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September 16, 2002

On Friday I fixed or eliminated dead links in my telephone history series. Today I start to clean up my mobile telephone history series. Some experts estimate that a third of all links on the web go bad every year, it's what's called link rot. It's frustrating for my readers and maddening for me. I have 330 individual web pages on this site, many of them with several external links. While I fix one link here, another goes dead over there. I've not yet found affordable software for the Mac that will help. But you can! E-mail me when you find a dead link. Give me the URL of the page that it is on and I will fix it. Thanks in advance.

September 13, 2002

Bell Laboratories helped build a boat? Yes, from 1914 to 1917 the Labs helped build the 55' yawl Elsie, a gift from Alexander Graham Bell to his daughter Elsie and son in law Gilbert Grosvenor. Now fully restored and updated, the boat cruises the beautiful waters of Bras d'Or Lakes of Cape Breton,.Nova Scotia. That's near Baddec where the Bells had their favorite home. The boat has a web site since it is available for charter. Wouldn't that be fun? Here's some information from the site:

"After three long years of restoration and eighty years after her launching, "Elsie" still reigns as Queen of the Bras d'Or Lakes.

"Built by Walter Pinaud at Bell Laboratories on Beinn Bhreagh and launched in 1917, the sleek 55' yawl is a striking example of the boat builder's art.

"The world renowned naval architect George Owen of M.I.T. using data collected by Bell, drew the lines especially for the wave and wind patterns typically encountered on the lakes. His interpretations were perfect. Elsie could not be better suited to her environment. Elsie is stiff and stable yet as fast and nimble as most modern cruisers/racers. In fact, Elsie was still winning races at Bras d'Or Yacht Club well into the 1980's. . . . http://www.baddeck.com/ElsieCharters/about.html (link now dead, use Google.com at top of page to search)

September 12, 2002

Social history of party lines is here, good writing!

September 11, 2002

One year ago terrorists killed 3,000 Americans. These terrorists would like to kill many more. Some say we should try to understand their anger. This thinking is stupid and foolish. The only reason to understand these people is to figure out their patterns of behavior so that we can better kill them. We are at war. We are under the gun. We are being held hostage. There can be no understanding or negotiating at the point of a gun. We do not try to understand why a person hijacks an airliner while it is in midflight or on the ground. Rather, we angle for the best shot so that we can kill them. You can analyze when the gun fire stops. But right now we do not reason with a terrorist any more than we negotiate with one. Evil will always exist, we cannot completely conquer it. But we can certainly lose to it. And that we can not do. Click here to read an important column that came out nearly a year ago; it will remind you why we are in this struggle. May God bless us in our fight.

September 10, 2002

Mark van der Hoek does it again!, outstanding advice on what to do if you think your property would be great for a cellular tower. Click here to read.

Memories, from a woman hacker and former telco employee who lived in Hawaii several years ago:

"Oahu was a bit tighter about hacking. I have great stories about dumpster diving out there, like the time my friend and I were swapping fence duties to get trash from the Punahou Central Office in the Kakaako district of Honolulu. (2054 Young street to be precise.) I was looking for GTD5 information (internal link); in fact I was obsessed with that switch because nobody knew much about EAX'es and I've always been an elitist ;) Anyway, while we were trashing there was, in front, a telco employee calmly sitting in his car, smoking and staring at us for two hours (Okay, there was a lot of trash, it was dark, it was New Years' Eve, and we were both just a bit drunk). So we got back to my apartment, found some numbers, called some people working at the switch and this guy comes on and says 'Aren't you one of those hackers?' to which I asked 'What's a hacker?,' and we proceeded to get into a discussion in which I vehemently replied that that was quite impossible, and that I couldn't be a hacker because there's no such thing as female hackers... But you probably had to be there to really get the joke . . ."

September 9, 2002

Some say we should investigate why many Islamic extremists harbor anger against American foreign policy. To me their anger seems clearly motivated: Jew-hating, anti-Zionism, and the United States' support of Israel. These terrorists remind me of violent cultists, like those that released Sarin nerve gas several years ago into the Tokyo subway. What, though, is there really to understand? Ultimately, we must judge people by their actions. Like the Japanese Aum Supreme Truth cult, Al-Qaeda and their sympathizers both maintain a destructive world view incompatible with modern society. Both groups need to be eliminated, as were the psychopaths that ran Nazi Germany. And as with our local police forces, we need not understand why a man runs down a street, knifing people. What we do need is a gun and the courage to pull the trigger.

