[^1]. The tangled interconnection of keys and signatures verifying them forms a web: the web of trust. In practice, the tide seems to have turned against the WOT model by the 2010s, and today it has been completely abandoned. It didn't scale as well as its proponents had hoped, usability problems with the tooling discouraged participation, and both the implementation and concept were complex enough that poor user understanding undermined the benefits. Today the WOT has fundamental problems (mostly related to the open keyservers) that have made it practically unusable, and I think it is fair to call it a failed experiment. Further extending that fairness, we should note that the WOT was surely an inspiration for the vastly simplified key verification schemes that appear in most modern end-to-end encrypted messengers. >From its messy academic origins to its transformation into an open project, PGP enjoyed a lot of prominence in academic and "cypherpunk" communities during the 1990s and 2000s, but was less common in corporate environments. The WOT model only made sense in the absence of a centrally maintained directory, and while PGP could be used with a directory it was not the path espoused by its advocates. PGP was mostly used among researchers and hobbyists, the cryptographic establishment. In the Enterprise, there was another player: S/MIME. ## S/MIME S/MIME originated with RSA Security, the company founded to commercialize the RSA encryption algorithm. RSA Security survives today as a subsidiary of teacher's pension funds, although its prominence in the industry has generally declined. Back in the 1990s, RSA was on the cutting edge, so 1996's introduction of an RSA solution for email encryption got quick attention from industry. Over the following two years, RSA's product evolved into an IETF standard called S/MIME, for Secure MIME. S/MIME saw a series of new versions up to the present day, and is exceptionally rare in the academic and hobbyist world but fairly common in corporate and government environments, especially with Microsoft Exchange (having adopted S/MIME as its secure email option of choice after the failure of X.400 to take over inter-organization mail). Let's see how S/MIME handles the first challenge of encrypted email, encoding the message for transport. Well, as the name suggests, MIME is involved. The simple sketch is like this: an email is prepared as a MIME document, which is then encrypted into the form of a PKCS#7 document. PKCS, the Public Key Cryptography Standards, refer to a series of open standards memos published by RSA Security. PKCS#7 describes "Cryptographic Message Syntax" or CMS, a standard container for an encrypted payload along with various metadata. In the terminology of the time, S/MIME is said to "enhance" messages with the "security services" of PKCS#7. We still use the term PKCS#7 today, mostly to refer to cryptographic certificates serialized in that format. For email, on the other hand, PKCS#7 has been superseded by an IETF standard called simply "CMS." The CMS version of the email, which remember is an encrypted MIME document plus cryptosystem-related metadata, is then encoded as PEM (functionally Base64) and made the body of a MIME email with a type of "application/pkcs7-mime" (yes, I just said that PKCS#7 is gone from this application, but naturally the name has stayed). This is pretty much equivalent to the MIME version of PGP emails, and has basically the same upsides and downsides: it's relatively elegant and avoids a lot of weird edge cases in clients that support it, but it's quite hostile to clients without S/MIME support, which will be unable to make anything of the message. It also keeps many of the general downsides of MIME, and for example the RFC has to spend some paragraphs justifying why binary data is base64d and then converted to binary and then base64d again. Not having the extra layers of base64 involved would break interoperability scenarios with non-S/MIME tools! Overall, S/MIME isn't that dissimilar from PGP in this regard, although I would say that it is overall simpler and better standardized. That is not to say that it is "simple" or "well-standardized," these are only relative observations. S/MIME implementations are still quite complex, and interoperability problems can appear even between organizations running the same software, due to the many configuration knobs involved. RFC 2311 includes this gem, to give some of the flavor of it: > S/MIME provides one format for enveloped-only data, several formats for signed-only data, and several formats for signed and enveloped data. Several formats are required to accommodate several environments, in particular for signed messages. The criteria for choosing among these formats are also described. "Several formats are required to accommodate several environments" is the story of email in a nutshell... if not all of computing. Let's consider the second aspect of the encrypted email problem, then: key distribution. Here, S/MIME takes a very X.400 style dodge. The original S/MIME standards documents, as far as I can tell, do not address key distribution in any way except for oblique and incidental references like "validating the certificate to a trust anchor." This seems odd except in the context of S/MIME's development by RSA Security and, as it became an IETF standard, Netscape—the birthplace of SSL. S/MIME was intended for use with the PKI, the Public Key Infrastructure, which has a nuanced and sometimes vague history but fell out of a combination of X.500 concepts and implementation work by companies including RSA Security and Netscape. In other words, S/MIME grew up alongside SSL/TLS, and uses the same key distribution architecture. S/MIME emails are expected to provide the certificates that go along with the keys used (one of the reasons for the CMS container format), and those certificates are supposed to be signed by a Certificate Authority. ╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ I put a lot of time into writing this, and I hope that you enjoy reading ║ ║ it. If you can spare a few dollars, consider supporting me on Ko-Fi. You'll ║ ║ receive an occasional extra, subscribers-only post, and defray the costs of ║ ║ providing artisanal, hand-built world wide web directly from Albuquerque, ║ ║ New Mexico. ║ ║ ║ ║ >>> https://www.ko-fi.com/jbcrawford <<< ║ ╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝ This is not exactly the same as saying that keys will be retrieved from a directory, but if you remember that the X.500 that gave us these concepts was itself supposed to be *the directory,* you can see that they are closely related ideas. In practice, they are often pretty much the same: a classic real-world application of S/MIME is in a Microsoft Active Directory environment, where the Domain Controller acts both as a directory (LDAP) and as a Certificate Authority, signing certificates for the users that populate that directory. This means that key retrieval from LDAP vs. certificate verification against the (AD) CA are pretty much the same thing, and you have the same assumptions around there being some sort of central authority to maintain the directory. This means that S/MIME thrives in the same places that X.400 was more successful. The US military, birthplace of internet email, opts for S/MIME for encrypting it. They have a truly enormous Exchange and Active Directory environment to this end. Once those emails leave the military, the whole thing becomes a huge hassle, because properly using S/MIME requires establishing some form of federation with the military's Active Directory domain... or at least importing their CA as trusted, which is not all that easy with most mail clients. ## Today So here we have the classical email encryption landscape: there are two major options, PGP and S/MIME, each of which is unsuitable for most users for its own special reasons. Out of this frustrating stalemate, several other phenomenon have emerged. First, we should briefly touch on "modern" email encryption, where "modern" can become a bit of a euphemism for "proprietary." There is a new set of email providers that offer some kind of built-in, managed E2E. Protonmail is the most prominent. Protonmail's dominant E2E encryption implementation is a proprietary, simplified system that relies on Protonmail as key directory and cryptographic implementation. This is not interoperable with other email providers, so I do not consider it a true form of "email encryption," but rather a proprietary encrypted messaging product offered alongside email. Protonmail does have two features for sending secure email to non-Protonmail recipients: the first is essentially a compatibility layer to PGP that allows Protonmail's encryption to get along with PGP tools. The second is a traditional compliance-driven "secure email" product where the recipient is actually sent a link to a website where they can enter a password to retrieve the message—once again, not really email but a separate product that loosely works with email. Second, let's talk a bit about how email is really encrypted, in real reality, because there is this huge, grand-canyon-esque disconnect between the way that people discuss email encryption and what actually happens in the real world. Let's start taking that on by differentiating some terms: so far I have discussed end-to-end or E2E encryption, which is not exactly a well-defined technical term but generally means that a single encrypted payload travels unmodified and undecrypted from a human user to a human user. This can be distinguished from non-E2E encryption, where a message might be encrypted and decrypted several times, and using keys controlled by people other than the sender and recipient. We should also note the distinction between "encryption at rest," whether or not data is encrypted when stored (e.g. on disk), and "encryption in transit," or whether or not data is encrypted when sent over the network. Email is exchanged between email servers using SMTP, and is exchanged between email servers and clients using IMAP [^2]. Both of these protocols are now widely used over encryption, either using the STARTTLS method or "real" TLS, a distinction that I will not explain right now. While I lack solid data, it seems like a safe bet that the vast majority of real-world email is encrypted in transit, because at least the mail server logs that I have access to show the vast majority of mail servers using STARTTLS to secure their transfer connections. Client configuration is a more confusing topic but everything other than IMAP over TLS is now generally regarded as a big mistake, and modern clients should aggressively steer the user towards that route. This is a confusing contradiction: we have had this big, long, boring discussion of how email encryption has failed to go anywhere. Then I tell you that almost all email is encrypted. What gives? To start, remember our "in transit vs. at rest, and E2E vs. not-E2E, distinctions. The fact that the network connections between email participants are generally encrypted gives us a lot of security advantages, but it does not address the full scope of requirements that PGP and S/MIME do. Your email is not secure from your email provider, or the recipient's email provider for that matter, since email is usually not encrypted at rest and the provider has all the keys anyway. It also does not provide integrity protection, or non-repudiation, or any of a number of other useful security properties. What's even worse is the technical reality. I pointed out that one of the big criticisms of PGP is that it is simply too complicated and provides too many options. This resulted in a litany of defects in PGP implementations over the years, and no small amount of insecure user behavior due to lack of usability. In-transit email encryption has very similar problems. STARTTLS, for example, is a fundamentally opportunistic mechanism. In its original form, an on-path attacker attempting to intercept an SMTP session can simply hijack it and suppress the STARTTLS offers from the two sides, preventing them ever negotiating a switch to encryption. This simple "downgrade attack" is a pervasive problem, and it's the main reason that I say that anything other than true TLS is a mistake. Unfortunately, STARTTLS is the most widespread option available for inter-provider email transfer. That said, there are ways to address this problem. For example, DANE, the DNS-based scheme for TLS certificate distribution, has failed in the HTTP arena but has decent adoption (although very far from universal) in email transfer. It does a good job of providing mail servers with a way to discover that their peers are capable of encryption, without doing so over the SMTP channel itself. Even without DNSSEC to fully protect the DANE channel, this is an improvement that prevents many common attack scenarios. There is an even more popular approach that, while clumsy, avoids the dependence on DNSSEC to avoid a *second* on-path attack on the key channel: MTA-STS. MTA-STS is similar to DANE in that it provides an independent channel for a mail server to find if a peer supports TLS, but it uses HTTPS for that second channel, thus inheriting the protections of CA-rooted TLS. Both DANE and MTA-STS are ways of "tipping" a mail server that a peer has STARTTLS support, at which point the mail server knows that it should *only* connect via STARTTLS, even if the mail server on the actual SMTP channel claims not to support it. While the extra moving parts are unfortunate, this does a lot to close the downgrade attack window, and email transferred between mail providers with DANE or MTA-STS support is really pretty well secured, at least on par with most instant messaging solutions. This also implies that you can improve your email security a lot by just manually pinning major peers—e.g. configuring your mail server that, regardless of everything else, connections to major providers like gmail.com *must be encrypted*. This is actually a pretty common practice in some industries, including internal processes to maintain the list of "secure email destinations" so that it includes business partners and other frequent recipients. In some industries, this is taken to an extreme: within the healthcare sector, for example, there are healthcare information exchanges that operate secure messaging platforms that are mostly just conventional email servers configured to refuse any non-TLS SMTP exchanges. This is sufficient to meet NIST 800-43 recommendations which is sufficient to meet the NIST security architecture for healthcare information. That might be surprising to you but it illustrates how this topic gets confusing: we all know that "email is not secure," but that's really a *configuration problem* with the "public" email system rather than a technical limitation. Few compliance standards actually require E2E, and securing email in transit and at rest, once you drop the E2E requirement, is so easy that it sometimes happens just by default when SMTP servers have STARTTLS support and disk encryption. If you look at healthcare marketing materials, you'll sometimes see STARTTLS and S/MIME described as *alternatives to each other*. This doesn't make much technical sense, but you have to think about the context. If you have to communicate over mail servers whose configuration you do not control (or at least have insight into), you don't have a way of ensuring that your messages will be encrypted in transit unless you use E2E encryption such as S/MIME. If you are sending mail between servers that you *do* control, though, you can ensure encryption in transit by configuring the mail servers that way, and you do *not* need E2E encryption to meet that specific aim. Taken in this view, E2E encryption is almost a workaround for a defect of the design of email, and if you have taken anything from this longer than expected journey I hope it will be that: the history of encrypted email is so odd, and full of so many false starts, because it is basically the history of E2E encryption as an overlay "fix" for email's lack of the level of security provided by newer messaging solutions out of the box. This also helps to explain the lack of adoption: it's not really that we can't figure out how to encrypt email, we *do* encrypt email. But as with most communications technology, the "security layer" has been pushed onto the service providers rather than the users. This has significant downsides, since it requires trust in those service providers, but one huge, conspicuous upside: if encryption is transparent to the user, people will actually use it. [^1]: The idea that all humans are separated by six degrees at most was popularized in 1990 and undoubtedly had influence on the PGP WOT design, as well as a number of other similar connection-following social technology ideas of the same period. As it turns out, the whole idea came from fiction and has little grounding in actual statistical research on human social networks, which is at least suggestive of a reason why none of these web models have been successful. [^2]: I am intentionally simplifying this situation here, both by addressing only the case of IMAP and using the terms "server" and "client" for email, which only loosely map to the more proper roles of "transfer agent" and "user agent." Links: 1: https://computer.rip/2021-03-27-the-actual-osi-model.html 2: https://computer.rip/2020-05-20-file-transfer-pseudoprotocol.html 3: https://computer.rip/2021-05-10-lightweight-as-in-ldap.html sincerely, j. b. crawford me@computer.rip ================================================================================ Unsubscribe notify+trBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q@b.newsletters.love from this list: https://maleman.computer.rip/unsub/notify%2BtrBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q%40b.newsletters.love/dJTXHwuHBpTaMuJV Read online, tell your friends, submit to webrings, etc: https://computer.rip/ Questions? Problems? Lingering doubts? Just reply to this email. CAN-SPAM says I have to tell you if I'm a cop: COMPUTERS ARE BAD Seventh Standard LLC 1 (877) 456-4340 PO Box 26924 Albuquerque, NM 87125-6924 USA]]> Sun, 19 Jul 2026 22:08:35 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/id6J46INamKfvPUJNuR6wFiCaVQe9JMd/p/id6J46INamKfvPUJNuR6wFiCaVQe9JMd in case you missed it: the manual is open in case you missed it: the manual is open
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]]> Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:00:59 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/cHgXpjs0yiCXImRcswccxsrIC2eg3VQU/p/cHgXpjs0yiCXImRcswccxsrIC2eg3VQU Adult Survival Guide is open Adult Survival Guide is open
IT IS HERE  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌
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]]> Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:00:57 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/RIhGDzsR83iDso1ZS9QSgiRZphf4iD03/p/RIhGDzsR83iDso1ZS9QSgiRZphf4iD03 You are not bad at being an adult You are not bad at being an adult
and this proves it  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌
fbigthdsyttk

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© 2026 Sidneyraz

228 Park Ave S, #29976, New York, New York 10003, United States

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]]> Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:30:34 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/ecGirxUrahhngmWpiOlmjWNVFT4CEFz7/p/ecGirxUrahhngmWpiOlmjWNVFT4CEFz7 Did everyone else get an adulting manual? Did everyone else get an adulting manual?
