From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Sep 30 19:53:35 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i8UNrZa29612; Thu, 30 Sep 2004 19:53:35 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 19:53:35 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200409302353.i8UNrZa29612@massis.lcs.mit.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: massis.lcs.mit.edu: ptownson set sender to editor@telecom-digest.org using -f To: ptownson Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V23 #459 TELECOM Digest Thu, 30 Sep 2004 19:53:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 459 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson WWW is Ten Years Old in 2004 (Karl Pospisek) Our Inexpensive Directory Assistance Program (TELECOM Digest Editor) Re: What is the Name of #? How did # Get its Name? (Scott Dorsey) Re: Paper Tape Technology was Re: What is Name of # (SunGard BSR) Re: Can Anyone Recommend a "Pay as You Go" Economy Cell Phone? (Glowing) Re: Can Anyone Recommend a "Pay as You Go" Economy Cell Phone? (Joseph) Re: What is the Name of #? How did # Get its Name? (Justin Time) Re: What is the Name of #? How did # Get its Name? (Paul Vader) Lawsuit in Colorado Over Rerouted 911 (Carl Moore) Re: Fireman Claims Radio Failure Nearly Killed Him (Tony P.) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: kpospisek@yahoo.com (Karl Pospisek) Subject: WWW is Ten Years Old in 2004 Date: 30 Sep 2004 13:10:38 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Commercial WWW is about 10 years old this year What a vivid experience it was when I installed a beta release of Netscape 0.9 and entered a URL. WOW - It had colour pictures and was better than a terminal or BBS window. At that stage Yahoo was my homepage of choice, one could even keep up with the "New sites" added daily back then. Since then, life and work has not been the same. I'm surprised I haven't seen a world party arranged by some of the founding geeks -- their efforts are now *well* appreciated by all. Karl Pospisek Telecom Product Designer [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Indeed, it does seem like a long time ago, that what is now informally known, in street parlance, as the 'Web' got started, but it was about ten years ago, in the late summer or early fall of 1994 that the mode of transport on the Internet we refer to as the web -- essentially the only thing many or most of the younger users know about -- got started. Prior to this 'web', of course we had gopher (anyone remember that?) and telnet (still in use a little) and similar, but truly, the modern internet pretty much took off with the invention of the World Wide Web. We have come a long way in the past decade, and these 'old fashioned' styles of transmission such as straight ASCII text (as used here in the Digest) are getting more and more rare. I am trying now to think of the name of the one person who did most of the work creating the Web, but his name off hand escapes me. I know he has been (or still is) involved with MIT and he also has an office (or perhaps lives) in Switzerland. Please remind me who I am (trying to) thinking about. I do know he never took a nickle for his work in developing the Web, which I guess would be the 'killer application' of all time. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 18:30:51 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: > In the early 1960s, "time-sharing" and multi-tasking was developed so > that a computer could serve several people at the same time. At that > point Teletypes as computer terminals became more common. But until > time sharing was developed, Teletypes were not an efficient input- > output mechanism for computers. A notable pioneer system was SABRE, > the reservation system for American Airlines that used electric > typewriters. While conceived in the 1950s, I don't think it entered > real service until the early 1960s. SAABRE originally used pushbutton terminals with individual city and time buttons. These were then replaced with IBM printing terminals, and then with the 3270-type terminals that you will see in airports today. Sad to say, the original SAABRE kernal has been hacked over pretty well but is still running in most airline machine rooms on modernized 360 ison. > In the 1960s, many new mfrs of mini computers chose Teletypes (the > brand) as their input/output terminal and designed their systems to > work in on-line mode. Around that time Teletype introduced a new line > of machines that ran faster at 10 cps and also had a much bigger > character set (ASCII instead of Baudot). The mini-computer mfrs used > ASCII. Notable mfrs included General Electric (Dartmouth's pioneer > BASIC system), Hewlett- Packard, Digital PDP, Data General, and > others. While users of these machines tended to really love them, > they were limited in their ability to handle high volumes of data. At > some point, batch processing on a traditional mainframe was more > efficient. There were lots of alternatives, from the Friden Flexowriter to the GE Terminet, to the IBM typeball thing. Most of them were much faster and much more expensive than the 33ASR. The reason the 33ASR wound up being shipped as a console with so many computer systems was because it was cheap. It was also very poorly made compared with the higher grade offerings from Teletype and the other firms, and it was a bloody pain. --scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Paper Tape Technology was Re: What is Name of #? Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 18:24:41 -0400 From: J Carpenter (SunGard BSR) >> As an undergrad at Harvard, Bill Gates wrote software to read >> and=20 count these punched holes (a task complicated slightly by >> the fact=20 that they are randomly spaced along the paper tape) and >> set up a=20 company ("Traf-O-Data", I believe) located in his dorm >> room which=20 received these tapes, read them using bootlegged time >> on Aiken's early Harvard University computer facility, and sent >> back printed reports to traffic engineers all over the company. > Gates and Allen did run Traf-O-Data, but the rest is wrong. Since > Bill is 48 years old, when would he have > been at Harvard? When was Aiken doing the Mark I through Mark IV? > Sheesh. Actually, it was before Bill Gates went to Harvard, when he was still in high school, that Bill Gates and Paul Allen built their own computer to measure traffic data, and they made about $20,000. Search the web on "bill gates" and "traf-o-data" for the details. ------------------------------ From: GlowingBlueMist Subject: Re: Can Anyone Recommend a "Pay as You Go" Economy Cell Phone? Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 17:28:35 -0500 ava cohen wrote in message news:telecom23.457.6@telecom-digest.org: > I am thinking of getting my 12 year old daughter a pay as you go cell > phone in California. > Can anyone recommend a "pay as you go" economy cell phone? (like > prepaid cards?) > I do not want to subscribe to any plans. > Which company? > How much does the phone and the calls cost? > Where is the best place to buy it from? > Any help would be highly appreciated. > Thanks. > Ava I presently use a TracFone that I purchased at Wal-Mart. The cards to feed the phone can be found at a large number of stores. Their web page displays many companies where you can get both the phones and the refill cards. With the large number of locations handling their phones you should not have problems accessing service. You get assigned a telephone number based on available numbers in the zip code area you register it for use in. You can change the registered zip code (local calling area) a few times a year (with corresponding phone number changes) in case you spend half the year in one location and the other half in another. I'll let you view the web offerings for phone models and prices but I think the cheapest phone is around $30. I believe you have to process a phone card refill at a minimum of every 3 months unless you purchase one of the yearly cards. So for someone of the younger set you might stay with the smaller phone refill cards and get one every couple of months. Unused time gets added to the refill if you renew it before the refill date shown on the phone. Their web page is www.tracfone.com As for myself, I just relocated from a different state and still looking for a new job. With that in mind it was foolish to lock myself into a phone plan until I know exactly what state/city I'll be working and living in. So far the only thing I don't like is that my outbound calls do not show my personal caller ID info. Instead people get just the name of the local phone carrier along with my phone number. Many people won't answer thinking it's one of those dreaded sales calls from the said carrier unless they know my number. I'm sure other areas serviced by a different cellular company might even display the owners name as well as number. What ever cellular company you wind up with make sure that the refill cards are available from multiple major merchandisers. I know of friends that had purchased phones from other companies only to find out that they could no longer purchase refill cards for those phones in the state where they lived, not something I have heard about with TracFone. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: A very popuar pre-paid phone around here is Trac Phone (available from Walmart) but another widely used phone is Alltel (also available at Walmart from the Alltel corporate kiosk there and also available from the Radio Shack store here.) In Alltel's case at least, they do not require 'cards' to be purchased; you just refill the phone time by dialing *369 on the phone and using a credit card. Alltel also has a 'monthly prepaid plan' where you can pay about $35 per month and get all the features you normally would have on a 'regular' cell phone (such as caller ID, roaming, and other things) and the first $35 they find on your account each month goes to pay for another month of that 'pay as you go' service. If you get on the monthly prepaid plan, (I think they call it 'smart pay') then you *must* tell the agent you want off if you no longer wish to keep it on a certain month. For example, you have (let's say) thirty dollars in credit on your phone; they want $35 or whatever for a month of prepaid service; when they cannot confiscate it all entirely on the first of a month they cut the phone off; they do not revert you to a call-by-call (much more expensive) basis. So with Alltel, you do get some flexibilty, paying for a month at a time (better rates and more features) or 'call by call' (few if any features, no roaming, etc) if that is what you prefer and you pay over the phone itself for additional time. AT&T is similar. Pay with your credit card in various increments for calls (it gets cheaper when you buy more) and you can pay with a credit card over the phone itself, and you get caller ID as well. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Can Anyone Recommend a "Pay as You Go" Economy Cell Phone? Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 16:21:27 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On 29 Sep 2004 21:32:48 -0700, avacohen100@yahoo.com (ava cohen) wrote: > I am thinking of getting my 12 year old daughter a pay as you go cell > phone in California. Where in California would help. > Can anyone recommend a "pay as you go" economy cell phone? (like > prepaid cards?) The cheapest one I've found is an AT&T Wireless reseller called JusTalk marketed by phoneshark. This plan will require that you have a deactivated AT&T TDMA phone (which you can often find at yard sales and the like.) This plan is 25 cents/minute at the $10 refill level and as cheap as 20 cents/minute at the $250 level. Just using the minimum level which is 40 minutes of calling for $10 comes out to ~$1.67 per month. This plan also comes with a dedicated toll-free 866 number so people can call you as a local call wherever you are partly because you may not be able to get a number that's local to you. I was issued a New York City 917 number. It also comes with free calling to many locations including all of western Europe and some other countries. You have to refill with more minutes at least every 180 days or the account will be deactivated. This plan requires that you have your own phone to activate service. If you're not in an area served by AT&T Wireless though there may be higher charges to use the service through roaming minutes. Another alternative is to get AT&T Free2Go service. I've seen full packages for as little as $20 including a phone. Depending on card value you can get airtime as cheap as 15 cent/minute. Another alternative that just started to be marketed by 7-11 stores is a prepaid service that costs 20 cents/minute and uses the Cingular network. http://www.howardforums.com has a pretty active discussion board about prepaid. Check out http://howardforums.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=249 It has several areas that you may wish to look at including an overview as well as discussion of many prepaid plans both in North America as well as elsewhere. And just as a note in case you don't know already it's called prepaid generally in North America and Pay As You Go (PAYG) or Pay As You Talk (PAYT) in other parts of the world such as in the UK. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: AT&T 'Free to Go' is what I have. At one point (when I lived around the Chicago, Illinois area) I used 'regular' AT&T Wireless service. But here around Independence, I started out with AT&T but the service was not so good, and I switched to Cingular Wireless (when AT&T sold their storefront and their agent to Cingular and split town.) I was unable to get the Nokia 6100 phone to work on Cingular so I got a Cingular phone had had my older AT&T cut over to the 'Free to Go' plan. PAT] ------------------------------ From: a_user2000@yahoo.com (Justin Time) Subject: Re: What is the Name of #? How did # Get its Name? Date: 30 Sep 2004 13:31:04 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) wrote in message news:: > bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) wrote > <> > As an aside, the language used on IBM's System/3x through the present > day AS/400 is RPG, which dates back to 1960 and the IBM 1401. The > language was intended to mimic the wiring of a tab machine control > panel so tab operators could make the transition to programming. >> The 3270 was a 'smart' terminal -- necessitated by IBM's "block mode" >> architecture -- and used 16 bits per displayed character. 1 byte for >> the character itself, and one byte for the 'attributes'. things like >> 'bright', 'blank', 'input', 'protected', etc. > It's funny how today we call 3270-type terminals (still in very wide > use) "dumb terminals" when in fact they were not. A Teletype was more > "dumb" since it basically transmitted or received upon a keystroke, > while the 3270 network had buffers, could erase and insert characters, > and as mentioned had different appearances. [There were advanced > Teletypes that could do some fancy stuff. Some 3270 functions were > handled by the controller unit that was required and supported a group > of terminals.] The term "dumb" and "smart" when applied to terminals really applies to their ability to process information. The 3270 terminal is a "dumb" terminal in the fact that no processing is done at the terminal and it only echoes back what is received from its intelligent source. According to the original definition of a dumb or smart terminal, a terminal connected through a PC or other device that was capable of doing processing, or in the case of mainframes, preprocessing would be considered a "smart" terminal. Before the days of the 3270 there were thousands upon thousands of 2260 terminals around. These also were dumb terminals as the only thing they did was provide a video interface into a system and displayed only the information sent to them. Keystrokes from the keyboard did nothing to modify the displayed information or change any attributes of the data without processing by the mainframe computer. The cable for a 2260 terminal was about a half inch in diameter with about 6 pair of 18 ga.