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 |   Tales from real life |
| Well, if they're not true, they oughta be! |
My recent post Unsocial Media described how I used an old-fashioned rotary phone to connect an ASR-33 teletype machine to our college mainframe computer. The teletype served as a primitive terminal for real-time interaction with the mainframe. At the time, it was considered quite an improvement over the punch card. Punch card programs had to be submitted to a technician who ran the deck of cards through a card reader and then returned the printed output to the user. It took time to run any deck, and there was usually a queue. It wasn't unusual to wait overnight to see the results of a programming change. The teletype, however, sent commands directly to the computer and printed the results immediately. Few of us realized it back then, but just placing a call with a rotary phone was a rudimentary form of digital programming. When you picked up a handset, that ubiquitous dial tone was the phone switch ‘computer’ saying ‘I’m listening’ (and it was far more useful than a radio-show psychiatrist). But the phone computer couldn’t understand analog human speech, so the dialing mechanism had to generate a series of electrical pulses similar to the ones and zeros that underlie all computer apps and programs. Those pulses were counted by mechanical relays at the phone company offices to direct your call to the desired person. I toured the phone company in Missoula, Montana in the early 1970s. Even that relatively small town had a warehouse size building with racks and racks of ten-position relays that clattered noisily as they switched calls from line to line. The mechanism inside a rotary phone includes a spring, a speed regulator, and an electrical switch. Oddly enough, nothing really happens when you rotate the dial to a specific number. All you’ve done at that point is wind up the spring. The action occurs when you let go and the dial rotates back to the start position. An electrical circuit opens and closes as the dial moves to create pulses on the phone line. If you select 7 with your finger, then seven pulses are sent down the line. Timing is critical to the operation of the telephone switching network, so the speed regulator is used to eliminate the human factor. And when the first pulse is received, a timer starts that defines the period for counting the complete number. If seven pulses are counted during the timer window, then the phone computer knows the first digit is 7. And you can’t wind the spring for the second number fast enough to interfere with the first number. Dialing a sequence of numbers was equivalent to programming a computer to connect you to your desired party. One-finger programming was pretty simple, but dialing seven digits could connect you to any one of ten million local telephones. Ten digits could reach out to ten billion lines throughout North America. If a single pulse was received as the first digit, that meant it was a long-distance call and the next three digits would be interpreted as the area code rather than the local prefix. For example, if my dad dialed 1-206, then the relays at his local phone company would mechanically switch positions to connect his line to a long-distance line for Washington state. Three more digits, the prefix, would be counted by a phone computer in Washington to move more relays and connect him to the desired local phone office. And then the local phone computer would count the last four digits to make the final connection to the phone in my house. And only after all of that digital programming was completed could the analog voice signal travel over a continuous wire from his mouth to my ear. “Hello?” |
Approximately a lifetime ago, my uncle Willie gave me a simple four-function pocket calculator with an LED display. It was my personal introduction to the space age, just four years after the first moon landing. My current smart phone is about the same physical size as that pocket calculator but has more computing power than the room-size mainframe computer that I used at college in the late 1970s. I know now that it was as crude as using an abacus, but I felt then as though I were joining the crew of the starship Enterprise. I won't even try to describe the stone-age programs that we wrote for that Xerox Sigma 7, but I have to say a few words about the ASR-33 teletype machine that freshmen used to communicate with it (green-screen CRT terminals were reserved for upperclassmen). The teletype was a hybrid of the mechanical typewriter and the Morse code telegraph system. Pushing a clunky mechanical key at one teletype would cause a printed letter to appear on the paper in another teletype, or on multiple teletype machines located in newsrooms across the world. That was the original newsfeed, and the chattering sound of the teletype machine accompanied television news programs for many decades. Imagine that chattering sound multiplied by forty. That was the environment in the freshman computing lab. Forty students hammering away at crude keyboards to input data into the mainframe and then reading the output on a continuous roll of paper as it fed through the teletype machine. It wasn't really great for concentration and the amount of wasted paper that merely showed error messages was