I've been working on something big  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌
fbigthdsyttk

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© 2026 Sidneyraz

3756 W AVE 40 Suite K #438
Los Angeles, California 90065, United States

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]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:30:46 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/TtQRtkulmDLpQhPv9SAZJMJ5BgHZQcPL/p/TtQRtkulmDLpQhPv9SAZJMJ5BgHZQcPL weird_wide_web_hole_127 weird_wide_web_hole_127 ]]> Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:57:31 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/NqztNA1OgpTsD33H1sywARa7Ik2LLJYl/p/NqztNA1OgpTsD33H1sywARa7Ik2LLJYl computers are bad: megawatts by microwave In 1914 the Department of the Interior, through the Bureau of Reclamation, investigated the possibilities of developing the Columbia River. Thousands of arid but potentially fertile acres needed only water to become the Imperial Valley of the Northwest. Locked in the mountain ranges were valuable ores awaiting electricity to turn them into needed metals. > > Two years later the State engineer of Oregon urged the development of the Bonneville site as a national-defense measure: he saw in the proposed power project a source of fertilizer in time of peace and nitrates in time of war. The dam also would completely drown out the Cascade Rapids and extend slack-water navigation some 40 miles eastward to The Dalles. > > The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1925 directed the Secretary of War, through the Corps of Engineers, United States Army, to prepare and submit to the Congress an estimate of the cost of surveys, examinations, and investigations of all navigable streams and their tributaries where power development appeared feasible. (Q1) It is difficult to succinctly explain why, exactly, the United States Army has spent much of its history involved in the construction of dams. It is partly an accident of history, partly the result of interagency federal politics, and entirely a product of American culture. In his book "Cadillac Desert," Marc Reisner examines the history of the American West's water control projects as a *religious* project, one animated less by practical needs than by a sense that domination of the West's rivers was destiny. The Bureau of Reclamation, part of the Department of the Interior, was formed for that purpose. At the time, though, the Army had already been used to survey and improve rivers for nearly 100 years. They were not content to give it up. The result was a rivalry, one with several feints and blows before the two settled into their modern areas of control. For the Bureau of Reclamation, the Hoover Dam was their signature project. For the Corps of Engineers, the battle that would go down in history was the Columbia River Project. ╔═══════════════════════╗ ║ /static/img/bpa/1.png ║ ║ "" ║ ╚═══════════════════════╝ The motivations for damming the Columbia were various. The Columbia was prone to flooding, which had caused damage and limited use of land along it. There was a great deal of land surrounding the Columbia that could be farmed, if the Columbia could be tapped for irrigation. Electricity, too, was a reason, although initially a somewhat secondary one. Perhaps the greatest reason, though, was simply economic: by the time that the major parts of the Columbia River Project were truly underway, the nation was in the throes of the Great Depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was already a fan of hydroelectricity. As governor of New York, he was exposed to the pioneering Niagara Falls power plant and pushed for other similar projects in that state. As President, his "New Deal" naturally incorporated hydropower as well. By 1934, he had formed a Regional Planning Commission that sketched out a series of dams along the Columbia, two of which would become the Grand Coulee and the Bonneville. These dams would produce a tremendous amount of electricity, and unlike in other similar Corps of Engineers projects to date, that power would not all be consumed by irrigation pumping. There was power to spare. To distribute that power, the Regional Planning Commission suggested an independent government agency on the model of the Panama Canal or the recently chartered Tennessee Valley Authority. As an interim measure, the loosely defined Bonneville Project coordinated the civilian side of the Corps of Engineers project until 1938, when the Bonneville Dam was complete and the Grand Coulee was much of the way there. The Bonneville Dam captures little water in its reservoir, so while it does have flood control value, electrical production is its primary purpose. The dam's two powerhouses produce up to 1.2 GW, an impressive number for the 1930s but one that pales in comparison to the Grand Coulee's eventual (1970s) full capacity of nearly 7 GW. The Columbia River dams increased the electrical capacity of the Pacific Northwest by orders of magnitude; the numbers were significant even at a nationwide scale. The bumper crop of electricity triggered a predictable controversy: what to do with government power? One camp favored public control of the resource, with the government marketing the power on some sort of equitable basis. The other favored private control, arguing that the output of the dams should be contracted entirely to private utilities like Portland General Electric (itself the scion of an important early hydroelectric project at Willamette Falls). In the New Deal political climate, the first camp won: the Columbia did not quite get a TVA, but Congress did charter the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the first of what would come to be known as Power Marketing Agencies. Over the following decades, the BPA became part of the Department of Energy (DoE)—uncharacteristically, for the DoE, a part of it that actually generated and sold electricity. Well, technically, the Corps of Engineers generates it, and the BPA markets and distributes it. In any case, starting in the late 1930s, the BPA was tasked with the construction of a network that could distribute power from Columbia River dams throughout the region—on an equitable, equal-rate basis often called the "postage stamp rate" that allowed rural coops to buy government-generated power at the same rate as the big city private utilities. The sudden bevy of power along the Columbia and the fair rates at which it could be obtained in great quantity led to an industrial revolution for the region, one that saw it as the seat of the American aluminum industry (with the Columbia Gorge producing something like 1/3rd of the nation's aluminum through to the 1970s) and that boosted the fate of hundreds of related industries (aerospace and, specifically, Boeing not least among them). BPA power has enduring influence today, with many towns on the Gorge (The Dalles, Boardman, Umatilla) disproportionately prominent on a map of the nation's data centers. AWS's us-west-2, for example, is a beneficiary of Columbia River dams and located near many of them—not just Bonneville, but the Dalles (1.8 GW), John Day (2.2 GW), McNary (1.1 GW), and more. In marketing this power, the BPA faced a challenge: the dams are spread across a large area, as are the customers. Industrial customers, such as the Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America) smelter that opened in 1940 at Vancouver, Washington [^1] were opening in rural areas where land was readily available, and an explicit goal of the Columbia River Project had been the extension of electricity to farmers and other rural industries. The concept of long-distance power transmission had been pioneered by an 1889 transmission line, the nation's first, between Willamette Falls at Oregon City and downtown Portland. Beginning in 1938, the BPA was tasked with expanding that concept across a region that would eventually span eight states. ## The Master Grid BPA's first administrator, J. D. Ross, presented a plan he called the BPA Master Grid. This ring-shaped network, made up of 230 kV long-distance transmission lines, would connect the dams not only to Portland and Seattle but to Pasco, Yakima, Spokane, Ellensburg, the Willamette Valley through to California, and the Oregon Coast. By 1945, the Master Grid covered three thousand "Circuit Miles" of transmission lines. It was the first integrated regional power grid in the United States, and would come to pioneer the market-based electricity pricing and distribution, independent system operators (ISOs), and pooling and wheeling agreements that form the modern US electrical infrastructure. The entire Western Interconnection, the unified power system that serves the US and Canada from the Rocky Mountains west, can be said to have crystallized outwards from the seed of the Bonneville Dam's switch yard. ╔═══════════════════════╗ ║ /static/img/bpa/2.png ║ ║ "" ║ ╚═══════════════════════╝ Getting there required that the BPA solve formidable technical problems and develop many new technologies in power distribution. BPA transmission lines operated at higher voltages than any before them and, in the 1960s, introduced high voltage DC transmission to the Americas, connecting the Columbia system to the major demand centers of Southern California at 800 kV DC. BPA was only slightly behind the TVA on the installation of a remarkable analog computer called a Network Analyzer, in 1939, which simulated the behavior of the transmission network like a scale model. The rural nature of the BPA network put substations in remote areas, where they were minimally staffed, and the long stretches of high-voltage transmission line meant there was ample potential for damage by wind, weather, and trees, phenomena that the BPA came to better understand through research laboratories and experimental field sites. This is not an article about the history of electrical distribution, or at least it wasn't supposed to be, so here we must exercise some discipline and narrow in on a topic. Telecommunications ought to do. By 1940, as the Master Grid entered operation, its numerous substations already caused administrators a headache. Each had a small staff of technicians, but communicating with them was difficult. Coordinating changes across large areas, or quickly responding to faults, involved a flurry of telephone and radio calls. When Portland General Electric built the transmission line from Willamette Falls to Portland, they encountered the same problem, and by the 1910s had implemented a very early form of its solution: telemetry and teleoperation. Through a set of control wires strung along the transmission line, operators in Portland could see certain measurements from the Oregon City powerhouse and remotely throw switches to bring turbines on and offline in response to load. As the BPA built the Master Grid, they invested in the same technology. Around 1939, the BPA commissioned a study of communications technology that could be used along the Master Grid. There were three main contenders: commercial telephone networks (which BPA called "land telephone" to differentiate it from the other two), "carrier current telephone" technology that superimposed telephone signals onto the electrical conductors of the transmission lines themselves, and radiotelephone equipment. A working agreement was reached with Pacific Telephone & Telegraph, the Bell System company that would later become US West, to share network information and analyze the cost tradeoffs between purchasing carrier current and radio equipment and leasing telephone lines. Ultimately, the diversity of the BPA network required some of all three. Each of the BPA's substations had a building, called the control house, that contained control and monitoring equipment along with office facilities for the substation's operators. A room of each control house was dedicated to carrier equipment, devices that modulated multiple telephone circuits using frequency division multiplexing, and to a set of carrier frequencies that could be coupled onto the transmission lines to be received at the next substation. This equipment is similar to carrier equipment used in the telephone network, although specialized to power distribution applications by the choices of carrier frequency. I cannot say for certain, but it is very likely that BPA purchased their system from Lenkurt, a San Francisco-based communications equipment manufacturer that specialized in carrier current systems at the time [^2]. The BPA's carrier system incorporated selective calling, meaning that users interacted with telephones that looked and felt much like conventional telephones, including a dial. An operator at one substation could dial the number for another and that phone would ring. The main difference from the telephones we use today is that these carrier current systems were interphones, more similar to intercoms or party lines than single-user telephone service. If you picked up a phone on a circuit, you would hear any conversations already underway. Of course, in industrial control applications, this built-in conferencing capability was generally considered a feature, and telephone circuits were assigned to shared use by departments or operating regions. ╔═══════════════════════╗ ║ /static/img/bpa/3.png ║ ║ "" ║ ╚═══════════════════════╝ Radio was installed as well, primarily so that construction and maintenance crews in the field could get messages back to the administrative offices. Some substations, in strategic locations for coverage, had a radio site about a half mile from the substation for isolation from the powerful electromagnetic interference created by the high-voltage transformers. These radio sites were wired to remote heads located in the substation control house office, where substation operators relayed messages between mobile radios in the field and the carrier current telephone system. Bear in mind that these were still early days for mobile radios, and the HF units used by the BPA were proudly described as using only 1.5 cubic feet of space in the trunk of the vehicle, plus the microphone, speaker, and control head in the cab. Finally, while not the main purpose, it was already noted in the 1940 Annual Report that the substations could use the radio stations to substitute for the carrier current system in an emergency. Complementing all of the above, the BPA leased telephone lines between major substations, agency headquarters in Portland, and the switch yard in Vancouver that was becoming the closest thing to a "main substation" in the network's distributed, ring-shaped design. Immediately after the BPA's first Annual Report discusses the selection of communications equipment, it moves on to Protection. Here I must introduce a topic in electrical engineering that I have only a loose understanding of, even having spent the last few weeks in part on YouTube engineering tutorials. It's important that we get comfortable with the field of "protective relaying" because, as we will see, it became the most widespread application of private telecommunications networks after the railroads. ## Protective Relaying In your home, you are protected against certain dangerous scenarios by the over-current protection device that we Americans call a circuit breaker. The electromechanical contraptions in your service panel use a combination of methods to monitor the current that passes through them, and if they detect excessive current they open the circuit. The electrical transmission system has similar protections on a larger scale: on the distribution wires strung on poles outside of your house, for example, there are various fuses and circuit-breaker-like devices known as reclosers. High-tension transmission lines [^3], like the 230 kV system built by the BPA, need similar protection for similar reasons—except that it is much more complex. Electrical terminology can be complicated on a good day, and this situation is even more complex because of the historic bifurcation between terms and practices in building electrical wiring versus electrical distribution (which are governed, for example, by two separate electrical codes) and the fact that we are talking about a system that is nearly 100 years old. Relays were a newer technology in the 1930s, as was large-scale over-current protection, so transmission engineers viewed circuit breakers as just an application of the relay and over-current protection on power distribution is still referred to as "relaying" today. Since the whole broader field of supervising transmission lines for safety and reliability is called "protection," relays that open to protect generators, lines, or loads from dangerous conditions are called "protective relays." Some of the protective relays used in transmission are very much like the circuit breakers in your home. Directional over-current relays, for example, monitor the current passing through them in one direction ("towards" the load) and open if it is excessive. Ground fault relays open when they detect, via various current transformers, that an excessive amount of power is leaking to the ground—just like the GFCI outlets or breakers installed in wet areas of homes. Some of them, though, are much trickier. The first major problem is directionality. In your home electrical wiring, there is a clear sense of where power flows "from" (the service panel) and "to" (an outlet or fixture). Wiring thus only needs over-current protection in one direction. In a wide-area transmission network, this isn't true. The Master Grid was designed to incorporate a ring for much the same reason that SONET and other communications technologies favored rings: with a ring topology, you can lose the connection between two points and still be able to serve all points by sending power the "other direction." In general, it is common that electrical transmission lines can be "fed" from both ends, and have "load" on both ends. This flexibility to reach the same places by different routes makes the grid more reliable and responsive to changes. It also makes over-current protection more challenging. Say that you have a span of transmission line, and that somewhere along it a tree falls and pushes one conductor against another. You now have a short-circuit fault at 230 kV (or more in later lines), a dramatic and dangerous condition. You also have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of customers that are depending on the power provided by that line. Current transformers can measure the enormous fault current, and indeed it will be detected at many points along the line. But what do you do? ╔═══════════════════════╗ ║ /static/img/bpa/4.png ║ ║ "" ║ ╚═══════════════════════╝ Ideally, protective relays should open on both sides of the fault, and as close to the fault as possible. This cuts power to the dangerous situation while minimizing the number of customers who experience an outage. It's also difficult to achieve in practice: you cannot simply open a protective relay on over-current, or every relay on the line will open at the same time. Instead, analog circuits were used to measure the impedance to the fault as a proxy for its distance. This way protective relays could be carefully tuned to open only when a fault was *near* them. Now, consider that a transmission line may be "tapped" and connected to load centers or generation at multiple points along its length. There may also be multiple parallel routes that current can take, with varying capacities. Both of these situations mean that it is often necessary to measure the current (to detect faults) at locations remote from the actual protective relays, which are large devices that needed to be located at substations. Further, the complications of parallel routes and possible ground faults on long lines required the use of a "differential protective relay" or "balanced current relay" that took a much higher level approach to the problem. In a differential system, you measure the current at every connection point to a given protection zone and sum them. The sum should be zero: the same amount of current goes into the line as comes out. If it's not, something has gone wrong somewhere, likely current that is escaping to ground or traveling on a parallel route not engineered for such abuse. But the points where you measure current may be many miles apart, and you still need to make real-time comparisons between them. In 1940, the BPA was already planning the installation of "pilot relaying" over their carrier current telephone system. In an engineering context, a "pilot" is usually something small that controls something big. A pilot operated relief valve (PORV), for example, is an arrangement where dangerous pressure levels (of a liquid or gas) cause a small pilot valve to open which then triggers a pressure differential in a much bigger valve that causes it to open. There is a similar idea in protective relaying: a pilot-operated relay is a relay that disconnects a very big wire under the control of a smaller wire carrying a pilot signal. The simplest scheme works like this: a device, like a current transformer, monitors a safety parameter and produces a tone whenever it is acceptable. Elsewhere, a protective relay monitors that tone. If the tone ever goes away, the relay opens. The tone might go away because the pilot device detected an unsafe condition, but it might also go away because the line carrying the pilot signal was damaged, making it a fail-safe design. This is good for safety, but bad for reliability, and requires that the communications infrastructure used for protective relaying be very reliable. Unfortunately, it was not: the carrier current systems installed by BPA through the 1940s were typical of the technology used in the industry at the time, but it was ill-equipped for the scale of the Master Grid. In part to alleviate concern of federal competition wiping out private utilities, and to improve general efficiency, the BPA formed the Northwest Power Pool in 1941. Initially made of about a dozen electrical utilities in the Pacific Northwest, the Power Pool formalized a set of arrangements by which utilities would buy and sell power among themselves, carried over the BPA's transmission network for a small "wheeling" fee. The Northwestern Power Pool would eventually become the Western Power Pool and a template for much of the nation's electrical industry. It significantly increased reliability and efficiency in the region by allowing utilities to sell their overproduction to utilities with high demand, and vice versa. It also brought the carrier communications system to its knees: a practical requirement of the power pool arrangement with wheeling over the BPA's transmission lines was that those transmission lines had to carry protective relaying pilot signals for all of the utilities involved. A severe fault in a utility taking power off of a BPA line, for example, might require opening protective relays at a power plant operated by a different utility somewhere else on that line. New techniques for communications-aided protective relaying were under development, things like "permissive underreaching transfer trip" and "permissive overreaching transfer trip" that are difficult to explain briefly. These required that protective equipment at each substation have