"Fast-forward to 1962. Ma Bell begins using T-1s to connect its switching centers. T-1s are a digital communications link, not analog. The entire phone network goes digital. In a modern phone network, the only analog communication is between an individual house's phone line and the phone company's box."

This is misleading. The phone network used analog links (typically microwave relay) for long distance almost exclusively for many years (into the 80s) after the introduction of T1. T1 itself is not terribly well suited to very long distance links though and can only be pressed into it with repeaters every mile or so.

>The phone network used analog links (typically microwave relay) for long distance almost exclusively for many years (into the 80s) after the introduction of T1

The reason should be obvious. Digging long distance trenches and all of the property buying/leasing and right of ways/easements and all of the other fun stuff makes it a total nightmare. Radio broadcast just makes much more financial sense as well as logistically.

130VDC on the copper, apparently.

Had "the second longest T1 in the service area" for a while there. BellSouth declined to renew the contract in 2008, the business folded, etc. In 2013 I was digging through the old building, and the T1 line card in the wiring closet was still powered.

Nowadays the relay boxes all the way into town are mostly hanging open or have been repeatedly run over. I wonder how much of the rest of that infrastructure they just abandoned in place.

the 130V was to power either repeaters or the smart jack.

Hence towers with dishes on the outside. Long perplexed why they had canvas stretched across, and didn't point up: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave#/media/File%3AFraz...

Our Charter Spectrum “cable” connection goes over a microwave link like this.

How do I know? Well, we had a pretty big wildfire a couple years ago that burned a microwave tower a couple hours away. The official response was that they couldn’t get internet back in town until they rebuilt the tower. Our internet was down for a couple weeks until it was safe enough for them to get back to the tower site.

Microwave relay links predate spaceflight and even when comms satellites became a thing, it made (and still makes) little sense to beam regional TV/radio/phone up to geosynchronous and back, due to cost and latency. There was no good replacement to terrestrial microwave until fiber optic became a thing.

In a very real sense microwave relays are the direct descendant of the optical telegraph (aka "clacks" in Discworld lingo).

> Long perplexed why they had canvas stretched across

Its a radome, used to protect the antenna from weather.

Were the microwave links really analog signaling?

The Long Lines network used frequency modulation and frequency division multiplexing and was completely analog. It was really only advancements in semiconductor lasers and optical fiber manufacturing that drove its abandonment.

> The phone network used analog links (typically microwave relay) for long distance

Those microwave links represent layer 0 in the connection which is by definition always analogue, the same is/was true for T-1 which used alternate mark inversion [1] signalling over a 4-wire circuit. It is the type of signal carried over the link which decides whether it is considered "digital" or "analogue". T-1 carried 24 time-divided PCM channels ("digital"), microwave links could and can carry both frequency-divided multiplexed analogue channels ("analogue") as well as time-divided PCM or packet-switched channels ("digital").

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_encoding#Alternate_mar...

Computers are old. The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed. I take a self-driving car multiple times a week yet anyone outside my bubble hasn't ever ridden one and thinks that technology doesn't work yet. I have conversations with an LLM, but people on the other side of the world don't even have laptops or reliable Internet access. Military people have jetpacks to move around on. Inequality is as old as dirt, unfortunately.

It also strikes me how much the old phone network, and its cultural aspects, have faded into the past - particularly when I drive past some derelict bit of telecom infrastructure. Even 30 years ago, it was amusing to watch kids try to deal with a rotary-dial phone. Now even landlines are an endangered species, and area codes are barely relevant. Finding a working telco pay phone these days would be like finding a unicorn.

Meanwhile, on a random roadtrip through rural Illinois yesterday, I was seeing "5G UC" on my cell phone, out in the middle of nowhere. Unevenly distributed, indeed!

>Finding a working telco pay phone these days would be like finding a unicorn.

Even if I found one, I would only be able to make a collect call. I never carry loose change on me, and I haven't had a calling card in decades.

There used to be a way to pay with credit card IIRC?

Not that I was ever exposed to. Calling cards were just account numbers with a monthly statement. If you used a credit card for that, then maybe, but to me paying with a credit card suggests a per call transaction. That I have not experienced. But the world is a bigger place than just me, so maybe it was available in other areas?

> Inequality is as old as dirt

Yes

> unfortunately

No. Perfect equality means that nobody can excel in anything, anywhere and any time. With perfect equality comes stagnation. If you happen to know Rush' song "The Trees" you'll know what I'm talking about:

Now there's no more oak oppression For they passed a noble law And the trees are all kept equal By hatchet, axe, and saw

It is not so much inequality which can be a problem but the fact that the lower bounds can be too low for an acceptable quality of life. As long as the lower bounds are high enough - above the "poverty line" - there can be inequality without that being a problem in and of itself.

Another thing which can be a problem is the reason for there being inequality, e.g. when some rule or custom creates artificial limits for some people but not for others ("discrimination").