almost scandalous. The lowly telephone, invented almost 100 years earlier, provided our link to the space-age technology of Siggy-7 just like it provided the link between newsrooms. Each computer programming session was initiated by dialing into the mainframe and then placing the telephone handset into the rubber cups of an acoustic modem. Remember the cute little beeps and boops that R2D2 used to communicate with C3PO? Well, the teletype machine quite literally talked to the mainframe over a phone line in a similar fashion. Except that the modem tones weren't cute at all. The lunatic squealing and chirping of those modems still haunts my dreams. Younger folks will be shocked to learn that telephones were once attached to the house. They had to be plugged into a phone jack in the wall to connect to the 'network'. The service was provided by a public utility just like water and electricity. And even though the technology was relatively simple, a human operator was available 24/7 to help a user confused by long-distance dialing. Those old rotary-dial telephones were big and heavy. They were sometimes cast in the role of 'blunt object' in a murder mystery (the only thing you can murder with a smartphone is a person's reputation). The only ‘mobile’ phone I saw as a child had a thirty-foot cord so it could be carried into the next room for privacy. If you were outdoors, or in your car? Then you were out of touch, perhaps for hours. The horror! Today, nearly everyone posts the excruciating minutiae of their daily lives on the world wide web for anyone to see. They willingly cede all right to privacy in the desperate hope that somebody, somewhere, will ‘like’ them. It wasn’t always so. An early form of social media was called the party line. It consisted of a single telephone circuit that served multiple homes. This was especially common in rural areas, where it was cost prohibitive to run dedicated phone lines to all of the widely separated houses. Each phone was assigned a unique ring code made up of short and long rings. The idea was that each household would answer only when they heard their own ring code. But it was more entertaining to pick up on any ring and catch up on the local gossip. Or pick up at random to see if someone was already on the line. You could listen in on your neighbor as she chatted with Aunt Minnie or hear about her medical issues as she made an appointment with the doctor. Of course, back then people thought it was rude to eavesdrop. There was considerable friction between those who were 'just curious' and those who felt violated by the snooping. Today, people are offended if you don’t pay attention to pictures and posts with intimate details. Modern apps are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than our ancient Basic programs, and today's ultra hi-res screens can show the most trivial images in beautiful detail. There are thousands of solitaire games and millions of clickbait posts to fill our leisure time without resorting to real-life social interaction. And endless newsfeed items allow for obsessive doomscrolling. But don't forget, even though today's smartphone is primarily used for updating social media, it can also make phone calls to real people. Just like the ASR-33 and Siggy-7, you can literally talk with another human being. Or is it an AI chatbot? What a difference a generation makes! Author's Note: ▼ |
It's that time of year again, and I just completed a poem, Dark Time, for The Solstice Poetry Contest  . A couple of years ago, I wrote a story, Solstice Day for The Whatever Contest -- Closed for Now . In my story, I described a rationalized calendar that has 13 months with 28 days each (364 days). A holiday called Solstice Day would be inserted in mid-June to complete a 365-day year. Every four years, another Solstice Day would be inserted in mid-December to account for leap year. I knew this calendar wasn't original with me, the basic idea has been around for hundreds of years. What I didn't know when I wrote the story was that this calendar almost became reality exactly one hundred years ago.Last month I read an article in The Washington Post about an effort to implement the very calendar I describe in my story. The International Fixed Calendar (IFC) was proposed in 1923 by The League of Nations. There was a burst of optimism after 'the war to end all wars' and the promise of science and technology seemed bright. They wanted to rationalize the months and days to create a perennial calendar. George Eastman was a fervent supporter of this idea, and his Eastman Kodak company actually used the IFC internally for many years. The only difference from my story is that the IFC inserts the 'extra' day between December 28 and January 1st. The opposition to the IFC came primarily from the Jewish community. They hold the seven-day cycle as sacred law and objected to a 'nothing' day that would shift the Sabbath by one day every year. The traditional Hebrew calendar inserts an entire month every four years to align with the solar calendar, but it always maintains the sabbath on Saturday. Other traditionalists also objected and the IFC was never implemented by any world government. The effort was abandoned in 1937 when it failed to win final approval from The League of Nations. |
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