information about the state of protective equipment at all of the other substations, in order to make decisions that are not just based on local conditions but are globally optimal for the health of the whole line. ╔═══════════════════════╗ ║ /static/img/bpa/6.png ║ ║ "" ║ ╚═══════════════════════╝ For example, avoiding a dangerous "islanding" condition on a transmission line might require opening relays at three or more locations along the line, but opening any relays beyond those required would simply cause unnecessary outages. Further, reliability is key and some types of faults on high-voltage lines are self-clearing (this is sort of a euphemism for the fact that a tree branch bridging sufficiently high-tension conductors will often be knocked off of them, if not vaporized entirely, by the resulting arc). Some protective relays are "reclosing" (and are often referred to in brief as "reclosers"), meaning that they will automatically reset (close) after a brief wait period. Some of the time, the fault will be gone and service is restored. Reclosing is potentially dangerous, though, and especially in transmission networks reclosing is only desirable in certain circumstances. Further pilot signals can be used to enable and disable reclosers based on the nature of the fault or the other locations at which it was detected, so that for example a fault that has taken a power plant offline does not lead to a recloser elsewhere "flapping" and stressing the remaining production capacity. By the end of the 1940s, the BPA's carrier telephone system was overstressed to the point of failure. Power Pool utilities had connected their own carrier equipment, butting frequency bands so closely against each other that they began to interfere and degrade the quality of connections that could already be difficult to make out over hundreds of miles of high voltage infrastructure. The fact that a fault on a transmission line would generally prevent carrier current communications over that line working was a feature for simple fail-safe pilot relaying systems, but as protective relaying technology advanced it became the source of cascading failures. For example, by the early 1950s the BPA had found that lightning strikes on major transmission lines would cause enough interference to the carrier current system that protective relays all along the line would lose their pilot signals, open as fail-safe, and escalate what should have been a localized problem into a systemic one. Besides, many sections of the network had by that time become so congested by various carrier current circuits that there was simply no room in the spectrum for more—and so no capability to install protective equipment for new service lines. ## Microwave Meanwhile, the Second World War had had a profound impact in two ways: first, wartime demand for weapons, aircraft, and aluminum had driven Pacific Northwest industry to new heights. In 1949, power consumption in the Pacific Northwest had more than tripled, and population increased by 45%, compared to 1939. The Corps of Engineers built more dams, so the BPA's network carried more power. Engineers at the Administration's laboratory developed the techniques to operate transmission lines at record-setting voltages, 300 kV and beyond—making protection systems all the more critical. Second, wartime radar research had produced technological byproducts including high-bandwidth microwave transmitters and receivers. ╔═══════════════════════╗ ║ /static/img/bpa/7.png ║ ║ "" ║ ╚═══════════════════════╝ So, the electrical industry adopted microwave communications technology alongside the telephone industry, and for much the same reasons. The high bandwidth of microwave links allowed for multiplexing huge numbers of channels, and the lack of wireline infrastructure (especially shared with the actual transmission lines) promised increased reliability. In my previous article on passive repeaters [link 1], I noted that they were especially popular with electrical utilities. Now, we learn why: utilities throughout the country built microwave communication systems that carried a fraction of the traffic of the Bell System, but often carried it to more remote locations and with higher reliability requirements. The BPA's situation was different from that of more traditional utilities. Most private electrical utilities had started in a city and grown outwards, with a denser service network and fewer long-distance lines. They had mostly built private networks for communications, stringing their own open-wire telephone lines between stations. The BPA, with its far-flung network and huge distances, couldn't afford that kind of investment in stringing wires. In some ways, this proved an advantage: they could start from a clean slate. This network would be architected from the beginning for efficiency and performance, rather than to accommodate existing infrastructure. While the BPA had initially built substations for a larger staff, the control technology was rapidly evolving and some of the more intensive activity BPA had expected at substations proved unnecessary [^4]. Despite the generously sized control houses, by 1950 most substations had only a single operator on staff, who would often be "out in the field" tending to the transmission lines. This created a problem if some sort of sudden problem required reconfiguring the network to restore service—a system operator might be left ringing a substation phone with no one there to answer. That year, three substations had been equipped with "supervisory control" technology. This new system combined telemetering and teleoperation, so that a system operator in Portland could monitor voltage and current measurements at the substation and remotely operate the switchgear. The benefits of supervisory control were obvious, but the limitations of the carrier telephone system meant that those three substations were as far as the system could reach. Based on its promising experience with supervisory control of those three stations, and the clear need to continue expanding an already-stressed communications system, the BPA in 1949 committed to the construction of a completely new, completely modern control system for the Northwest Power Pool. ╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ I put a lot of time into writing this, and I hope that you enjoy reading ║ ║ it. If you can spare a few dollars, consider supporting me on Ko-Fi. You'll ║ ║ receive an occasional extra, subscribers-only post, and defray the costs of ║ ║ providing artisanal, hand-built world wide web directly from Albuquerque, ║ ║ New Mexico. ║ ║ ║ ║ >>> https://www.ko-fi.com/jbcrawford <<< ║ ╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝ The BPA's substation in Vancouver, already one of the largest, had a combination of ample space and proximity to Portland that made it a convenient location for support facilities. Construction yards, maintenance shops, and research laboratories had all been added onto the facility. The 1949 project launched with a symbolic gesture: the site was renamed, from simply the North Vancouver Substation to the J. D. Ross Complex in honor of the BPA's first administrator. A new building at the Ross Complex, the Control Center, became the nerve center of the system and the Rome to which all microwave routes led. Keeping with our communications theme, one of the main features of what was then called the Ross Control Center was a "three position turret" (yes, a turret! [link 2]) by which operators could call any line on the microwave, carrier current, or leased line telephone networks. The plan was to obsolete the turret, though. In 1950, the BPA awarded a half-million-dollar contract to the Philco corporation (originally Philadelphia Battery and later part of Ford, then GTE, then Philips, amusingly providing another expansion of the name) for its new microwave network. Philco had done extensive military work on microwave radar during the war, and was at the time one of the leaders in microwave technology. Philco's expertise would be needed, because the microwave network ordered by the BPA would be the largest electrical utility communications network in the world. While more difficult to conclusively state, I think it is likely that it was either the second largest microwave network of any kind after AT&T's, or the third largest after those of AT&T and the Santa Fe Railroad (both of which were also Philco customers). At this point, the BPA's transmission network had extended to the Hungry Horse Dam in northwestern Montana, adding customers along the way. There were some 14,000 circuit miles of transmission lines and 400 substations in the system, and Philco's contract specified that they would build out the initial operating network in just 360 days. Work got underway: BPA signed the contract in February of 1950, in September testing and demonstrations were conducted, and in October the BPA officially activated the first leg: a 200 mile route from the Ross Complex to Snohomish, Washington. ## Snohomish This first route, built at a cost just under a million dollars, used repeaters at Mt. Rainier, Chehalis, Olympia, Squak Mountain. The longest single jump was Olympia to Squak Mountain, about 55 miles, an unusually long distance for microwave facilitated by Squak Mountain's prominence and a 150' tower at Olympia. With multiplexing equipment, this route carried 23 channels from the control center to the Puget Sound area. ╔═══════════════════════╗ ║ /static/img/bpa/8.png ║ ║ "" ║ ╚═══════════════════════╝ This first microwave link was quickly put to work for one of the most interesting new applications of utility telecommunications: fault locating. When a fault occurred on a long transmission line, the BPA's first step was to search the whole line for the problem. Many lines were in difficult terrain, so a helicopter or airplane was used to speed up the process. The faults were sometimes minor and not easy to see from the air (say, a broken insulator), so the survey aircraft would take photos for processing and analysis on the ground. This process was expensive and, moreover, it was time consuming. BPA engineers realized that sudden open circuits or shorts in transmission lines created electrical signals that propagated back through the line and could be observed on test equipment—so you could presumably locate a fault by calculating its time of flight to the substations at each end. The problem was obtaining a measurement of when the fault signal arrived at two different locations, in precise synchronization. Requiring high speed and, more importantly, consistent latency, this was exactly the kind of problem that microwave lines were well suited for. ITT [^6] designed the system to BPA specifications, including devices that detected fault waves and reported them over a microwave channel, and a machine that compared the timing of the received reports and calculated a likely fault position (in miles) relative to each substation. FTL seems to have estimated that the system was accurate to 600', BPA to 1,000'. The Ross-Snohomish route carried other important traffic as well: as part of its inaugural celebration, Washington State Representative Henry M. Jackson used the new internal telephone at Snohomish to call Ross over the microwave link, congratulating BPA's administrator and chief engineer on the accomplishment. Although I am unclear on the exact criteria being used, newspaper reports consistently identify the link as the "first of its kind in the world" [^5]. 1950 was still early for microwave technology; AT&T's first commercial microwave link had only gone into service in 1948, and that was experimental. The transcontinental telephone "skyway" wouldn't be completed until a year later. As a result, microwave technology was unfamiliar to the public, and the appearance of parabolic antennas on BPA facilities—and at repeater stations on mountaintops and out in the woods—was conspicuous. One reporter called them the BPA's flying saucers, another explained the repeaters in terms of "pitcher" and "catcher." Every paper ran photos. Over the next two years, Philco completed a second microwave route up the Columbia Gorge connecting each of the dams through to Spokane, and a third that linked Beverly, on the route to Spokane, to Snohomish—forming a ring like the original Master Grid that provided redundancy and direct protection channels for transmission lines on that route. The 1952 microwave network included fourteen primary terminals and 21 repeaters; it connected the dispatch telephone system at Ross with dams and substations along the microwave routes as well as seven mountaintop HF stations to reach field crews. As was typical at the time, the microwave equipment at each repeater and terminal ran directly from battery power. The batteries were charged (normally floated) from two different power supplies, one from the utility and the other from an on-site propane generator with a two week fuel supply. BPA initially used prefabricated aluminum shelters for the equipment at repeaters, although many were originally built or later rebuilt as cinderblock. This was, in part, due to the weather: mountaintop repeater stations in Washington coped with severe winters, and BPA went through several rounds of modifications to their building and tower designs. Towers were reinforced against ice accumulation, and repeater stations in particularly snow-prone parts of the Gorge and the Snoqualmie Pass were made two story. These buildings had a "balcony" entrance on the second floor with a ladder to reach it, allowing access even when the first floor was completely buried in snow. Towers were rated for 100 MPH winds, and some for thousands of pounds of ice. BPA designed ice shields for the antennas, and a heated cover to keep ice from covering the reflector surface. ╔═══════════════════════╗ ║ /static/img/bpa/9.png ║ ║ "" ║ ╚═══════════════════════╝ BPA also took advantage of passive repeaters [link 3] to relocate microwave sites to more accessible locations. At Rockdale, on the edge of the Cascade Mountains, a repeater was installed just next to the highway. Its antennas aimed more upwards than sideways, at reflectors at the top of the mountain ridge. Microflect passive repeaters were manufactured in Oregon, and the BPA was one of Microflect's first large customers, contributing design changes for mountainous service. By 1955, the BPA microwave network had reached Hungry Horse Dam in Montana and connected all of the major substations of the system. When a decision was made, in 1955, to relocate the power dispatch office from the Ross Complex to the new Portland headquarters, the capacity and expandability of the microwave system made the process much easier. The BPA's new HQ building looked more like a telephone exchange than a federal building: one of its most prominent features was a rooftop microwave tower. The 1957 annual report inventoried 61 microwave radio sites covering 1,300 miles of route, by then using a mix of Philco, ITT, and Motorola equipment. BPA's network had, by this time, achieved many feats of rural service. One of the most impressive was service to the southern Oregon Coast: this area was very remote and faced terrible weather throughout the winter. BPA's 115 kV South Coast line was the only electrical service into the region, and it was regularly disabled by ice storms and flooding. Because of the area's mountainous terrain, line crews working in the area were only infrequently able to reach a substation near Eugene on their mobile radios, and that was their only way of talking to dispatchers to coordinate repairs. In an effort to improve service reliability, the South Coast became the pilot for a new model of field communications. Relatively closed spaced microwave repeaters, each with a VHF radio, would bridge radio channels onto the microwave telephone system. To stand up to the Oregon Coast, each of these stations used an aluminum enclosure with heating, fire suppression, and a generator. Some of the enclosures were cabled to the ground, to better hold them down against the wind. During the 1960s, the value of the microwave system had been proven but it was once again facing the limits of its capacity. Microwave technology had improved tremendously in the post-war decade and BPA's 23 and 24-channel multiplexers were obsolete. A $1.6 million contract was let to Lenkurt to upgrade much of the microwave network to the modern Lenkurt 76C microwave radio and 46A or 34A multiplexers, capable of up to 600 channels at around 8 GHz (the previous system varied from site to site but operated at around 2 GHz). This was equipment designed and built under GTE ownership, and was also typical of the long-distance microwave links in the GTE telephone network. As part of the project, Lenkurt also installed VHF radio relays throughout the system. At some sites, Lenkurt installed dual-polarized antennas to allow simultaneous operation of the old and new multiplex systems and, later, increased capacity. Further contracts expanded the microwave network to Bellingham, Washington and to Corps of Engineers projects on the Snake River. In 1966, BPA dispatchers in Portland could monitor production at 21 dams, receive alarms from 250 substations, and completely remote control fifteen of the network's key switchyards. ╔════════════════════════╗ ║ /static/img/bpa/10.png ║ ║ "" ║ ╚════════════════════════╝ When the BPA built the Pacific Intertie, a combination of two 500 kv AC circuits and one 800 kV DC circuit stretching 900 miles from the Columbia River to near Los Angeles, it was the largest transmission line project in US history. Under construction from 1965 to 1970, the line's standard bearer came in microwave form. Collins Radio built microwave routes parallel to the Intertie transmission lines, a $2 million project with 22 new radio stations on the 600-channel Lenkurt system. Most of the work was finished by 1967, a prerequisite for some construction the transmission line itself, since the microwave channels were used for testing and commissioning. ## The Computer Age Microwave was not the only arena in which the mid-century had brought new technology. The BPA was not new to computers; various forms of electromechanical computation had been part of their engineering works since the 1930s. By the 1960s, though, projects like SAGE (a military air defense system) and SABRE (a commercial airline reservation system) demonstrated the potential of combining computers with telecommunications for real-time control. The BPA had a telecommunications network, and it had a real-time control system... and they decided to add a computer. In 1966, the BPA announced that its control center would once again move, from the Portland headquarters building back to the Ross Complex, where a new building would be designed from the ground up for centralized, computerized control of the power system. Named the Dittmer Control Center after a previous BPA power manager, the low-slung building had a prominent concrete microwave tower and was partially sunk below ground level for hardening against attack (it was, after all, the Cold War). Much of the Dittmer center's lower-level floorspace was devoted to equipment rooms, which would soon be the home of the computer system that BPA contracted to Rockwell. Among other equipment, Rockwell installed a PDP-10 computer that received, analyzed, and logged telemetering data from throughout the system for display to operators. From its commissioning in the early 1970s, BPA continued to enhance the computer center into an integrated power dispatching system that supported operators in monitoring the network, predicting future demand, switching transmission lines, and ordering changes in production at power plants throughout the Pacific Northwest. The ultimate manifestation of the PDP-10's software was called RODS, the Real-Time Operations, Dispatch, and Scheduling System. RODS was one of the first systems of its kind, initially contracted to Rockwell in part due to their experience with control computers for the Apollo program. Features of RODS included a time-synchronized data acquisition system to support differential current monitoring (ensuring that the computer compared current measurements taken at precisely the same time), which used an atomic time standard at the Dittmer Control Center to distribute high-precision timecode through the microwave network. As RODS matured, it established the 15-minute scheduling loop used by dispatchers to configure power plants and transmission lines for a constantly changing electrical load. DEC themselves, in an internal sales meeting whose minutes fortunately made it into the historic record, noted the Dittmer PDP-10 as a critical early sale in their efforts to break into the utility industry. ╔════════════════════════╗ ║ /static/img/bpa/11.png ║ ║ "" ║ ╚════════════════════════╝ Despite the technical firsts of the Dittmer Control Center and RODS, this chapter of BPA history is best known for its incidental brush with the Pacific Northwest's most famous chapter of computer history: as temporary employees of TRW, the aerospace contractor brought on for RODS software development, Bill Gates and Paul Allen both spent time at Dittmer. They were still in high school, it would be years before they moved to Albuquerque to found Microsoft. Many parts of the BPA's microwave network are still in use, although improving radio technology and the adoption of fiber optics (including fiber embedded into the neutral conductors of transmission lines) have allowed for elimination of some repeaters. As microwave technology continues to fall obsolete (in comparison to fiber, commercial terrestrial radio networks, and satellite), many of the remaining sites are likely to be demolished. Some of them—sites like Chehalis, Squak Mountain, and Rainier—have been in service for 76 years. The BPA microwave network is not unusual. It was the first of its type, but the transmission and power marketing concepts pioneered by the BPA are now used nationwide. Wherever power goes, protective relaying follows, and the telecommunications networks that shadow the electrical grid from coast to coast. Few enterprises outside of the communications industry itself have ever operated communications networks on the scale of electrical utilities. They find themselves in the company of railroads and oil pipelines, ventures that must span deserts, climb mountains, and cross rivers. Unlike many of those operations, though, the BPA is a federal agency, subject to the National Environmental Policy Act and National Historic Preservation Act. BPA's extensive Section 106 NRHP compliance program has produced extensive historic documentation of its transmission lines, communications infrastructure, and research facilities. While sometimes onerous, these federal policies have created the best-documented historic electrical utility communications system in the nation. An inventory of historic microwave stations still under BPA ownership turned up 28 in Washington, 22 in Oregon, one in Idaho, and two in Montana, and many are eligible for nomination to the Historic Register. From an aluminum shed at the Ross Complex to a squat concrete building and utility pole at Mary's Peak, they are monuments to American history—a singular, almost