(IIRC) wires to control the display and receive keystroke information. Video was over a small coax in the center of the cable. The last 2260 style terminals I installed was almost 30 years ago, in the mid 70's. OBTW, the common screen width for a 2260 was 48 characters and early 3270 terminals did both 48 and 80 characters. The maximum number of charcters displayed on a full screen 3270 was 1920 (24 x 80). It was the high cost of a terminal from IBM that gave birth to the low cost dumb termial market that spawned the ADM-3 (Adam) 3, 3A, the Televideo, Lear Siegler, TI, DEC and so many others. IBM did a major price cut on the 3270 terminals in 1978 that drove most of the replacement terminal manufacturers under or into consolidation. 3270 displays went from several 1000 dollars to around 1000 or so and effectively killed the key to disk market at the same time. Some of you may remember names of companies like Mohawk that just disappeared by the early 80's after doing several hundred million dollars of business just 2 or 3 years earlier. Once the equipment leases ran out. > The Bell System had a heck of a lot of private lines serving business > data communications. Yep, computer rooms always had a bank of "Dataphone" modems. Usually 2400, 4800 and wow -- 9600 Baud Syncronous. Async ran at 300 baud and was good for only low speed stuff -- like teletypes at 100 WPM and an occasional terminal. > A big difference was that IBM liked synchornous transmission while > many other computers, including common PC transmissions used > asynchronous transmission. I don't know which is superior. > We had 3rd party imitation IBM 3270 units but IMHO they weren't as > good as real IBM units. However, they were a lot cheaper. I don't > see any "dumb terminals" anymore, it seems almost everyone now has a > PC with an emulation program/card imitating a 3270 terminal. In the > early days of PCs, I refused to use a PC with a CGA screen as a 3270 > terminal since it was so fuzzy compared to a real terminal. > (Actually, I shied away from CGA PCs altogether.) > Over time, the cost of 3270-type units and controllers dropped quite a > bit in price while modem speed increased. Asynch modem speed didn't increase until the Hayes modems started coming out around 1980 or a little later. The first jump was to quadruple the speed to 1200 baud, but the big jump was to 2400 baud about a year or so later. 9600 baud became fairly common around 1989 -- 90 with 14.4 around 91. 56K modems have been around the longest, since the mid 90's or almost 10 years. It was the introduction of the 2400 baud modem that did the most to increase the number of computers in individual use than any other improvement. The 2400 baud modem paved the way for the acceptance of the computer as a home computer rather than a scientic tool or hobbyist toy giving birth to the need for software and spawning companies such as Microsoft, Word Perfect Corp., Norton, Wordstar, Lotus and others. Datapoint developed a split speed modem for use with their timesharing/ data entry terminals. They had a 300/1200 baud modem, 300 transmit because it was keystrokes and 1200 receive to handle the display character input. This meant you could "paint" a full 1920 character screen in about 1 1/2 seconds - and that was pretty darn fast for those days. But then computers had cycle times - one trip through the main timing chain to process a single instruction - measured in multiples of whole microseconds. The venerable Four Phase system IV-70 (dating from around 1970) took 2.04 microseconds to process a single 24 bit computer word, and it was one of the fastest "mini" computers available at the time. I think the original Altairs were around 8 microseconds for a cycle. It wasn't until later that people started measuring clock speed in order to "boost the speed" without any engineering changes. The original IBM PC ran at 4 MHz, the AT at 6. Now we measure clock speeds in the billions of cycles per second rather than millions. ------------------------------ From: pv+usenet@pobox.com (Paul Vader) Subject: Re: What is the Name of #? How did # Get its Name? Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 22:56:32 -0000 Organization: Inline Software Creations SPAMhukolautTRAP@SPAMattTRAP.net writes: > IIRC, the "attribute byte" only had to get transmitted when the > attribute properties changed or when you wanted to jump to a different > portion of the screen. Correct. > You could also get very creative with these fields. At least one > implementation that I am aware of used "protected, non-displayed, > returned" fields to "hide" data from the user but make it easier on > the server machine. This still is standard practice in just about any system using 3270 screens. You set the hidden, protected, and modified data flags on data you're sending out to make sure you get it back. It's a way of storing "state" without using a user spool area. > Actually, as I recall, the controller was necessary. The 3270's > didn't transmit anything until the operator hit the "send" key, and > this would be buffered in the "cluster controller." Right, at least until the tn3270 protocol pretty much destroyed the cluster controller business. Lots and lots of aps still use 3270 protocols, but you don't see hardwired 3270 terminals around anymore. > The controller, in turn, would be polled at roughly 2 second intervals > by the far end, at which time it would send the data. A controller > was theoretically limited to 32 terminals, but we found that 16 was a > practical limit for our applications. None of that was true for the last two decades of cluster controllers. I strongly doubt that cluster controllers EVER polled at 2 second intervals, because that would set the minimum response time to one second, and NOBODY would tolerate that. Maybe 30 years ago I suppose. > I never encountered an installation where there was an isolated 3270 > without a cluster controller, although I presume this was > theoretically possible. Nope. There were devices you could hang on a leased line which gave you only a terminal or two, but they were still controllers. > customers. Even though the cluster controllers communicated with the > host at either 4.8 or 9.6 Kbps, the probability of all 16 clerks > hitting send during the same 2-second interval was pretty small. The standard leased-line speed for a cluster controller was 56k. And late in their life, they could go a LOT faster, which they needed to do if you had one controlling 128 terminals. I still shudder remembering all the coax running to the last-generation controllers we had at a warehouse. A bundle of cables three feet across going in, and one token ring cable going out. * * PV something like badgers--something like lizards--and something like corkscrews. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 16:31:30 EDT From: Carl Moore Subject: Lawsuit in Colorado Over Rerouted 911 There are other readers more knowledgeable than I on this, but I have learned of a lawsuit (by a woman in the Denver area) over a wrong address for home telephone number. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: We printed something on this story in the previous issue of the Digest today. As sad as it was to read of the little guy dying because the ambulance was delayed in getting there due to the dispatcher's failure to *stay with the call and find the proper agency to make the referral to* it was sort of refreshing to note that for a change, the blame was not put on VOIP, nor did the story even say if the mother was using a VOIP or a 'landline' phone. I am sure if it had been VOIP we would have heard all about it. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Fireman Claims Radio Failure Nearly Killed Him Organization: ATCC Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 21:46:03 GMT In article , hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com says: > The Phila Inqr (www.philly.com) reported 9/30/04 that a city fireman > with 23 years of service says his new digital radio failed leaving him > trapped in a burning building and severely injured. > The city spent $54 million on a new public safety radio system that > has more channels and allows all agencies to talk on the same > frequency during emergencies. Firefighters have filed steady > complaints about the system, which operates on 800 Mhz band. > The city is investigating with Motorola. One concern being > checked is if cellphones interfere. > Motorola did say one emergency feature (that the fireman used) > might not always work. They also said they may have been confusion > between the encrypted and clear modes. > Other news reports said the batteries in police hand held units don't > hold a charge and fail during service. Other cities had a similar > problem. > Suburban public safety departments have also upgraded to digital > radios at tremendous cost since all radios, both on vehicles and hand > held, must be replaced. Suburban officials have found numerous dead > spots. > One can't help but wonder if the digital technology being used in new > public safety radios is not mature enough for the demanding > applications. From news reports, it seems the digital systems are > much more likely to have deadspots (just like digital cell phones) > than the prior analog systems. > Has anyone heard reports from other municipalities about problems with > digital radios? Oho! Motorola is famous for pushing communities to buy new gear even though their 20 to 40 year old Motorola gear works just fine. I'm so happy my city hasn't bitten the deadly trunking bullet. It's an accident that was waiting to happen and I'm happy that it did, but my condolences go out to the firefighter who was nearly killed because of Motorola's funky emergency system. I hope he sues the ever loving crap out of Motorola and wins. ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, Yahoo Groups, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. 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Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #459 ******************************