Daniel, thanks for that historical perspective, I appreciate the refresher. It lends rationale to an otherwise (or at least, seemingly) convoluted nature of things. It's sometimes good to see the reasoning behind why such "organic" constructs of an industry grow the way they do. Folk lore can be used as the greatest teaching aid of them all, I believe. For example, I learned just as much about TCP/IP developments in the early Internet Society procedings by examining the idiosyncratic tendancies of its member firms (and their appointed individuals) as I did by reading many of the texts on the subject.
I recall the OCC (other common carrier) bureaus in the local operating companies well, the ones leading up to divestiture, that is. I ran one such "desk" for several years in Manhattan, which was lumped into my liaison (hammer-man) duties while on loan from T to NYTel. It was fun while it lasted, until it became just one big anti-trust discovery process. I had to make a decision: Either get out and begin a consulting practice of my own, or wait for the next consent decree to hit (or worse, at the time a total breakup was not even contemplated, but one had a sense that something was about to give), or spend the rest of my career filling boxes and crates with line cards and other trouble ticket information that would be used to support litigation. I elected to get the hell out and watch the inevitable slaughter from a distance in '77.
Most of my experiences at the time were devoted to "high speed" private line data services. Our biggest problems stemmed from nonlinear distortion anomalies in digital system compressor boards, and misbehaving compandors in analog systems, as they affected data speeds over 2.4 kbps. To give you a little idea of just how long ago that actually was in relative terms, in Internet time, we're talking Paleozoic.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