megalomaniacal vision of the Columbia River tamed; the rise of Pacific Northwest industry under wartime demands; a technical approach to environmental preservation and economic equality. Infrastructure for the public benefit: a great American achievement. We might, one day, find the will to do it again. ╔════════════════════════╗ ║ /static/img/bpa/12.png ║ ║ "" ║ ╚════════════════════════╝ [^1]: This Vancouver is just across the Columbia from Portland, and should not be confused with the big one in British Columbia. Having grown up in Portland, I will probably not disciplined enough to put Washington after it each time, so just remember that we aren't talking about Canada. Yet. [^2]: Lenkurt would later merge with GTE, becoming something like the Western Electric to AT&T's principal competitor. [^3]: This is another example of the difficulty of electrical terminology. "High tension" in this context is a result of the historic use of "tension" (and enduring use in some languages) to refer to what we now usually call "voltage" or "potential." Specifically in electrical distribution, "high tension" is older language but still in use to refer to 100 kV and higher transmission lines. [^4]: BPA was navigating many firsts in the construction of the Master Grid, and the high-voltage transformers used to step up and down from the 230 kV lines were new technology. They were filled with a heavy oil for cooling and electrical insulation, and the BPA had at first expected that they would need to drain the oil and open the transformers on a regular basis. Early BPA substations featured a network of rails and low-slung metal carts that would be used to pick the transformers up off of their pads and move them to a specialized building called an "untanking tower," where they could be drained of oil and the covers lifted off by a gantry crane. In practice, transformers were virtually never opened, and the untanking towers and rails became vestigial. [^5]: You know that I am a little bit obsessive about this kind of superlative, and since it seems to have originated with Chief Engineer Sol Schultz, I tend to think he had a good definition in mind. My best guess is that it was the first microwave link in the world (at least that they were aware of) to carry telemetering and teleoperation signals over such a long distance. [^6]: This company changed names from Federal Telecommunication Laboratories to Federal Telephone and Radio and was then acquired by International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), all during the time period covered by this article. I will refer to it simply as ITT for readability. Links: 1: https://computer.rip/2025-08-16-passive-microwave-repeaters.html 2: https://computer.rip/2021-05-19-telephone-turrets.html 3: https://computer.rip/2025-08-16-passive-microwave-repeaters.html sincerely, j. b. crawford me@computer.rip * * * - Q1: "First Annual Report of the Bonneville Administrator," 1939 - Images: "Bonneville Power Administration Microwave Radio Stations Historic Resources Technical Report," AECOM (2019) ================================================================================ Unsubscribe notify+trBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q@b.newsletters.love from this list: https://maleman.computer.rip/unsub/notify%2BtrBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q%40b.newsletters.love/dJTXHwuHBpTaMuJV Read online, tell your friends, submit to webrings, etc: https://computer.rip/ Questions? Problems? Lingering doubts? Just reply to this email. CAN-SPAM says I have to tell you if I'm a cop: COMPUTERS ARE BAD Seventh Standard LLC 1 (877) 456-4340 PO Box 26924 Albuquerque, NM 87125-6924 USA]]> Sat, 04 Jul 2026 20:18:27 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/ITIj5cW3MtXkXdWI3fY3Oqlr8wUQPr4H/p/ITIj5cW3MtXkXdWI3fY3Oqlr8wUQPr4H weird_wide_web_hole_126 weird_wide_web_hole_126 ]]> Thu, 02 Jul 2026 07:45:59 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/9LBnxxaLgjtQMpF9DCR87rZSMpgGyr09/p/9LBnxxaLgjtQMpF9DCR87rZSMpgGyr09 weird_wide_web_hole_125 ]]> Thu, 25 Jun 2026 06:53:37 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/gEmoFXbQQxwgYg4iP3hyd6djpfhgFGTE/p/gEmoFXbQQxwgYg4iP3hyd6djpfhgFGTE weird_wide_web_hole_124 ]]> Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:10:21 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/Cpxlp3tDLPZtu9jyqpaWSmwMB8HbpV1R/p/Cpxlp3tDLPZtu9jyqpaWSmwMB8HbpV1R computers are bad: from hookswitch to grave Millions of telephones come back to Bell System service centers each year, many with their housings, handsets, and other molded plastic components bruised and battered. Some can be put back in shape by buffing, solvent polishing, or painting. Others wind up in piles. (Q1) The scale of WE's phone refurbishing program was remarkable. Huge workshops of WE employees inspected, cleaned, repaired, and tested each phone. Refurbished units visited a test desk for a thorough electrical checkout before they received the service center's stamp or label that they had been remanufactured for use. In the Mountain States and west, WE service centers were found in Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. By the 1960s, Portland and Salt Lake City had joined. Of course, despite the best efforts of all of WE's horses and all of WE's men, not all telephones can be put back together again. Much of the equipment returned to WE could not be satisfactorily refurbished. Besides, it wasn't just phones that telephone companies returned to WE, it was *everything.* Upgrading a crossbar exchange to an ESS? The ESS came from Western Electric, and the crossbar exchange went back to them. WE supplied telephone poles to the operating companies, and at the end of their life it took them back. > Western Electric has manufactured millions of telephones, millions of miles of wire and cable, tens of thousands of manual and dial switching units, and the thousand-and-one other kinds of apparatus that go into the plant of the Bell System. It has purchased from thousands of other manufacturers the great variety of supplies that are used by the Bell System. (Q2) The majority of that output—at least what wasn't still in service during WE's decline—went back to WE for disposal, as well. That included the wire: from simple drop wires to heavy multipair cables, old wiring was routinely cut into sections and shipped back to WE—specifically, to the WE Salvage Works on Staten Island. In 1883, as the component elements of a telephone industry were swirling around New York and accreting by gravity into the shape of the Bell System, Benjamin Lowenstein arrived from Germany. Settling in New York City, he took up a business that he must have learned back in Europe: metal refining. Within a year of his arrival, the B. Lowenstein & Bro. company was smelting scrap metal from a shop in Manhattan (the brother, Moses Lowenstein, was a constant second fiddle in Benjamin's ventures until he sold his share and retired to go his own way in 1900). Lowenstein had a way of maneuvering his metals businesses into the path of technological progress. His first such success was lead, or rather an alloy of lead with tin and antimony. This specialized alloy was eutectic, meaning that it melted and solidified at a single, well-defined temperature, and a low one at that. These were exactly the requirements for feeding the newly-invented Merganthaler hot-metal typesetting machines, later known as Linotype—much as the metal came to be known as Linotype alloy. By 1890, B. Lowenstein & Bro. was the major supplier of feedstock for hot-metal typesetting in the US. Linotype metal brought in a lot of money, enough that Lowenstein looked to expand. New York City was already dense enough that it was hard to find a site for a large industrial operation. Instead, Lowenstein found land in the southern end of Staten Island, near the town of Tottenville. There, he founded the Tottenville Copper Company, Tottenville Copper grew quickly, well positioned for the new demand for copper brought about by the electrical revolution. During the 1900s, Lowenstein rebranded B. Lowenstein & Bro. as the Nassau Smelting and Refining Company and moved to consolidate it with Tottenville Copper. In 1914, as the US entered the First World War, Nassau Smelting and Refining was noted as one of four companies responsible for 90% of the country's copper exports. It's said that war is good for business, and it certainly was for Lowenstein. The war brought a pressing need for copper, and the Tottenville plant was pressed into military service. This part of the company's history is, unfortunately, well-documented due to a scandal all too familiar to our present times: on March 27th, 1918, police officers seconded to Naval Intelligence raided the Tottenville copper plant and arrested sixteen laborers—Germans and Austrians, many of them crew members of German merchant ships who had become trapped in the United States by wartime turmoil. In finding productive employment, a way to support themselves, they had made the critical mistake of taking jobs that supported the war effort. > The intelligence officers spent most of the day at the plant in Tottenville, which employs about 500 workers. Practically all of them were questioned, but most of them were found to be either native Americans or naturalized citizens. The sixteen who were unable to show either that they had registered or had obtained zone permits were placed under arrest at the plant. (Q3) Because of its role in supplying copper components of artillery shells, the Tottenville smelter was considered a munitions plant, and was thus off limits to any enemy aliens who did not possess a specific movement permit issued under police supervision. A few of the sixteen arrested had not registered as enemy aliens, but most had registered and had the wrong work permit. The newspapers do not suggest that these sixteen had committed any offense other than a lapse in paperwork, but they were nonetheless "turned over to Federal Authorities for internment." The authorities were also, reportedly, investigating an allegation that a manager at the plant had made "seditious remarks." These included criticism of the Liberty Bonds used to fund the war effort, and a suggestion that American forces in France would not prevail. Fortunately for the plant manager, he was able to produce paperwork proving his citizenship, and officers deemed the evidence of his "seditious" opinions to be insufficient for charges. If the war brought good fortune to Lowenstein, peace took it away. The end of steady military contracts complicated the finances of Nassau Smelting and Refining, requiring a retooling of the plant towards other products in the difficult context of the post-war recession. A major fire at the plant, in 1923, racked up a huge repair bill and cut into production. There were personal problems, too: in the mid-1920s, Lowenstein divorced, starting a bitter multi-year legal battle over custody of his children—a question ultimately resolved in his favor, but not without the involvement of the appellate courts and an axe-wielding deputy sheriff. The financial condition of his company continued to decline as the country slid into the Great Depression. Lowenstein must have been looking for an exit. By this time, Nassau Smelting and Refining was consolidated into a 45-acre property on Staten Island straddling Mill Creek, just south of State Route 440 and between Arthur Kill Road and Page Avenue. There were two primary operations: the "red metals" complex which processed copper, and the "white metals" complex for lead and tin. Both ran primarily on reclaimed scrap, refining it into ingots ready for reuse. Conveniently, these were two categories of metals in great demand to the Bell System: copper, for wiring, and lead and tin, extensively used to coat cables and splices and as key ingredients in solder. The post-war period brought not only general economic decline, but also an increase in metals prices, stressing AT&T's supply chain. Western Electric turned its mind towards consolidation. Given the Nassau plant's proximity to WE's headquarters in New York City and plants throughout the region, WE must have already done quite a bit of business with Lowenstein's company. In 1931, they bought it. Likely because Nassau Smelting and Refining was already a well-established business, WE left it to operate as an independent subsidiary, alongside the Teletype Corporation (which was acquired at nearly the same time) and, later, the Sandia Corporation in Albuquerque—the three independent subsidiaries of Western Electric through the 1980s. ╔══════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ https://computer.rip/static/img/nassau/2.png ║ ║ "Western Electric promotional graphic" ║ ╚══════════════════════════════════════════════╝ By the 1940s, Nassau Smelting and Refining was processing thousands of tons of scrap each year. Most of this was disused telephone equipment and cable that had been broken down at other WE plants and then delivered to Staten Island for smelting. WE reported that about 3/5 of the nonferrous metal content of this scrap was returned to WE as high quality metal stock for manufacturing use. In the mid-1950s, Nassau Smelting and Refining provided about 16% of the Bell System's copper supply and 20% of its lead. During the Second World War, when copper became exceptionally scarce, the Nassau works provided a critical in-house metal recycling capability that not only supplied the military as a contractor but also allowed AT&T a reliable source of metal for its wartime telephone projects. During several such periods of disruption in the metal market, Nassau Smelting and Refining provided most of AT&T's supply. For AT&T, vertically integrating metal smelting thus had two key advantages: cost savings from owning its own supplier, and a degree of protection from the whims of the market. "Nassau Smelting and Refining Company is a further extension of Western Electric's constant effort to do its Bell System job better and more economically" (Q2). A 1946 newspaper article, announcing an open house at the plant with tours open to the public, gives a sense of the scale of the operation. Each day, an average of five railroad cars of scrap arrived at the plant. Stripping machines separated lead sheathing from telephone cables "like a child would peel a banana" before the remains were fed into the furnaces—enough oil to heat a house for a year kept each furnace at 2,000 degrees for one day. Lead was transferred from furnaces to kettles, 30 tons at a time, and poured into ingot molds. Much of the lead then went to the plant's on-site solder mill. Each of the presses there formed enough rosin-core solder to reach "from Tottenville to St. George [at the far end of Staten Island] and back," each day. During the mid-century, WE expanded the Nassau company's remit beyond just nonferrous metals. Nassau Smelting and Refining became WE's general broker of scrap and secondary materials, brokering cinders from telephone company power plants as a soil amendment, and iridium recovered from telephone relay contact points as a precious metal. As a subsidiary, rather than a mere component of Western Electric, Nassau was somewhat more independent of AT&T than the rest of WE. The metal operation wasn't restricted to the telephone industry, and both purchased scrap on the open market and sold metals to any buyer. Nassau was one of two bidders, for example, on an enormous post-war Naval copper supply contract. Metal refining is not a clean operation. In 1947, Nassau faced charges of "smoke annoyance" and "noxious conditions" that might have led to a criminal prosecution, were the case not forestalled the company's agreement to install a $350,000 bag house to filter furnace emissions. By this time, Nassau was called one of the nation's largest "above-ground mines." Metal recycling, while economical nearly from the beginning of metallurgy, received a surge of interest in a post-war nation that keenly remembered the shortages of the previous decade. Unlike our modern association between recycling and environmental protection, in the 1940s it was styled mostly as a new form of extractive industry: "The Nassau Smelting and Refining Company... mines the vast Bell network for valuable metals.... in 1948,.. Nassau reclaimed more copper than was produced in six of the nation's 14 major-producing states. And of 22 major lead-producing states, only four produced more than was reclaimed by Nassau." The president of Nassau at the time, William Scheuch, described "American homes, factories, and cities" as the "mines upon which modern industry depends." He noted as well that, by that time, rubber, plastics, rope, and "scores of other materials" had fallen under Nassau's responsibility. "So thrifty are Nassau's experts that even floor sweepings are cooked by incandescent heat to reclaim the last drop of metal content" (Q4). Later that year, Nassau hosted a delegation of European metallurgists discussing techniques for recycling aluminum, then a major focus of Nassau's research department. //beg// In 1956, the *Staten Island Advance* ran a puff piece on Nassau's production (162 million pounds of scrap converted into 138 million pounds of saleable metal in 1955) immediately next to the headline "Smog Growing Problem." In 1958, the same newspaper carried an editorial by Nassau's new president, Arthur Fegel, under the headline "Nassau Battles Air Pollution." In some ways, the piece is a celebration of the company's 75th anniversary, but the headline betrays an underlying political struggle. "Just as good families are good neighbors,.. an industrial concern like Nassau devotes much attention to being a good citizen in its own neighborhood" (Q5). This was the preface to an announcement, at the end of the article, that Nassau was about to build a new furnace that would burn the insulation off of wire. The exhaust, he promised, would be "clean as a whistle." In the early 1960s, Nassau underwent a wave of expansion, including new office and warehouse facilities on the north side of the property. The plant had become one of the major employers of Staten Island, with a payroll including "12 fathers and their 14 sons." The Staten Island Railroad operated a train station for the plant's employees, called Nassau, and expanded it in the early 1970s. The plant was one of their largest freight customers as well, with an industrial siding just off of the station. In 1971, the Deputy Commissioner of the New York Department of Air Resources paid a visit, or rather a "sniff," in part to confirm that Nassau had complied with an order to stop burning lead away in furnaces. "In terms of other smelters in New York City, it is fairly clean; but that doesn't mean it is in compliance with all the standards" (Q6). The 1970s were, for the Bell System, the beginning of the end. An upstart subsidiary of the Southern Pacific Railroad waged an intense legal battle against AT&T's monopoly, won the right to compete on long-distance service, and renamed itself to Sprint before merging with principal AT&T competitor GTE. Corning demonstrated a new communications technology based on light trapped in glass fibers; by 1980 the manufacturing technique for these new cables had become refined enough that they presented a lower-cost option compared to AT&T's coaxial and microwave network (Bell Laboratory's alternate plan for the future of communications, long-distance microwave waveguide, was stillborn). At the same time, the American environmental movement hit its stride. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency; each of these steps imposed new requirements on an aging metal plant that had long been considered a major polluter. Wastewater from metal separation processes, a slurry of heavy metals and petrochemicals and God only knows what else, was redirected from Mill Creek to the site's first water treatment plant in 1973. That plant separated the contaminants into a dried sludge, which for years was simply piled up under the approach ramp of the Page Avenue bridge. Later, this sludge was processed to extract precious metals, but that modest revenue didn't make up for the capital investment. It wasn't a good time to be an expensive part of Western Electric: facing declining revenues, labor unrest, and the weakening state of its sole benefactor AT&T, WE entered the late 1970s as a company in decline. WE started backing away from its integrated salvage operation: sometime in the late 1970s, the remaining metal recycling operations at Nassau were contracted to a company called C&D Recycling, which assumed management of part of the Nassau plant. Copper smelting operations at Nassau ended in 1981, beginning a multi-year decommissioning and demolition process for the Red Metals complex. The main copper processing building was razed by 1985, but in the mean time, the entire Bell System had met a worse fate: divestiture. Antitrust lawsuits against AT&T, brewing throughout the 1970s, leading to a 1982 settlement agreement that required the dismantling of the Bell System over the following years. On the first day of 1984, the Bell Operating Companies became independent corporations, over 2/3rds of AT&T gone overnight. Western Electric went along with them: one of the key findings of the antitrust case was that AT&T had built and maintained a monopoly through vertical integration so extensive that it deprived their competition of equipment and supplies. AT&T was able to partially mitigate the unwinding of their vertical integration: by agreeing to completely divest the operating companies, it won terms on which Western Electric could remain an AT&T company, under a new name. AT&T had agreed to end use of the trademarks most associated with their nationwide monopoly, including not just "Bell System" itself but the Western Electric name and logo. WE was reorganized, with some divisions meeting other fates, but most of the company became AT&T Technologies. As part of the settlement, AT&T had gotten relief on various restrictions imposed on them by previous antitrust cases, including a key prohibition on Western Electric marketing general-purpose computers. While there was some initial optimism that that small victory would allow the new AT&T Technologies to take on the likes of IBM, it didn't work out that way. A series of poor decisions, several fundamental missteps, and no doubt some plain bad luck had Western Electric, and its close partner Bell Laboratories, on the downhill. Post-divestiture, Nassau Smelting and Refining took on a new identity: AT&T Nassau Metals. As part of the settlement agreement, Bell Operating Companies could no longer be required to purchase equipment and supplies from WE. The Bell telephone market was suddenly open to competitive manufacturers such as the Canadian company Northern Electric (later Nortel), itself a fragment of Western Electric that had broken away when a 1950s antitrust case led to a settlement agreement that WE would divest its foreign operations. On top of the Carterfone decision and divestiture making consumer telephones a competitive market, WE found its business seriously undermined. The 1980s saw closure of many of WE's largest plants, Nassau not excepted. The White Metals complex at Nassau continued longer, shutting down in 1991 