September 8, 2002

September 7, 2002

I am trying to explain, in fifty words or less, the difference between the electrical and electronic eras. Arrgh. Oh, click on this external link, Nokia is getting closer to building a video phone:

http://www.nokia.com/phones/3650/

See the little camera lens on the back? Good for 640 by 480 resolution. Grainy but not bad for a mobile. You take pictures and then they are forwarded. This is not real time, interactive video-telephony. More like a phone and digital camera in one. Then, too, you have to be on one of the faster, far more expensive GPRS networks to send your picture. I like the handwheel approach.

September 6, 2002

The pixelated icons on the left are what the cellular carriers are now using to dress up their new phones. You can download an image like you can a ringtone. But I think Jeffery Zeldman of http://www.zeldman.com (external link) could do much better. Check out some sample icons on the right, or better yet, go to his site and spend several hours learning about good design. It has always been an amazing resource.

September 5, 2002

I'm trying to explain D.C. signals for my telephone history series. Take a look below to see if you can understand what I write:

Analog transmission in telephone working. At the top of the illustration we depict direct current as a flat line. D.C. is the steady and continuous current your telephone company provides to carry your conversation. The middle line shows what talking looks like. As in all things analog, it looks like a wave. The third line shows that when you talk the telephone impresses that analog wave on the direct current provided. Thus, your voice varies the telephone's electrical current. Click here for another diagram that complements this illustration. Comments? Corrections?

September 4, 2002

Enough nonsense! Read about how Bell in fact invented the telephone. And get those urban myths, badly documented claims, big conspiracy against the little inventor, thoughts out of your head. Click here to view a new page at this site (internal link).

September 3, 2002

Tom:

Just stumbled across your site searching for some history; its great! I enjoyed reading a few items about GTD-5 and Roseville Tel (internal link). I was part of the design team on GTD-5 from 1982 --1986. We cutover the first GTD-5 in Banning, California in 1982. I and 2 other engineers tested, commissioned, and cutover the first GTD-5 Remote Switch Unit. The base unit was in Savannah, MO with the RSU about 15 miles away in Helena, MO. We were there for about 5 months and I got damned good at driving the route between installations at high speed! One day we had been making excellent progress with testing going well when the remote just went dead. We could not talk to the remote from the base for nothing. I hoped in the rental car and drove the cable route out to the remote. About halfway there I found the farmer with his backhoe along side the road!

Roseville Tel was also a great company to work with. I spent time in their main C.O. doing field service on their ITT 1210 and then returned a couple years later to work on the GTD-5 in Citrus Heights with an RSU at Roseville Main.

Your site stirred up some great memories; thanks!!! If you want to see the next great C.O. switch, visit http://www.santera.com( external link).

Thanks, Tom

September 2, 2002

Steve writes in, "I enjoyed reading your Mobile Telephone History. My own company, Xilex, was a 'pioneer in the industry' (they said) from circa 1980-1983. My units were the most sophisticated microprocessor-controlled mobile telephones of the day. Our units handled MTS, IMTS, AMTS, IPTS, DTMF, 2-tone, 5-tone, Secode Smart, and some others which I've long forgotten. Well, it was a long time ago. Anyway, thanks for the informative article. And speaking of tone controlled equipment devotees, I am now good friends with the infamous Captain Crunch."

I do different things today. A little work on the site, bill paying, work at my Church, and perhaps a swim in the Auburn River. We'll see. Mark van der Hoek submits the photo below as an example of a cell phone tower fire. I said nonsense, that this was Greece trying to control their Olympic costs by constructing an alternative Olympic torch. :-) Click on this link or the image itself to bring up a bigger picture.

September 1, 2002

AMPS, or Advanced Mobile Phone Service, analog cellular, is scheduled to end in America in five years. The Federal Communications Commission in early August decided that cellular carriers would no longer be required to keep open a few analog channels for the now small number of non-digital phones. You can download the official F.C.C. document by clicking here. AMPS audio sounded great, many will miss it, but it took up too much bandwidth. Now we have digital wireless, bandwidth friendly, feature laden, but often with poor audio because of over compression. That's because the cellular carrier wants as many calls over the air as possible, all scrunched together, with voice quality now a small concern. AMPS, we will miss you.

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