For a society to thrive you want people to make the best of their possibilities and to use their capabilities to the fullest extent. With that you automatically get inequality because not everyone has the same possibilities and capabilities, e.g. a farmer on a rock-infested piece of glacial detritus will not be able to produce bumper crops even if he is at least as capable as the farmer in the river delta who can not leave his wooden shoes outside without them sprouting roots and growing leaves. On that same river delta a capable farmer will be able to more reliably produce good crops than one who has never heard of crop rotation. If you take the most productive developer in your company and provide him with a fully equipped tool shop he will not be able to produce as good a widget as would the most experienced mechanic who in his turn would not be as productive a developer. Both can do their best to reach their local optimum but the developer will most likely see that result in higher earnings than the mechanic will.

Inequality is not a problem. Equity - forced equality as personified by the "they" in the lyrics to "The Trees" - is a problem.

Great point. The distinction between equality and equity is an important one, with the canonical image for it for me being the one with the fence*. Where inequality today looks like billionaires throwing parties and doing drugs on their own private island at one end, and people living in tents and going hungry, also doing drugs, but with no hope at the other end, it's not the inequality itself that's the problem, it's that the lowest end of the spectrum is so utterly bleak that people have to steal and commit crimes to survive that's the problem.

* https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shrehan-Lynch/publicati...

Isn't Morse code technically a digital signal, albeit with an extremely low bit rate?

Yes. It's sloppy PWM with a non-ASCII character code. It's optimized for human encoding/decoding rather than machine; the pulse widths are not globally uniform like they would be in a machine-oriented code, which is what I mean by "sloppy."

Telecommunications were the first application for nearly every principle and technology now used in computers.

In the 1930s, Claude Shannon was trying to optimize the phone network's automatic switching fabric built out of millions and millions of relays when he, more or less by accident, proved that switching circuits are equivalent to Boolean algebra, in a deep sense, and so the appropriate arrangement of switches, can compute anything that can be computed.

The first major commercial application for the vacuum tube was not in radio, but in amplifying long-distance telephone links. They would quickly find use in frequency multiplexing telephone lines, too. [1]

Similarly, one of the first applications of vacuum tubes as a high-speed electronic switch was for multiplexing telegraph lines, and much of the initial research on high-reliability low-power tubes able to switched fully on without damage began, with the telephone and telegraph companies.

The first computers were built out of relays and vacuum tubes specially designed for telecommunications.

The transistor was invented at Bell Labs. The planned application was the telephone network. The very same year, the theory behind modern error correcting codes was developed at Bell Labs too. These find extensive use today in data storage in computers, but the original goal was arbitrarily accurate transfer of telegraph data over noisy links.

Digital transmission of photographs dates to the late 1920s too; they wanted to send images over extremely noisy long-distance telegraph links. So record the intensity of light over each spot of the image on paper tape. Then send the tape over the wire. And reverse on the other end. [2]

I've come to understand the computer revolution as really the story of the telecommunication revolution. Computers serendipitously came about with advances in telecommunications, enabled by the same technologies, and indeed, often driven by the needs of telecommunications. (One of the very first applications for a computer in an embedded context - dating to the late 1950s in experiment - the telephone exchange, of course.)

[1] https://long-lines.net/tech-equip/misc/Graybar103-0693.jpg

[2] http://www.hffax.de/history/html/bartlane.html

At one time teletype switching was done in centers where the incoming line was connected to a tape punch. The operator tore the tape off the punch, read the destination address punched at the beginning of the tape, and put the tape on a tape reader connected to an outgoing line to another center closer to the destination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_relay

IP routers now do this faster.

I'd argue that they were also invented specifically to do specific mathematical calculations. Many predecessors of the modern computer were designed to do math. Some examples:

The ENIAC was invented to do mathematical calculations for the army.

Blaise Pascal invented a mechanical calculator to do arithmetic in 1642. Leibniz improved on his design and made his own version in 1673. However, not many of either version were made, as it was still cheaper to just do the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division yourself.

Herman Hollerith invented a punch card tabulating machine and patented it in 1884. It was used to process the 1890 US Census. It could increment counters to do addition and multiplication, but its main purpose was to assist with processing large amounts of data using punch cards, the way SQL databases are used today.

In 1930, Vannevar Bush invented a machine called the Differential Analyzer, which was an analogue computer that could solve differential equations by integration. You could store functions in it by adjusting gears. The purpose was to be able to automatically calculate things like the position of a projectile moving through the air after n seconds without having to calculate it by hand.

Most of this I got from the book ENIAC, The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer, which touches on all these predecessors to the computer.

The idea of the Semantic Web dates to about 1945 and Vannevar Bush, in As We May Think. Douglas Engelbart (Mother of All Demos) cites Bush as a major influence.

Bush was Claude Shannon's graduate advisor.

I sometimes wonder how much crazy stuff these people didn't write down because they only knew how to make little bits of it happen with current tech.