with demolition starting in 1996. The last manufacturing operations at AT&T Nassau Metals, by then limited only to electroplating, ended in 2001. Nassau had actually outlived its parent, WE, which was renamed to Lucent Technologies and made independent in 1996. By that time, AT&T Nassau Metals had been renamed to simply the Nassau Metals Corporation, and existed primarily to manage the closure and remediation of the Tottenville site. All of the original, 1930s-era manufacturing buildings were found south of Mill Creek and had been demolished by 2000. The newer 1960s era buildings, an office building and a warehouse north of Mill Creek, were leased to a developer who found various commercial tenants. Most of the site remained abandoned in its post-demolition state for the next twenty years, though: a formidable environmental recovery was required before reuse. The Nassau Metals site was investigated by the EPA for inclusion on the National Priorities List as a superfund site during the 1990s, but was ultimately not nominated. The main reason was simple: the Potentially Responsible Party was the Nassau Metals Corporation, a subsidiary of AT&T, a company that was still very much alive. With some cajoling by environmental authorities, AT&T agreed to avoid the federal CERCLA process by entering the New York Department of Environmental Conservation's Voluntary Cleanup Program (VCP). Many environmental authorities offer something like the VCP: one of the reasons that contaminated industrial sites, often called brownfields, tend to stay that way is the uncertainty and liability involved in environmental contamination. Real estate developers are understandably hesitant to commit to a property that may require an enormously expensive remediation in the future. The VCP provides an alternative: when a company participates in the VCP, they develop a comprehensive plan for site remediation—at their expense—that is mutually agreed with and supervised by the Department of Environmental Conservation. In exchange for the land owner completing the approved remediation plan, the Department of Environmental Conservation makes a binding agreement not to impose further requirements in the future. In other words, it's a legal arrangement to settle on what level of cleanup is "good enough," so that future owners of the property are protected from expensive surprises. For remediation purposes, the Nassau site was divided into three Operable Units. The largest, OU1, includes the primary industrial area where both the Red Metals and White Metals facilities had been located. From a 1991 Site Investigation Report to the 2011 Final Engineering Report, remediation contractors identified extensive contamination of the soil throughout the site, and downstream on Mill Creek, with lead and other heavy metals. It was found, for example, that a substantial portion of OU1 was built on artificial infill of a former wetland. The fill material, in line with standard practice in the 1930s, is best described as "assorted trash." Everything from construction debris to domestic garbage to old telephones had been piled up and compacted, and then factory buildings put on top of it all. Every time there was a storm, Mill Creek surged against its south bank and washed some of it away, downstream, into Arthur Kill. Particulate contamination from these materials could be identified out into the ocean. During the 2000s, contractors dredged Mill Creek and parts of Arthur Kill, temporarily dammed Mill Creek to facilitate further excavation, stabilized the banks of Mill Creek by geotechnical methods, developed new wetland areas on other parts of Arthur Kill at a 3:1 ratio to the area permanently disturbed by the site, replanted vegetation, and cleaned out storm sewers that had been contaminated by runoff from Nassau. These were all secondary efforts, though, in comparison to the largest remediation activity. The majority of the site, on both sides of Mill Creek, were covered with an engineered barrier of soil, stone, geosynthetic clay liner, and asphalt, intended to ensure that the contaminated soil will remain on site. It is simply too large of a volume to practically be removed, and even if it was, the degree of the contamination is so severe that it would be difficult to find a facility licensed to dispose of it. We tend to think of nuclear waste in the most severe terms, a contaminant that we can never be rid of, pretending that this is somehow an unusual outcome. The reality is much worse: permanent on-site entombment is one of the most common fates of industrial contamination, and there are tens of thousands of sites across the United States in which it is forbidden to dig. Nassau is one of those. Nassau Metals no longer owns the land, it has all been sold to private developers. On the north side, where the office building and warehouse remain (now a restaurant and a complex of fitness facilities respectively), the parking lot and foundation slabs of two new fast food restaurants make up the permanent barrier. Whenever any paving or concrete work is required, a qualified environmental engineer must be on-site to supervise the work and ensure that the integrity of the barrier is maintained. On the south side of the property, which was unpaved, the clay barrier must remain in place under the new construction or a new barrier must be approved by the Department of Environmental Conservation. No digging can be done without arranging for disposal of the disturbed soil at a licensed facility. Covenants on the property require that these institutional controls be observed in perpetuity: > the owner of the property shall prohibit the Property from ever being used for purposes other than for Commercial or Industrial use without the express written waiver of such prohibition from the Department Because of the particular standards to which the site was remediated, it is considered suitable only for limited occupation within the context of the institutional controls. Healthcare facilities, elder care homes, child care facilities, agriculture or gardening of any kind (even at hobby scale), and residential construction are all perpetually prohibited. The groundwater cannot be used without construction of a treatment facility approved by the state. The barrier system containing the contaminated soil must be inspected and recertified by engineers on a regular basis. > This, then, is the story of Western Electric—it calls for many things and many activities, blended together, to create the miracle of telephonic communications. It takes people and equipment, inventiveness and technical skill. It takes experience, and, above all, the fundamental desire to be of service to the public and the nation. (Q2) For some 75 years, AT&T was the telephone company, and Western Electric made the telephones. It destroyed them, as well: every phone inspected, tested, and if found wanting, condemned to the furnaces of Nassau. Telephone wires stretched across the nation by 1915; and by 1984 that very same wire had likely been cut, stripped, melted, and refined on Staten Island; quite possibly, it had even been returned to Western Electric, just a few molecules in each of the 35,000 telephones rolling off the line of the Indianapolis Works. Likely also, a few molecules of the soil permanently interred under Premiere Pickleball of Staten Island, a few molecules on the banks of Mill Creek, a few molecules of the ocean. ╔══════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ https://computer.rip/static/img/nassau/3.png ║ ║ "Ingots at the Nassau plant" ║ ╚══════════════════════════════════════════════╝ Metal is highly recyclable; it's sometimes estimated that the majority of the copper ever mined is still in use today. Much of that metal passed through Nassau at some point, there might be a bit of a Western Electric 500 in your smartphone today. There certainly is under the YoYo Chicken: a tombstone for the telephone era. sincerely, j. b. crawford me@computer.rip * * * - Q1: "Recycling turns scrap phones into new plastic products," *Bell Laboratories Record* 53 (December 1975) - Q2: *The Story of Western Electric,* AT&T corporate publication, c. 1955 - Q3: "Sixteen Germans in War Plant Seized," *New York Herald* (March 28 1918) - Q4: "New Copper and Lead 'Mines' to Be Found in Cities, Says Nassau Smelting Head," *Staten Island Advance* (April 30, 1949) - Q5: "Nassau Battles Air Pollution," *Staten Island Advance* (April 26 1958) - Q6: "Official Sniffs Nassau Smelting," *Staten Island Advance* (August 5 1971) Images from *The Story of Western Electric*. ================================================================================ Unsubscribe notify+trBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q@b.newsletters.love from this list: https://maleman.computer.rip/unsub/notify%2BtrBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q%40b.newsletters.love/dJTXHwuHBpTaMuJV Read online, tell your friends, submit to webrings, etc: https://computer.rip/ Questions? Problems? Lingering doubts? Just reply to this email. CAN-SPAM says I have to tell you if I'm a cop: COMPUTERS ARE BAD Seventh Standard LLC 1 (877) 456-4340 PO Box 26924 Albuquerque, NM 87125-6924 USA]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:35:22 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/xFxtL126VE1xLw9XQApBJE5DJFgo4JeW/p/xFxtL126VE1xLw9XQApBJE5DJFgo4JeW weird_wide_web_hole_123 ]]> Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:27:12 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/PwerSiK8VLj1tpOpcRbepKSpeLwhVapA/p/PwerSiK8VLj1tpOpcRbepKSpeLwhVapA weird_wide_web_hole_122 ]]> Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:34:21 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/NTXvetH2b0ODa3zEuaAYk3KCOmcwptfB/p/NTXvetH2b0ODa3zEuaAYk3KCOmcwptfB computers are bad: the totalisator The British love for backing one's fancy was specially provided for in a manner the fairest possible to the public, in the shape of a pari mutuel. This machine was worked by two gentlemen whose suave manner was inimitable, to the satisfaction of all parties, who volunteered their services, and have handed over legitimate commission for presentation to the Southland Hospital. This is a fascinating passage that reveals a few things. First, in New Zealand, parimutuel betting as a concept had been popularized mainly by people who were importing and selling machines—as a result, New Zealanders thought of parimutuel betting as closely coupled to mechanized calculation [^3]. The perceived impartiality of the machines (and, as it turns out, the suave manner of its operators) did much to reinforce the idea of parimutuel as a fundamentally more trustworthy form of gambling. Second, the mention of a "legitimate commission" to the hospital reflects the legal situation in New Zealand at the time. The history of gambling and its legality is a fascinating topic that I am trying very hard not to digress too far into, but many of the fits and starts in development of gambling technology result from widespread recognition of gambling as a vice and subsequent efforts to regulate, restrict, or outright ban it. This might feel like a modern issue, but in the 19th century it was already at a steady boil, and some of the parimutuel industry's emphasis on "fairness" was clearly an effort to maintain legal status. Much the same interplay (between regulation or banning of gambling and claims that mechanization mitigates the harm) is visible in our more traditional gaming industry today (e.g. slot and pachinko), although the online sports books are evidently free of the need to defend themselves. Despite legal complexities, parimutuel was a hit in New Zealand. In 1908, the Trentham Racecourse had a large tote house with eleven mechanical calculators, presumably operated by eleven tellers with additional clerks to calculate sums and update the manual tote board that made up much of the building's facade. Mechanical calculators were indeed available but expediency, and the chaos of a busy race, meant that much of the odds calculation was done in the minds of the clerks updating the board. There was a margin of error involved, and by newspaper accounts a lot of stress and conflict. Still, this was the dominant model for the first decade of the 20th century: New Zealand racetracks replaced an ad-hoc system of bookmakers and parimutuel carts with large, central tote houses where a single, track-wide pool was maintained. The staff of a busy tote house could be 30 or 40 people, all running around, copying numbers between slates, and shouting updates to tote board's loft. Add another challenge of racetrack betting: the tote houses, even as large as they were, struggled to keep up. One can imagine the impatience of a gambler who was just won it big, running up against a harried teller whose mind has already moved on to the next event. This problem was all the worse because of a problem clearly illustrated by our modern prediction markets: the matter of closing bets. At a roulette wheel, the croupier ritually declares bets closed before the ball can touch the wheel. Otherwise, the last to place their bets have more information on the outcome. Similarly, in a horse race, any bets placed after the race has begun are better than those placed before. The takeaway is that, under most rules, the tote house had to close bets and complete final odds calculations before the race could begin. A busy tote house meant that races started late—and then later, and later. This was, apparently, a very serious problem in the nineteen-oughts. ╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ https://computer.rip/static/img/tote/2.jpg ║ ║ "Longchamp Tote Board, Powerhouse Museum Collection" ║ ╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝ Relief would come not quite from New Zealand, but certainly nearby. George Julius was born in England in 1873, moved to New Zealand in 1889, and soon enrolled at Canterbury College to study railway engineering. After his studies, Julius took a job with the Western Australia Government Railways, the start of a career that found him in Sydney in 1907. By this time, he had two sons, and a clear mechanical inclination. While he set up a practice as quite possibly Australia's first consulting engineer, he spent evenings with his sons on a bit of a side hustle: an automatic vote tabulator. This part of the history has become obscure, and the order of events is not completely clear to me, but it went something like this: while Julius had been working in Western Australia, a friend had complained about the slow process of elections and suggested that some kind of machine could do most of the work. The idea stuck with Julius, and in Sydney, he built a prototype and perhaps even applied for patent on a "foolproof mechanical voting machine." Australia has a long history of interesting and innovative election practices, so Julius's invention might have started a new chapter in the history of election administration had it not been a total failure. The prototype must have worked, but Australian authorities were unimpressed and declined to purchase the system. It might have moldered among so many other not-quite-revolutions had it not been for yet another friend, this one in Sydney, who was familiar with parimutuel betting and the current state of the art in machines. This friend told Julius that his election machine met similar ends (adding up numbers and displaying the results) and explained the operational details of the large tote houses typical of New Zealand racetracks (but, as far as I can tell, not yet popular in Australia—at least not in Sydney, as Julius later wrote that this was the first he had heard of parimutuel). What followed was another series of late nights, but one that ended with more success: prototype in hand, Julius incorporated as Totalling Mechanisms Ltd and made his first sale. In 1913, the first Parallel Automatic Totalisator was installed at the Ellerslie Racecourse in Auckland, New Zealand. This machine was called "parallel" because it was a single, large mechanism that all of the parimutuel tellers operated simultaneously. It was "automatic" in that it performed all of the calculations end to end. Not only did it record the tickets sold by each teller, it recorded the totals (in currency) for each horse and a grand total. All of these numbers were presented to bettors by a brand new kind of tote board: a mechanical one, made of chain-driven number wheels showing through windows. Julius's machine was installed in the existing large tote house at Ellerslie, and fitted with 30 teller stations. Different from today's approach, Ellerslie's parimutuel operated on fixed-value tickets sold in different denominations at different windows. A person wishing to place a 20 shilling bet would queue for one of the 20 shilling tellers, but once at the window could buy any number of tickets on any number of horses. As the teller dispensed the tickets, the tote board above updated in real time. While quite trivial today, it was a tremendous accomplishment for 1913. Conceptually, it was closely based on the established type of mechanical counter that had been sold, for example, by Hengstler [link 1]. The difference was one of scale: these wheel counters were huge, as they were directly read by the public. The tote board actually was the machine, in other words, and the number wheels behind it were not just displays but the actual mechanism by which the totals were calculated and stored. At the back of the tote house, an array of concrete weights hung from chains over sprocket wheels. Gravity pulled the weights, which turned the sprockets, which rotated drive shafts for each horse. Or, at least, tried. The drive shafts were normally blocked by pawls. Each of the parimutuel tellers sat at a station with a set of levers, one for each horse. When a bet was placed, the teller took a ticket for the corresponding horse out of their drawer. They inserted it into their machine and pulled the corresponding lever, which both caused a pattern of holes to be punched into the ticket (validating it as properly issued) and pulled on a long metal wire that ran up through the ceiling into the tote board. That wire pulled on the levers of the clockwork-like escapements that locked the driveshafts, so that each pull of the wire caused the counter for the selected horse to advance by one. Each of the individual counters was connected by chain to a "shaft adder," basically a series of sprockets coupled to the shaft by one-way clutches. When each individual counter advanced by one, it also pulled the shaft adder along with it, which drove the grand total display at the top of the board. As the machine ran, the weights descended, with those representing the most popular horses falling the fastest. A catwalk rail, up in the tote board, accommodated a worker who carried a crank handle from driveshaft to driveshaft. They would crank the weights back up as needed, and reset all of them to the top between races. The first Julius machine was big and complicated, with the attendant inertia and friction. My description of its workings is more than just a bit simplified, but most of the complications have less to do with parimutuel than the practical realities of machinery. There were several extra layers of mechanisms like escapements and shaft adders, required so that all 30 of the teller stations could advance the machine with a reasonable degree of effort (although the size of the teller's levers suggests that they still required some heft) and without the machine jamming, miscounting, or otherwise misbehaving when two tellers happened to pull levers at the same time. Given his background in railroad engineering, I suspect that Julius drew from techniques used in railroad interlocking machines, which at that time also made great use of levers that pulled cables to drive chains. Despite later patent applications, the history of this machine is not as well documented as you might hope. An excellent description [link 2] from the University of Auckland notes that the actual design of the counters is unknown, particularly how they performed carries. This isn't all that big of a mystery as similar counters (then often called totalisers) existed at the time and Julius must have used one of several known techniques, but still, it is always disappointing to have mysteries in the details of such a notable invention. This first parallel automatic totalisator operated until 1918, although it was modified and reworked several times in that span. At least early on, the tote house continued to keep manual totals for payout calculations, mistrusting the machine where it really mattered. There are indications that it was out of service during some races, and it may not have been all that reliable in general. Still, it worked. After its first proper operation during a major race, the *New Zealand Herald* published a report that conveyed its success and its complexity: > A small knowledge of the extraordinary demands that the work of a totalisator imposes upon its parts shows clearly how [the] mechanism might have failed in a dozen ways. But in the meantime alterations have been made, the machine has become more familiar to its operators, and it worked on Saturday and yesterday with fine regularity, and to everybody’s satisfaction.... > > [An] obstacle of importance was raised by the fact that, in view of the facility with which many investments could be put upon a single horse at a time, the machinery was apt to be run at times so fast that the starting and stopping of the rotating wheels, which, in spite of their light construction, have considerable inertia, set up almost destructive strains and shocks. This trouble has been overcome with an ingenuity altogether admirable. The counter releases a spring-driven gear, which can go as fast as it will irrespective of the motion of the wheel on which the figures are shown to the public, and the wheel simply runs leisurely and smoothly ahead until it overtakes the gear. Even then the wheel, free to make several rapid revolutions, would be difficult to stop at the right place if its speed were not controlled by a governor. The Ellerslie totalisator might not be called a complete success. Julius charged the racing club £4,000, but spent over £11,000 on construction and modifications. The result was so complex, and required so much maintenance, that the staff of the tote house actually expanded after its installation. Still, the immediate display of totals was a huge draw for bettors, and it succeeded as well in speeding up the closing process. I am always hesitant to apply superlatives, but the Ellerslie totalisator has been called the largest calculating machine to date. I believe it to also represent a major step in the history of displays: a very early, if not first, implementation of a billboard-sized data display that automatically updated in real time. In any case, the machine brought in money. On the totalisator's first full race day, the grand total counter went through £41,514. An estimated 83,000 bets, 10,000 on some single races. ╔════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ https://computer.rip/static/img/tote/3.jpg ║ ║ "Julius totalisator adder and indicator, Powerhouse Museum Collection" ║ ╚════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝ On the back of the Ellerslie machine's success, Julius restyled Totalling Machanisms Ltd as Automatic Totalisators Ltd, or ATL. The First World War caused a great deal of disruption to, well, just about everything, including the racetracks. It halted progress in totalisators for several years. The lull didn't last long, and by 1922 ATL had built improved totalisators for a half dozen New Zealand racetracks. These used a simplified design, benefiting from newer technologies such as electricity. While the totalisator would remain mechanical for decades to come, the Ellerslie machine is the only one to have been *completely* mechanical. It seems that Julius began to contemplate electrical designs before he even finished the Ellserslie installation, and all later machines (including an "upgrade" installed at Ellerslie after 1918) used an electric drive system instead of the concrete weights and their crank-wielding attendant. More significantly, though, they also electrified the teller machines: instead of pulling cranks, the tellers pressed buttons, which energized circuits that operated the escapements in the tote board via solenoids. This made it possible, for the first time, to locate tellers for a single parimutuel pool at different locations throughout the racetrack. The greatest of ATL's electromechanical totalisators was installed at Longchamp, Paris, in 1928. This machine, occupying a building that one could easily mistake for a grand hotel were it not for the numbers behind each window, supported at least 270 tellers (some sources say more). Sales numbers don't seem to have made it to the modern age, but with so many tellers working it must have hit six-figure ticket volumes for popular races. It remained in use until 1973. Later ATL totalisators were reduced in size and price (truck-mounted portable versions for small racing clubs, for example), and improved in features. We learned early on that some manual tote boards had displayed equivalent odds, while the early Julius machines showed only totals. That limitation wasn't permanent, and ATL machines switched over to estimated payout odds in the 1930s. These took the form of "barometer" displays, or vertical bar graphs, that rose as the odds approached 1/1 (a horse favored to win) and fell down to 100/1 (decidedly long odds). Many of the early ATL systems were upgraded to this later design, and some of the "win/lose barometer" machines saw service, like Longchamp, into the 1970s when computers presented a cheaper alternative. Totalisator technology became somewhat stagnant after the 1930s, perhaps a result of saturation. Many large markets like the UK had legal restrictions on race betting that prohibited large totalisators (although an oddity of UK law meant that they were allowed for *dog* races, where the Julius totalisator is best known in that country). In countries with laxer gambling rules, like New Zealand and France, there simply weren't that many large racetracks and by the end of the '30s most of them already had ATL machines that would operate for decades more. The more innovative designs were seen in portable systems, which were a big market for the many racing clubs that held seasonal racing at different venues. They could not afford to build a large tote house, and didn't have the attendees to keep one busy anyway, but a semi-trailer machine could be towed around with the race days, to be set up and run a small crew in the tradition of carnival rides. These portable systems demanded miniaturization, which was difficult with chain-driven gear shafts but much easier with the relays, and relay logic, that had emerged from the telephone industry. Similarly, the transition to more electrical totalisators made them easier to assemble and disassemble, since it was a matter of hooking up wires rather than aligning sheaves and tensioning cables The burgeoning telephone industry also meant that relay systems and all manner of electric devices were better understood and easier to manufacture than ever before, inviting new manufacturers into the market. British firm Bell Punch, founded to manufacture machines for validating (punching) railroad tickets, saw ATL's products and responded with their own line of totalisators that were almost entirely electrical. These were particularly popular at smaller tracks, since they were much more compact and easier to install. In the United States, electrical engineer and race horse breeder Harry L. Straus founded the American Totalisator Company, or AmTote, in 1928. It took several years for AmTote to get off the ground, but their 1933 system at Arlington Park in Illinois established them as the dominant US manufacturer. Their machines were entirely based on telephone relays, and appear to have been the genesis of incandescent numerical displays. Straus's design used a grid of light bulbs, 4 wide by 6 high, with a cabinet of relays that would activate the correct bulbs to show the digits 0 through 9. AmTote numerical displays were an innovation in their own right and found widespread use outside of totalisators (the prices on the original set of *The Price is Right* are a notable example), but the totalisator business was good, and AmTote installed hundreds of machines around the world. ╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ I put a lot of time into writing this, and I hope that you enjoy reading ║ ║ it. If you can spare a few dollars, consider supporting me on Ko-Fi. You'll ║ ║ receive an occasional extra, subscribers-only post, and defray the costs of ║ ║ providing artisanal, hand-built world wide web directly from Albuquerque, ║ ║ New Mexico. ║ ║ ║ ║ >>> https://www.ko-fi.com/jbcrawford <<< ║ ╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝ AmTote also brought other innovations. Despite the historical practice of bets on "win" or "place," ATL machines had only handled a single pool of bets for the race. AmTote's more compact machines could afford the extra logic, almost a duplicate machine, to run a second pool. That meant that parimutuel tellers at AmTote ticket machines could select either a "win" or "place" ticket for each horse, and odds and payouts were calculated appropriately. Instead of preprinted tickets, the AmTote machines operated a mechanical stamp to mark the ticket with the bet information including a "code word" that changed for each race to discourage modification or forging of tickets. A central control panel, in the tote house, "locked" the ticket machines to close bets at the start of each race. Later generations of AmTote machines even used modular (connectorized) electrical wiring and connected all ticket machines to a shared bus, which made portable systems much easier to set up and encouraged owners of fixed systems to add more teller stations at locations convenient to bettors. The totalisers used in AmTote machines are similar to, and presumably derived from, the Strowger rotary or step-by-step switches used in telephone exchanges. They were fitted with solenoids that would advance them not just in single steps, but in units of 5 or 10 steps as well, for atomic issuance of tickets at different denominations. Much else was taken from the telephone industry: the "brains" of an AmTote machine were installed on relay racks, and extensive diagnostic features were fitted, including controls to produce void "test tickets" at each ticket station and a self-test routine that should advance the counters to known values. AmTote even used a distinctly telco power arrangement: motor-generators converted mains power to DC, which floated the lead-acid batteries that actually powered the machine. ATL was not to be left out of these innovations, and in particular designed an impressive relay-logic system that fit into a truck called the "Totemobile." A number of these systems were built, and ATL operated them as a service for smaller racetracks. For a commission, ATL would send its own staff to your club's track, and wire the Totemobile to ticket machines installed wherever convenient. They took bets, paid out winnings, and at the end of the day they drove away to the next job. George Julius lived until 1946, by which time he was Sir George Julius and better known for his influential tenure as chairman of Australia's government R&D organization CSIRO. At CSIRO, he turned towards electronics, as did the company he had founded. After the Second World War, ATL started on a major rework of their product line that introduced relay logic and led to the company's expansion into relay and analog computers. The post-war global economy led to new totalisator installations around the world, and with that surge of new interest came new features. "Quinella" bets, that two horses will place first and second but in either order, were newly popular in the 1950s and ATL designed the first machines that could efficiently manage them and display the odds. Also during the 1950s, ATL designed a new generation of ticket machines that issued tickets as small segments of punched paper tape. In 1966, ATL designed a totalisator for the New York Racing Association with 550 ticket issuing machines, two primary incandescent light bulb odds displays, and twenty smaller odds displays located around the stands. Installed at the Aqueduct racetrack in NYC, the machine handled over $700 million in a season. Here, for the first time, there were no chains, no cables, no rotary selectors. Instead, the tote house was home to two Honeywell 200 computers. A partnership of ATL, Honeywell, and a software firm called Data Trends had reinvented the totalisator as an early online computer application, the computers polling the ticket machines and updating the displays. Over the following years, ATL would adopt the PDP-8 as the core of their totalisators. From 1970 on, totalisators were almost universally computers. North London's Harringray Stadium, a greyhound track, operated an ATL mechanical totalisator until its closure in 1987. There was, reportedly, a mechanical totalisator operating in Caracas as late as 2005. In the UK, where many smaller greyhound tracks had totalisators installed, there are several examples that are disused but still standing. At many older racetracks in New Zealand, the UK, and Europe, bets are still placed at teller windows under the enormous tote board that once housed an ATL machine. George Julius changed the "totalisator" from a room full of people to a machine. His company, ATL, would later change it from a machine to an application. The era of electronic totalisators is its own story, with its own ups and downs and anecdotes, one that I plan to cover in better depth one day. In particular, electronic totalisators were a major impetus of improvements in numerical displays. Display systems designed for totalisators went on to be used in all kinds of applications, from scoreboards to transit destination signage. Starting in the 1980s, off-track betting led to nationwide networked totalisator systems and all of the fascinating asides that that entails. AmTote is still around, a major developer of gambling technology. ATL has scattered to the winds, but makes up part of the modern Light & Wonder (formerly Scientific Games) and Sportech. ╔════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ https://computer.rip/static/img/tote/4.jpg ║ ║ "Former Ellserslie tote house, Haydn & Rollett Architects" ║ ╚════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝ Still, I don't find these later machines quite as romantic as Julius's cruder invention. There's something about the fusion of the totalisator as a system, a building, a process, and a machine. The tellers at their windows, pulling on wires to influence the workings of a great machine hidden away in the ceiling. > The lever pulls a long wire cord; the cord releases the counter. The gearing revolves a little, and the counter wheels turn. Sometimes the wheels move at long intervals; and then, as a horse becomes popular, its set of wheels will commence to spin frantically, so that one might imagine the count terribly apt to fail. But the ‘tens’ tot up the units, the ‘hundreds’ go up in their turn; and grand total wheels turn phlegmatic somersaults, and perform mathematical prodigies. (*New Zealand Herald*) It is funny, then, that one of the faults of the earliest electronic totalisators was their struggle with arithmetic. But that's a story for later. [^1]: The specific notation used here is the British system. For historic reasons, horse tracks in many other countries (including the US) also observe the British system. In other countries or other sports, you will find other conventions used to express the same thing, such as the "moneyline" system used for other sports in the US in which "7/1" would be written "+700" (a $100 bet returns $700 on win). Historically there have been multiple conventions in use, and the confusion that could cause is yet another reason that mechanized standardization proved popular. Keep in mind as well that these conventions all express "net" payments, when it is conventional that winners also have their original stake returned. This means that 7/1 or +700 odds mean that a person who bets $100 and wins will be paid out $800, their original $100 and a gain of $700. This is perhaps more intuitive with the UK system where we can observe that 7/1 odds sum to a "pool" of 8, but perhaps the moneyline system is popular here because we do not like to think about fractions. [^2]: I'm simplifying a bit here, but to make a long digression short: parimutuel betting was actually banned for a time in France for running afoul of the gambling regulations. Oller started a new parimutuel business about a decade later, but now "parimutuel" was gone and his cart was called the "totalisator" instead. It seems like he may have effected a rebranding to disassociate his new venture from the old (illegal) one, and like "parimutuel," the strange word "totalisator" is probably from French (a corruption of "totalisateur"). One of the outcomes of this whole thing is that it's actually sort of ambiguous what "totalisator" refers to: the concept of parimutuel betting? the office where it takes place? the business that takes bets? the machine that calculates these odds? All of these were called "totalisators" in various times and places. In modern use, "totalisator" refers almost exclusively to the machine that performs the calculations, yet the word was already in use before these machines were invented. [^3]: Following up on the previous footnote, the terminological confusion we have today emerged very early. An 1881 New Zealand patent dispute over a small mechanized parimutuel calculator reveals that different parties in New Zealand seem to have disagreed over what exactly "totalisator" meant and whether or not it was equivalent to "parimutuel." Of course, the person defending the allegedly infringing patent claim had plenty of motivation to argue that they were different, since both parties involved seem to have copied the idea from France. Links: 1: https://computer.rip/2024-03-17-wilhelm-haller-and-photocopier-accounting.html 2: https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/historydisplays/SecondFloor/Totalisators/FirstJulius/FirstJuliusMain.php sincerely, j. b. crawford me@computer.rip ================================================================================ Unsubscribe notify+trBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q@b.newsletters.love from this list: https://maleman.computer.rip/unsub/notify%2BtrBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q%40b.newsletters.love/dJTXHwuHBpTaMuJV Read online, tell your friends, submit to webrings, etc: https://computer.rip/ Questions? Problems? Lingering doubts? Just reply to this email. CAN-SPAM says I have to tell you if I'm a cop: COMPUTERS ARE BAD Seventh Standard LLC 1 (877) 456-4340 PO Box 26924 Albuquerque, NM 87125-6924 USA]]> Sun, 31 May 2026 22:25:23 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/yeFPSvrDrGWOFNFLQDq4yi9gea9KtRkt/p/yeFPSvrDrGWOFNFLQDq4yi9gea9KtRkt weird_wide_web_hole_121 ]]> Thu, 28 May 2026 08:13:11 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/5V1nhNmqmgyEBB7vpayseOf3ytUyCb8r/p/5V1nhNmqmgyEBB7vpayseOf3ytUyCb8r weird_wide_web_hole_120 ]]> Thu, 21 May 2026 09:14:43 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/rbmlAbFTbFdfqibNPX7rSndjJsRAk24D/p/rbmlAbFTbFdfqibNPX7rSndjJsRAk24D weird_wide_web_hole_119 ]]> Thu, 14 May 2026 08:24:20 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/vQjYagz6sLWoazTsgCxbDaeS8LdMhNsS/p/vQjYagz6sLWoazTsgCxbDaeS8LdMhNsS computers are bad: extremely low frequencies >> https://www.ko-fi.com/jbcrawford <<< ║ ╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝ During the 1960s, the Navy performed a series of poorly documented experiments to establish the feasibility of Sanguine. These included a Wyoming power transmission line that was temporarily disconnected for use as an ad-hoc 40 mile antenna, and a power-line-like 110 mile antenna built by RCA in North Carolina and Virginia. The details of this RCA experiment, part of Project Pangloss, have become obscure. It appears that RCA was contracted to evaluate a number of different communications options for the Navy, including the use of other planets in the solar system as passive repeaters, but most of them didn't work out. The VLF transmitter for the project was located at Ararat, North Carolina, and the two two electrodes at Algoma, Virginia and Lake Lookout, North Carolina. A 1963 test successfully got a message from the test antenna to a submarine submerged 150' deep and 520 miles from the transmitter. Like most of the military's ambitious plans in the late 1960s, Project Sanguine didn't happen. The reasons are complex, or at least several. Sanguine was unpopular with the public: besides specific concerns around safety, the late '60s saw a rising anti-nuclear campaign and a general lack of interest in enormously expensive military undertakings. The fact that Sanguine needed a massive amount of land meant that it was pretty much impossible to site it somewhere that wouldn't generate local opposition, so like ICBM fields, Sanguine was kicked around like a football. Originally planned for Wisconsin, it later shifted to Texas, and Texas didn't like it that much either (although by that point the antenna field had been downsized to just 1,600 to 3,200 square miles). And, of course, the technology was struggling to keep up with the threat landscape. The hardened design of Sanguine relied mostly on the idea that the Soviet Union couldn't possibly nuke most of the transmitters distributed over 6,500 square miles, a reassurance that the development of multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs) seriously undermined. As public opposition formed, a health and safety review commissioned by the Navy resulted in a noncommittal report that did little to reassure the public (and lawmakers) that the plan was safe. Last of all, but certainly not least, the budget projections for Sanguine were formidable, and Congress did not have the appetite for the spending. Sanguine made it far enough that, during 1968, the Navy and RCA built a scaled down transmitter and antenna in the Chequamegon National Forest of Wisconsin. This came to be known as the Wisconsin Test Facility, and it was used as a transmitter for a series of jamming tests in the late '60s and early '70s. During this period, the Navy also considered the use of a BPA transmission line from The Dalles, Oregon to Los Angeles as an ELF transmitter—the plan being to actually modulate messages onto the 60 Hz AC power carried by the line, which was incidentally radiated due to the line's largely straight 850 mile span. This plan was called PISCES, and it is unclear if it ever went anywhere, although an interesting rumor holds that it was operational for a short period and used as the "jammer" transmitter for jamming susceptibility testing of the Wisconsin transmitter. The results of these tests were mostly positive, but that wasn't enough to save an unpopular plan. Sanguine faded away, perhaps replaced by a scaled-down system called Super Hard ELF or SHELF. There is very little information on SHELF today. The idea seems to have been to install an ELF antenna in deep underground shafts (potentially over a mile below the surface) using hard-rock mining techniques. Work on SHELF apparently continued through the 1970s, but it probably never got beyond the feasibility stage. Instead, the Navy shifted its focus to Project Seafarer. Seafarer was clearly a direct descendant of Sanguine, but addressed many of its biggest problems through a stripped down design. Seafarer transmitters, for example, would be located in surface buildings instead of underground. Still, the same basic antenna design remained, a grid on 3.5 mile spacing requiring about 4,700 square miles. The Nevada Test Site was considered as a location, as was White Sands Missile Range and forestland in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Michigan was ultimately selected, a result of favorable ground conditions and the lack of frequent large explosions. Seafarer construction was expected to begin in 1977, but instead it ended. The governor of Michigan shot the idea down, Congress didn't like it all that much, and President Carter signed the order ending work on not only Seafarer but ELF in general. In 1977, after roughly two decades of R&D work across multiple experimental sites, the ELF Program was in mothballs. The Navy was not so easily dissuaded. Later in 1977, they proposed "Austere ELF," a plan to throw together an ELF transmit site more or less from spare parts. A transmitter at Sawyer AFB in Michigan's Upper Peninsula would feed 32, 45, and 53-mile-long antenna elements, and via a leased telephone line the AFB would also control the inactive Wisconsin Test Facility transmitter. Even this basic, partially spare parts plan fell afoul of the public and congress. It failed to address most of the original health and environmental concerns, and still cost too much. Serious resumption of the ELF program would have to wait for President Ronald Reagan. Reagan was a fan of big, expensive, technically sophisticated solutions to Cold War programs, and ELF sure was one of those. Reagan approved "Project ELF," itself a scaled down version of Austere ELF. Project ELF used the existing Wisconsin Test Facility, supplemented by an identical 56-mile antenna in Michigan's Escanaba State Forest. Both would be operated by Sawyer AFB. The Wisconsin Test Facility from Project Sanguine, after 20 years, came to be known as Navy Radio Transmitter Clam Lake: the first operational ELF transmitter. The Michigan site, known as Navy Radio Transmitter Republic, quickly joined it. It's amusing that a temporary test facility ultimately became the final product, but the Navy had already invested a huge amount of effort in the Wisconsin transmitter. Everything from the strength of the EM field produced by the transmitter to its location in a National Forest had posed complications. Although Sanguine was intended as a hardened, underground system, burying antennas was a lot of work and the Wisconsin Test Facility had originally been temporary. Instead of buried cables, it used 1/2" aluminum wires strung above ground on utility poles for the two antennas. The voltages on the antenna wires required isolation from the surrounding environment, so as with power lines, trees were cleared to make a right of way for the antenna cables. The Forest Service, concerned about aesthetic impact on the forest's recreational areas, required that the antenna routes avoid some parts of the forest and take right-angle jogs near roads so that it was not possible to see a considerable distance down the antenna ROW when driving past (which would make the existence of the cleared ROW much more obvious). The transmitter site and antenna ROWs [link 2] are still clearly visible today. At each of the four ends, about seven miles from the transmitter building, around 10,000 feet of buried copper wire make up the electrode. Trickier were the electrical problems. The ELF antennas could induce a significant potential in parallel electrical lines, and the use of ground return meant a lot of interference on telephone lines. When transmitting, which was ultimately the case 24/7, the 2.6 MW transmitter induced a current of about 300 A in the cables and ground. Understanding these impacts of ELF transmitters was actually one of the original purposes of the Wisconsin Test Facility, and the Navy had built model power and telephone lines parallel to the antenna elements. The ELF system was found to cause problems ranging from flickering light bulbs to phantom telephone ringing, and the Navy installed additional grounding and filtering on public utilities throughout the area at its own expense—even reimbursing the utilities for administrative costs related to customer complaints. Still, the interference problems were not fully solved during the test operations and no doubt contributed to the public's less than enthusiastic support. The former Wisconsin Test Facility, as Clam Lake, became operational in 1985. Its sister site, Republic in Michigan, went online in 1980. Republic was new construction, not an old experimental facility, but for cost and expediency reasons it was a virtually identical design to Clam Lake with above ground wires to buried electrode screens. Because of geographical constraints, the Republic antenna is not in a straightforward cross configuration. Instead, it's more of an "F" shape, electrically equivalent but with the feedlines placed differently. From 1989 on, the two sites operated in synchronization, with their total 2.6 MW operational transmitter power producing a radiated power of about *eight* watts. Yes, even at 14 miles in length, ELF ground dipoles are extremely inefficient. This remained a key problem with ELF. Early Navy ELF plans, like Project Sanguine, had assumed the use of extremely high transmit powers to produce a usable signal. ELF propagates very well, but at the paltry 8 W achieved by the Project ELF transmitters, practical reception still required extracting the transmitted signal from a noise floor that was just about as loud. That meant reducing the practical bandwidth of the system even further, and thus its speed. Project Sanguine would probably have been able to transmit EAMs directly to submarines; Project ELF was not. Even the compact format of EAMs was too long for a system with an effective symbol rate of about one letter per five minutes, or fifteen minutes to transmit the three-letter code groups used by the Navy. This reduced ELF capability was basically a very fancy pager network. The Navy has not disclosed the details of the scheme, but it's probably something like this: each submarine has a three-letter code group assigned to it. When its ELF receiver detects that specific code group, the submarine crew know that there is a message waiting for them, and they have to move at least close enough to the surface for VLF in order to find out what that message is. The Navy often referred to this as "bell ringing:" ELF messages were like the ringing of a telephone. As a means of supervision, so that submarines knew they were capable of receiving a message, "idle" code groups were transmitted 24/7. For how hard the Navy had fought to build it, Project ELF did not have a long life. The Navy's ELF submarine communications system was conceived around 1958, became operational over 30 years later in 1989, and shut down in 2004 after just 15 years of service. "The Nuclear Register," an anti-nuclear-weapons newsletter, put it like this: "A surprise Navy announcement signaled the end of 36 years of first local, then global, opposition to the Navy's giant transmitter system." ELF overcame formidable political odds. Besides Congress's lack of interest in the expense and federal policy concerns around health and the environment, a statewide ballot referendum in Michigan had attempted to prohibit construction and legislation prohibiting ELF transmitters was perennially introduced in the federal congress. Activist groups opposed to the transmitters staged regular demonstrations and, as Project ELF proceeded despite their objections, protests gave way to civil disobedience. Utility poles supporting the ELF cables were cut on numerous occasions, and the transmitter buildings vandalized. "The Nuclear Register" wrote: > Nukewatch said the Navy's closure announcement, while welcome, raises more questions than it answers. The Navy said "improved technologies" and "changing requirements of today's Navy" made ELF obsolete. However, "very-low-frequency (ELF) [sic] alternatives to ELF have been around for 30 years and the 'changing requirements' refer to the end of the cold war that happened 14 years ago," LaForge said. Indeed, it is hard for me to see the undignified closure of the Navy's ELF program as anything other than an admission of failure. The basic technical concept of ELF appears sound, but the transmitters are large, disruptive, and costly to operate. It is not clear that the advantages of ELF, namely the greater depth at which it can be received, outweigh its downsides or compare well to VLF. VLF is still used by the US Navy today. ELF is not: the US has had no ELF capability since the 2004 closure of Clam Lake and Republic. China, India, and Russia are the only other nations to have constructed ELF transmitters. The Russian system, ZEVS, operates at 82 Hz from ground dipole antenna in place since at least the early 1990s. It is a candidate for the most powerful radio transmitter in the world, although the exact specifications have not been made public. India's INS Kattabomman gained an ELF transmitter in the 2010s, and while few details are known, China is believed to have constructed an enormous ELF transmitter in Huazhong during the 2010s. It is, of course, interesting that China and India have both built an ELF capability after the US abandoned the technology. One wonders what made an ELF capability so hard to sustain here, even after the Clam Lake and Republic sites were built. Well, there is an inertia to politics: the organized opposition to ELF, once energized, didn't go away. Area residents and politicians continued to organize for the closure of the Wisconsin and Michigan transmitters until their final days. Opponents of the ELF sites got plenty of help from both science and popular culture. Preliminary research linking ELF radiation to leukemia has not held up to modern scrutiny, but as with broader EM/RF cancer links this is an area of ongoing controversy. Extensive research by the Navy, mostly on the Clam Lake Site, hasn't found evidence of ecological disruption due to the ELF transmitter. Still, there is ongoing controversy, and one of the reasons for Project ELF's long and torturous construction process was a series of lawsuits and appeals under the National Environmental Policy Act, contesting the thoroughness of the environmental research. As usual, these possible connections to health and environmental impacts have given way to conspiracy theories. In the more shadowy corners of the internet, ELF is associated with everything from strange sensations to mind control. And that is where I first became involved. The X-Files episode "Drive" (S06E02) sees Fox Mulder cornered, practically carjacked, by a man who insists that if he does not drive West then his head will explode. The episode aired four years after the release of *Speed* and no doubt owes inspiration to that film (Mulder even makes a joke about it in the episode), but it attributes the bizarre scenario to a very different cause. The hapless victim, portrayed by Bryan Cranston, gained his head-exploding illness as a result of some sort of military experiment involving long antennas secretly buried beneath his house. Vince Gilligan wrote the episode, and while there were several influences, the final episode is a direct reference to Project ELF and the surrounding controversy. Years later, because of their collaboration on "Drive," Vince Gilligan cast Cranston as the lead in his show *Breaking Bad.* In the episode, Cranston doesn't make it to the West Coast. Mulder and Scully hatch a plan to puncture his inner ear and relieve the pressure building in his brain somewhere on the California coast, but Mulder just can't drive fast enough. Cranston's head explodes. ╔═══════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ https://computer.rip/static/img/elf/4.jpg ║ ║ "Clam Lake transmitter" ║ ╚═══════════════════════════════════════════╝ Over the lifespan of the Project ELF facilities, police issued 636 trespass citations to demonstrators. Congressional representatives introduced legislation and amendments to end the ELF program multiple times. At least a half dozen ELF transmitter concepts were canceled, each one less ambitious than the ones before it. ELF is an interesting technology, but in a way, it's more interesting as a case study in military acquisition. Take a concept that is expensive, politically unpopular, and questionably superior to systems already in service—but if the military wants it, they tend to eventually get it. After thirty years, the military wears resistance down and gets something pushed through. Fifteen years later, the Navy shrugs, calls it obsolete, and shuts it down. What's left is a 14-mile-across "X" in the forests of Wisconsin, a legacy of controversy that still echoes, and a pretty good episode of The X-Files. [^1]: Unrelated to astronomer Percival Lowell, although there are enough moments of intersection between the two that you wonder if they might have met. [^2]: Many of the fine details of the original NSS installation have become confused, probably because the Navy upgraded the equipment several times in its first decades and the specifications of different eras have become confused. Here are some notes: some sources give the transmitters as 350 kW, others as 500 kW. A Navy history explains that improvements to the antenna design allowed for raising the power after the site was originally designed, so 500 kW is indeed what was installed but we know where the 350 number came from. Some sources give the original towers as 500' tall and others (including Wikipedia) 600', I think the 500' number is more reliable as it agrees with the Navy history. I am not quite sure where the confusion comes from, though. [^3]: Some sources, such as Wikipedia, give a number of 22,500 square miles and 2/5 the area of Wisconsin. This was the very top end of a preliminary estimate that was revised down to 6,500 during planning. The 22,500 number still frequently appears, probably just because it's the more absurd figure, which is an example of the challenges of historical research when most information comes from activist groups opposed to the thing you're researching. Of course, we have to temper that criticism with the fact that some anti-Sanguine sources use the 6,500 figure, especially older ones. The shift towards the more attention-grabbing 22,500 might have happened later as Sanguine was discussed more by people without original knowledge of the program. Links: 1: https://computer.rip/2023-09-10-the-Essex-GWEN-site.html 2: https://www.google.com/maps/@46.0845615,-90.9164033,1469m/ sincerely, j. b. crawford me@computer.rip ================================================================================ Unsubscribe notify+trBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q@b.newsletters.love from this list: https://maleman.computer.rip/unsub/notify%2BtrBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q%40b.newsletters.love/dJTXHwuHBpTaMuJV Read online, tell your friends, submit to webrings, etc: https://computer.rip/ Questions? Problems? Lingering doubts? Just reply to this email. CAN-SPAM says I have to tell you if I'm a cop: COMPUTERS ARE BAD Seventh Standard LLC 1 (877) 456-4340 PO Box 26924 Albuquerque, NM 87125-6924 USA]]> Sun, 10 May 2026 00:12:17 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/i3bezLPB8eAvZqt3LfHkkbGG6hf1xuXX/p/i3bezLPB8eAvZqt3LfHkkbGG6hf1xuXX weird_wide_web_hole_118 ]]> Thu, 07 May 2026 07:03:46 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/3EDzfeXC6jcWWlo7cvfkEKIOKkYXCKJD/p/3EDzfeXC6jcWWlo7cvfkEKIOKkYXCKJD weird_wide_web_hole_117 ]]> Thu, 30 Apr 2026 07:19:06 +0000 https://app.newsletters.love/collections/0bW1UprSxHrwaIU1ZURi91Mf470Gar0P/p/0bW1UprSxHrwaIU1ZURi91Mf470Gar0P computers are bad: voice modems From its origin in 1981, AT has shown remarkable staying power. Virtually all computer-connected modems, to this very day, continue to use AT commands for basic configuration. Likewise, the basic architecture of the Smartmodem persists: the Smartmodem connected to the host computer using a single RS-232 link that switched between carrying control messages and data. The very latest 5G modems still work the same way, complicated by the addition of multiple separate UART serial channels (so that, for example, control commands, data, and GNSS data can each have their own separate channel) and the adoption of the USB communications device class "Abstract Control Model," a standard UART-over-USB implementation mostly intended to simplify modems. Plug a modern 5G modem into a Linux machine and you can easily observe this: virtually all cellular modems are USB-attached and will appear as a USB composite device with multiple serial adapters, usually attached as /dev/ttyACM* due to the USB-CDC ACM class. Courtesy of the V.250 standard (a formalization of AT commands) and considerable effort by driver implementers, USB-attached modems "Just Work" as network interfaces on modern Linux—but under the hood, the kernel is communicating with the modem over separate serial interfaces. Back in the olden days, it was common to run PPP (point-to-point protocol) over one of the serial interfaces to use the actual data (bearer) channel, but now PPP has mostly given way to "Direct IP" where you just push packets over the serial link. Just to complicate things a touch more, there are vendor-specific standards like QMI (Qualcomm) that completely replace AT and find use in modern smartphones, but they're messy with regards to Linux support. If you are personally interacting at this layer, messing with modems or writing communications software or whatever, you are almost certainly going to stick to AT commands. Modem vendors continue to build on AT. If you look at LTE modems made for IoT applications, for example, it's common for them to provide a complete HTTP implementation (and sometimes MQTT, and sometimes some kind of proprietary message broker protocol) accessible via AT commands. That means you can implement an IoT device without a network stack at all, deferring all network operations to the modem itself. With a JSON-over-HTTP backend, for example, you might send AT commands with JSON payloads over the serial control channel and then get JSON back. You never interact with the network at all, the modem is a completely self-contained system. At the extreme, you might implement your entire device using exclusively the modem. This is a common approach for telematics devices like GPS trackers: they consist of nothing *but* a cellular modem, the telemetry application is built for the modem using an SDK from its vendor, and you interact with it using AT commands. IoT-class modems frequently provide GPIO and user flash for just this purpose. None of that is actually what this article is about, but I want to make clear how profound the implications of the Smartmodem heritage are. In 1981, the Smartmodem was a standalone device controlled over serial because the limitations of the era's computer made that a practical necessity. Processors weren't fast enough to run the modem DSP alongside other workloads, certification requirements for telephone-connected devices were stricter, etc. Despite the late-'90s detour into "winmodems," most of those constraints still exist, just in the different forms of the cellular network. Today's modems are less v.54 and more 5G, but they still act as standalone devices controlled over serial channels. Most telephone modems of the 1980s were exclusively data modems. You could use AT commands to make a call, switch into data mode, and then you basically had a very long serial cable from your device to the computer on the other end of the call. That was all these modems did; their only interaction with "The Telephone System" besides as a pair of wires was for basic call control like detecting dial tone and sending DTMF dialing. That was quite natural considering their evolution from acoustic coupler modems (where you dialed the phone yourself and then set the handset on the modem), but by the late '80s, as devices like the Smartmodem with their own call control were common, it started to feel primitive. With Carterfone and the breakup of the AT&T monopoly, computers were starting to feel like first-class citizens on the telephone system. Shouldn't they have more complete support for, well, telephone things? >From a modern perspective, it might seem odd that fax came to modems before voice, but it makes technical sense. Fax machines use a digital protocol that is loosely derived from Bell 103 and belongs to the same extended family as other telephone modems, so modems already had the hardware. Implementing fax support was just a matter of software. With some extensions to the AT command set, your computer became a fax machine. By the late 1980s, fax support was common in modems, usually distinguished by marketing the modem as "data/fax." For example, the command AT+FCLASS=1.0 changed the modem to T.31 fax mode (fax class 1.0). T.31/EIA-578 is a standard for sending and receiving faxes using a serial connection to a telephone modem, and it was widely implemented by commercial software packages. There were so many "PC fax" packages available in the 1990s that you could stock half an aisle of an OfficeMax with them, and indeed that's what happened. The legacy of this industry is that there are still dozens of "fax server" products built around data/fax modems, like the open source Hylafax. Fax modems also made a more general contribution to the modem state of the art: the concept of distinct modes. "Fax class 0" was data mode, while values like 1 and 2 and, oddly, 1.0 and 2.0 were used for different fax implementations. There was an obvious, and tantalizing, opportunity: more modes. Maybe, even, a modem mode for that most classic application of the telephone: voice. Could you use your computer for *telephone calls?* The idea is obvious, so it's no surprise that several vendors were working on it all at once. Early efforts at telephone-on-computer could be quite comical, consisting of a telephone that was more or less glued to a computer, no electrical connectivity between them. The IBM Palm Top PC 110 is my favorite example of this form, a Japanese-market miniature laptop with a speaker and microphone on the front edge so that you could hold it up to your face to make a call. Besides amusement, it illustrates a fundamental challenge of merging computers with telephony: real-time media is hard. It seems very funny to build a telephone into a computer because computers are general-purpose devices defined by software. Putting a phone in the computer should not mean *physically* putting a phone in the computer; the phone should obviously be a software application. Well, obviously from our modern perspective, but real-time media has always been difficult for computers (which, for architectural reasons, are mostly seen today as fundamentally asynchronous, non-real-time devices). Modern computers get away with it by brute force; they're just so fast that they can be wildly inefficient with media and still keep up to real-time. But things were different in the 1990s. Real-time audio processing was a fairly demanding application and most of the computer industry preferred to leave it to hardware. Still, the voice modem was an inevitability. In 1991, the *Los Angeles Times* reported that at least three companies were working on some form of "modem with voice support" for 1992. They focused mainly on Rockwell International, which proved the right call. We don't remember Rockwell as a semiconductor company today, but in the 1990s they very much were—Rockwell Semiconductor later spun out into Conexant, now part of Synaptics. At the time, Rockwell was a major player in semiconductors, especially for communications. Rockwell had particular expertise in answering telephones. During the 1970s, the Rockwell Galaxy Automatic Call Distributor just about invented the modern call center. It was the first digitally-controlled system that answered calls on a pool of telephone lines, placed them on hold, and distributed them to a pool of operators. The flexibility and efficiency of Rockwell's computer-controlled system, which was specifically designed to cut costs by presenting calls to operators as rapidly as possible, displaced AT&T's contact center systems (like turrets) and Rockwell had almost complete dominance in the new world of 1-800 customer call centers during the 1980s. Rockwell did not manufacture complete modems, but instead chipsets that were integrated into modems by other manufacturers. That makes it a little tricky to figure out the first model that Rockwell shipped with voice support, but it was sometime in 1992. Rockwell's chips quickly lead to a generation of "data/fax/voice" modems from all the usual manufacturers. Despite competition from other chipset vendors like Cirrus, Rockwell's voice modems became the Hayes of voice. By the mid-'90s, data/fax/voice modems were widespread and the majority either used a Rockwell chipset or a chipset that matched Rockwell's control protocol. Let's talk a bit about that protocol, and how voice modems actually worked. Although the v.250 standard for many AT commands was in place, there was no standard for voice control. To oversimplify a bit, the "core" AT commands are generally AT followed by one or two letters. "AT+" came to be used as a prefix for standardized "extension" commands, like those added for fax support. Manufacturer-specific extension commands used AT followed by some other character, and Rockwell chose AT#. To start, voice mode was presented as just another case of fax classes. Specifically, Rockwell voice mode is fax class 8, so to put a modem into voice mode you sent AT#CLS=8 (it seems like the properly standardized AT+FCLASS=8 also worked on many later chipsets, but I'm not sure about the early examples) to enter Fax Class 8. In most cases, you will also want to use the commands AT+VLS=?, which retrieves the modem's voice feature support, and AT+VSM=?, which returns the list of audio codecs supported by the modem. Once in voice mode, you can use a set of voice-specific AT# commands to dial an outgoing call or answer an incoming one. The modem provides messages about call state, so once the call is up, you can issue the command AT#VTX to begin transmitting voice. This puts the modem into a mode much like a data or fax connection, in which everything sent over the serial connection is interpreted as audio data to be played onto the telephone line. This gets into one of the ugly details of voice modems. Early voice modems had no audio connection to the computer, only serial, so audio data had to be sent over the serial connection. In keeping with telephony conventions, 8-bit PCM was widely supported, but practically required a fast 115200 baud serial connection. That's basically the limit for RS-232 and it was desirable to provide lower-bandwidth options, which mostly appeared as a proprietary form of ADPCM (adaptive differential PCM). During transmission of voice data, the modem would indicate events ranging from hang-up to received DTMF digits using escape codes prefixed with DLE (ASCII 0x10). Similarly, the computer could send the modem an escape code to indicate the end of voice data. Things worked much the same in reverse: AT#VRX put the modem in recording mode, and the modem sent audio data back to the computer over the same serial connection. The computer would use an escape code to stop recording, and could also receive a number of escape codes indicating various state changes from the modem during recording. The design of voice modems is pretty simple, just about the minimum viable product for sending and receiving voice data over a conventional telephone modem, and that's probably why it stayed. Voice support appeared in most Rockwell chipsets by 1995, and many other chipsets had a similar (but often not completely compatible) proprietary voice command set. Still, due to what I suspect may have been some ugly industry politics, it was not until 1998 that voice modem behavior was standardized by V.253. V.253 voice modem commands are mostly the same as the Rockwell proprietary scheme, but using the AT+ prefix. For example, AT+VRX and AT#VRX do the same thing in the V.253 and Rockwell command sets respectively, and in practice many post-V.253 modems seem to have just recognized both. I suspect that Rockwell's interest in voice modems has some direct heritage to their contact center solutions, because the Rockwell voice command set provides more or less exactly what you need to build a computer-based interactive voice response (IVR) system... IVRs being a concept that Rockwell could fairly claim to have invented. And indeed, that was one of the main applications. The voice modem almost immediately spawned a whole little industry of PC-based small office IVRs. As The Internet came into popularity, many businesses would already have a computer modem connected to their phone line for internet use, so why not let the computer answer the phone as well? Widespread addition of voice support to otherwise ordinary modems meant that some people already owned all the hardware necessary for an automatic attendant, and for those that didn't the cost of telephone modems (with voice support!) was crashing in the mid '90s. The Internet Archive has preserved two such products from the early days of voice modems, Super Voice 2.0 from 1994 and Phone Secretary v1.01 of the same year. Phone Secretary (by Unique Software) has become quite obscure, and while there is still a company called Unique Software in the telephony market, I think they might be unrelated. Super Voice, on the other hand, made it to SuperVoice Pro 11 in 2016 and you can still buy a license today for just $99. Both of these products, and many more like them, had features like multi-mailbox voicemail and menu trees that used to require far more expensive equipment. Much of the original marketing for these products emphasizes the "Big Business" feeling of a phone tree, and Super Voice's description still says "Ideal for individuals, professionals and businesses that want to grow or appear bigger!" Given how much people hate phone menus today, it's funny to think of them as a feature for your business's reputation, but small businesses are often trying to appear larger and having a menu of departments behind your single inbound phone line was a great way to do it. Besides, plain digital answering machines were very new in the '90s, so PC-based solutions promised more features at a similar price. Voice modems got a big boost in 1996, when Microsoft introduced the Voice Modem Extensions for Windows 95. That package extended Windows Telephony API (TAPI) with standardized support for voice modems. TAPI fully abstracted voice modems, which proved surprisingly complex and quite important. While most all voice modems used either the Rockwell commands or a very similar protocol, the actual details of audio handling were surprisingly varied. Poor handling of audio by the computers of the era meant that a lot of external voice modems had their own headset and microphone connections, and sometimes built-in speakerphone, for voice use. External modems almost universally used a single RS-232 interface that switched in and out of audio data mode, as described previously, but by 1996, internal (ISA or PCI) modems were starting to use a separate UART channel for payload, including audio codec data [^2]. Even better, some manufacturers of internal modems were starting to integrate them with audio cards on a single expansion board. This allowed the modem to "cheat" off of the sound card's ADC and DAC components, and the OS's audio stack, reducing hardware cost with the downside that TAPI had to support a bunch of different cases for how the control and audio channels related to each other, and whether the audio channel was "Rockwell style" or "Soundblaster style." And note well that V.253 wasn't yet published, so while most voice modems were at least Rockwell-adjacent there were considerable inconsistencies from chipset to chipset when it came to the fine details of escape codes and behavior. A lot of software for voice modems from the era have noncommittal language about supporting "most" voice modems, and from 1996 forward that usually meant that they supported whatever voice modems Microsoft had special-cased in TAPI. The latter type, of integrated modem/sound cards, is particularly important as the Creative Phone Blaster and Creative Modem Blaster were popular examples of consumer data/fax/voice modems. They were indeed Sound Blasters with modems added on, usually just stereo audio out, mono in, and a telephone jack. I am not clear on the difference between the Phone Blaster and Modem Blaster product lines, and I think those might just be older and newer names (respectively) for the same lineup. They are not special, lots of manufacturers had similar products, but they are good examples of just how strange consumer voice modems became. The appeal of the voice modem to businesses is pretty obvious, since they were a far lower cost option for business phone systems. Unlike many telephony products, though, computer modems of the 1990s had little differentiation between consumer and business or "enterprise" products. Many large modem banks ran on the exact same modem chipsets as consumers used for dial-up connections, sometimes packaged in rack-mount modem banks but sometimes just as a whole lot of external modems taped to shelves. That meant that consumer modems tended to have the feature of business systems, including the infrastructure for an IVR system.
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The way that this manifested in commerce was... odd. Take the Creative Modem Blaster DI5660, described on the box as a "56kbps internal data fax modem with voice." While not exactly bargain basement, this also wasn't special, it was a pretty standard modem for the late '90s and received revisions until at least 2000. In the manual, after some mind-numbing complexity around integration with other sound cards [^3], and the customary 20 pages of screenshots of the driver installer, the manual gives a feature matrix that promises: > Able to record and play voice messages over the telephone line. > > Multiple mailboxes using included communications software. > > High performance speakerphone. So, the Creative Modem Blaster is not just a modem. It's not just a sound card. It's an *answering machine.* Wow! Nothing else is said about voice features. The install CD includes Cheyenne Bitware for sending and receiving faxes, but I'm not sure that this modem even had voicemail software on the CD. Earlier Creative modems do seem to have shipped with a software voicemail implementation, but only a very simple one integrated into the driver. The short AT command reference on the CD doesn't mention the voice-related commands at all, and at no point in the documentation is anything about IVRs or business applications mentioned. This situation is really common with consumer modems. Find the manuals or driver CDs from 1990s modems (the Internet Archive has tons). Flip through them, and you will often find mention of multi-box voicemail as a feature and then absolutely nothing else about voice capability. "Answering machine" was the exclusive consumer application to such an extent that some of the manufacturers, including Creative, seem to have adopted the terms "voice mail modem" or "message modem" as replacements for "voice modem." This narrowing of vision doesn't reflect any technical limitation; these modems all supported the full Rockwell (and later V.253) standards. You can find them on compatibility lists for business IVR packages, for example. Instead, it looks like voice mail was just the only consumer application anyone could come up with. The rest of the potential of the voice modem, for complete custom applications, was complicated and difficult to support, so it was easier to just not bring it up. This is a general problem with more advanced features in modems. Telephone modems for internet access had all these downsides, like hogging a phone line that they arguably still did not fully utilize, that manufacturers kept trying to solve. Consumers, on the other hand, seem to have simply not cared. Computers of the 1990s were relatively big, loud, costly, and unstable, so people didn't tend to leave them running 24/7. That severely cut into the practicality of a modem-based voicemail package, especially for consumers, for whom the value of a more sophisticated inbound calling experience didn't justify much extra computer maintenance. Other inroads towards unified telephone/modem features met similar adoption challenges. Consider "modem-on-hold," a common feature of late-'90s modems that allowed for answering incoming voice calls while the modem was in use. It seemed like it solved one of the #1 complaints about telephone modems, but in practice it was tricky enough to use that hardly anyone did. Efforts like ASVD and DSVD provided actual multiplexing of Simultaneous Voice and Data (SVD, in Analog and Digital forms), meaning you could talk on the phone and exchange data at the very same time, but hardly anyone did. There are a few reasons these didn't succeed. One is compatibility; voice modems had a rough start with the long period between the Rockwell implementation and the actual V.253 standard, but at least most modems were fairly similar to Rockwell and the incompatibilities were isolated to the computer/modem interface where they were easier to handle. Protocols like SVD required support in the modems on both ends and were seldom compatible between vendors, which became an even bigger issue as independent BBSs gave way ISP modem banks (which were fundamentally incompatible with the concepts behind SVD). More time might have solved the compatibility problems, but consumer telephone modems were also proving to be a dead end. ISDN did not sweep away the modem by 1995 as the telcos had expected, but a few years later DSL did. DSL could do simultaneous voice and data much more seamlessly than even the most sophisticated modem SVD implementations, and with more bandwidth for both channels to boot. To the modern computer user, the idea that a common telephone modem would casually incorporate a voicemail system is silly. Despite the obvious technical overlap, those are very different domains of consumer products. The window in which it made sense to combine them was fairly short, and the practical realities of the Windows 95 and 98 era severely limited the promised convenience. At least in the consumer realms, voice modems went pretty much nowhere. Still, it is a technology with remarkable staying power. For example, you might assume that the late-1990s reshaping of the modem industry around thin "winmodems" (that eliminated most hardware in favor of software on the host CPU) wiped out voice support, but it didn't. By moving most of the logic to host software, winmodems actually tended to make voice features simpler to implement. V.253 voice support was quite common on winmodems. In fact, it's still common on modems today. Consider the StarTech USB 2.0 v.92 modem, a very common choice for anyone in need of a telephone modem today. StarTech titles it as "Computer/Laptop Fax Modem" and "USB Data Modem," never quite invoking the traditional Data/Fax/Voice, but if you look at the feature list you'll find: "VOICE AND CALLER ID SUPPORT: Make and receive phone calls through your desktop / laptop computer." Despite the callout in the feature list, the spec sheet makes no mention of any voice command set. It does tell us that the modem is built around a Conexant CX93010-21Z (recall that Conexant is the descendant of Rockwell), and the Conexant reference manual for that chipset describes a voice command set that is "based on V.253." This gets at one of the other fatal flaws of the voice modem. It's peculiar that a modem manual would specifically claim voice support and then list all of the supported data and fax modes, but not list any voice modes at all. Every single modem I've found after the mid-1990s is like this: they tell you that they have voice support, but absolutely nothing about it. You walk away with no idea how you would use a voice modem, or what a "voice modem" even is, outside of the one feature that the manufacturer *may* have deemed fit to ship on the CD, which is invariably voicemail. I think this is the manifestation of an underlying problem: the compatibility and standardization problems with voice modems go beyond the fact that it took six years for Rockwell's command set to turn into an ITU standard. It doesn't appear that voice modems were ever that well standardized. Despite the wide range of voice-compatible modems on the '90s market, and the wide range of software for using them, most all of those software packages come with a manual full of warnings, caveats, limitations, and workarounds. Despite V.253, different manufacturers had different opinions about the meanings of escape codes. Several common chipsets had outright bugs, which applications had to work around. As we found today, it was often the case that understanding voice modem compatibility required identifying the underlying chipset and getting the manufacturer's command set reference manual. Modem manufacturers, the end-user brands, seldom made their own chipsets. They were at the mercy of companies like Conexant, who seemed uninterested in further evolution of voice features. No wonder that they found it easier to just not talk about it. For how little it ultimately mattered, voice modems got a surprising amount of technical investment from the software world. I suppose that in a world before widespread DSL and VoIP, they seemed like a solution to two problems: the disconnect between computer and telephone operation on the phone line, and the desire to use computers to automate telephone call handling. In 1997, reviewer Mark Spiwak wrote for *Windows Magazine:* > Thanks to the Hayes Accura 288 Internal Fax Modem with Voice, small offices seem large to outside callers. This single expansion card from a trusted modem manufacturer equips a PC with a fast modem and fax capabilities, and provides speakerphone and voice-mail functions. The modem distinguishes among incoming voice, data and fax calls, and routes them accordingly. With the modem's speaker, you don't need a sound card (although it will work with one, and a cable is included). There's also a microphone in the box. There are ups and downs in this review. First, consider the degree of complexity hidden in the modem "distinguishing" voice, data, and fax calls. That's a longstanding hard problem in telephony that engendered a lot of hacky solutions. I think that what Hayes is referring to here is actually more of a Windows/TAPI feature than a modem feature; as part of TAPI Microsoft shipped something called the Microsoft Operator Agent that would answer phone calls on a voice-capable modem, detect modem tones or prompt the user to select a call mode as an IVR menu, and then invoke the specified application to handle the rest of the call. There was a whole generalized, registry-based routing mechanism to allow multiple applications to accept phone calls based on caller intent. It feels like a rather sophisticated piece of operating system functionality to have almost completely withered away. On the other hand, there's "a microphone in the box" and the promise that the modem *will* work with a sound card even if one isn't required. These are hints at the kind of complexity that a typical consumer would have found fairly impenetrable, the ugly tradeoffs involved in running a real-time media application on a Pentium system that would use AC'97 audio if you were lucky. During the early '00s, Microsoft invested in fax as an OS feature in Windows, although I don't think it ever received that much use. It was already too late for voice modems, though, and Windows support for voice modems (and TAPI) generally declined after XP. On the Windows Server side, NT4's TAPI could provide a fairly complete IVR system with Windows alone, but the potential of COM-based TAPI business phone systems got wrapped up in Microsoft's Unified Communications craze and then died along with it. Voice modems surely lasted longer in business applications, particularly since a number of business products like PABXs actually implemented V.253 as a bridge for TAPI applications. Quite a few voice-modem-based IVR products are still for sale, suggesting that they have enduring users. Of course, the more actively developed of them now all offer VoIP capabilities as well. Practically speaking, SIP has completely replaced the role of the voice modem, and it says something about voice modems that even with its many idiosyncrasies SIP is the simpler and better supported path. And now, we come back to our modern era. In the course of researching voice modems, I ran into a 2017 blog post, The sad state of voice support in cellular modems [link 2]. The author, Harald Welte, laments that USB-attached modems do not present a USB audio device, but "instead, what some modem vendors have implemented as an ugly hack is the transport of 8kHz 16bit PCM samples over one of the UARTs." In the full light of history, we realize that what Welte describes as an "ugly hack" is, in fact, exactly the way it has always worked. In 1981, Hayes introduced the Smartmodem, a standalone device that abstracted every part of telephony into a serial channel and a simple command format. In 1992, Rockwell made the modem speak, by putting PCM audio over that same serial channel. In 2017, very little had changed—Welte's post has aged poorly only in that many modern phones have the modem more fully integrated into the SOC and use a completely proprietary interface instead of the traditional serial channel. Of course, that's for smartphone manufacturers, who have the extensive engineering department and the close relationship with their chipmakers to implement such proprietary interfaces. For the rest of us, with our USB modems (now universally USB, even when packaged in m.2 form), the modem is still a black box with a serial port. The computer does not participate in a phone call, that's the modem's job. If you want to say something, you better PCM encode it and send it to the TTY. [^1]: It is very common to refer to this component of a smartphone, the actual RF and cellular implementation, as the "baseband." Baseband is an overloaded term in telephony and the connection between the word's original meaning and its use to refer to a smartphone component is so indirect as to verge on rhyming slang, so I will simply call it the "cellular modem" for clarity. [^2]: Mixing arbitrary communications data (the bearer channel) with control commands on a single serial channel created a heap of problems around escaping and mode switching that were never fully resolved. Consider, for example, that Rockwell modems used ASCII DLE as an escape character despite the fact that the 0x10 byte could, and would, appear in PCM audio data. That meant that any instance of 0x10 in the audio data had to be replaced with 0x1010 (DLE escaping itself to produce a literal DLE), at the cost of some bandwidth overhead and implementation complexity. And that's simple and elegant compared to how the same problem was handled for data mode, with the infamous "+++" sequence. The result was that modem manufacturers started separating the bearer and control channels into two different UARTs as soon as it became feasible. I will save more depth on this for a future post but modern LTE modems, depending on configuration (and this is indeed configurable), may present as many as 7 separate UARTs for different purposes. You only *need* one of them, but using separate UARTs instead of switching modes on the primary one saves a whole lot of headache. [^3]: Some sound cards in this era had a connector for a jumper wire to a telephone modem, so that the sound card could exchange audio with the modem. That allowed you to set up the same logical architecture as integrated modem/ sound cards, but with two different cards. It's amusing that Creative provided such a connector with an integrated modem/sound card, but they explain that you might want to use it so that you can use your computer as a speaker phone without having to have a *second set of speakers* plugged into the Modem Blaster. Yes, in practice, things got pretty ugly. You could come up with an elegant setup but it would take some doing. Links: 1: https://ko-fi.com/jbcrawford 2: https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20170902-cellular_modems-voice/ sincerely, j. b. crawford me@computer.rip ================================================================================ Unsubscribe notify+trBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q@b.newsletters.love from this list: https://maleman.computer.rip/unsub/notify%2BtrBVUFt2STAz0ALpzZMN_Q%40b.newsletters.love/dJTXHwuHBpTaMuJV Read online, tell your friends, submit to webrings, etc: https://computer.rip/ Questions? Problems? Lingering doubts? Just reply to this email. 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