[HN Gopher] Building the Bell System
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Building the Bell System
Author : JumpCrisscross
Score : 60 points
Date : 2024-07-14 10:45 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.construction-physics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.construction-physics.com)
| interpunct wrote:
| Of course, _engineering_ the Bell System led to a few innovations
| and societal changes, too.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon
| borski wrote:
| Can you be more specific? I'm familiar with Shannon's work,
| obviously, but what societal changes happened as a result of
| engineering the Bell system specifically?
| interpunct wrote:
| > At the close of the war, he [Shannon] prepared a classified
| memorandum for Bell Telephone Labs entitled "A Mathematical
| Theory of Cryptography", dated September 1945. A declassified
| version of this paper was published in 1949 as "Communication
| Theory of Secrecy Systems" in the Bell System Technical
| Journal.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_Theory_of_Secrec.
| ..
|
| > what societal changes happened as a result of engineering
| the Bell system specifically
|
| I don't have _that_ much time, but in general think about how
| I am even capable of communicating with you at all. Start
| with the "https://" at the beginning of most modern URLs.
|
| UNIX, transistors, foundational information theory, "on and
| on till the break of dawn." If you want to become more
| familiar with Shannon's work and Bell systems, separately and
| together, try his master's thesis, followed by his Ph.D., ...
|
| > obviously
|
| I thought my original comment was obvious. At least we both
| seem to be familiar with the principles of:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)#/medi.
| ..
|
| Thank you for for helping me clarify my thoughts, and have a
| nice day.
| borski wrote:
| Thank you! That was a super-helpful response. I wasn't
| asking because I disagreed, but because I didn't fully
| understand what you were getting at. Now I do. Thanks!
| interpunct wrote:
| I wasn't trying to be snarky. Here is a 7 volume "A
| history of engineering and science in the Bell System"
|
| https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/1460436
|
| The first volume 1875-1925 is over 1000 pages. I'm
| telling you, Bell was an important organization with
| respect to modern sociology.
| greenyoda wrote:
| [delayed]
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _thought my original comment was obvious_
|
| Your comment is stronger without this. (From a fellow
| Shannon fan.)
| ioblomov wrote:
| Though perhaps not strictly societal in its effect, let's
| also not overlook the discovery of the cosmic microwave
| background...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_cosmic_microwave
| _...
| Animats wrote:
| Shannon's great contribution to the Bell System was that he
| figured out how to reduce the number of relays in a fully-
| connected toll office from O(N^2) to O(N log N).[1] After
| that, they let him work on whatever he wanted.
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/bstj29-3-343
| interpunct wrote:
| > great contribution
|
| _One_ of his great contributions, I would argue,
| information theory being another, and secure
| telecommunications.
|
| Early work on switching networks (MS Thesis):
|
| https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11173
|
| Seminal work on information theory
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematical_Theory_of_Comm
| u...
|
| > they let him work on whatever he wanted
|
| UNIX was written by some guys in the same organization, I
| wonder one of them thought "Oh sure Shannon gets to work on
| what _he_ wants, why can 't we work on the the future of a
| global inter-net? Why do we have to hide it as a text
| processing system?"
|
| My management here apparently is a crowd sourced mob trying
| to silence me by clicktivism. Shannon and KNR had it easy,
| IMO.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Unix's involvement with the development of the Internet
| was mainly through BSD, which was a UC Berkeley joint,
| not Bell Labs.
| Animats wrote:
| Actually, no. The UC Berkeley TCP/IP implementation was
| not the first. It was more like the fifth. But it was the
| first for UNIX that was _given away to universities for
| free_. Here 's the pricing on a pre-BSD implementation of
| TCP/IP called UNET.[1] $7,300 for the first CPU, and
| $4,300 for each additional CPU. We had this running at
| the aerospace company on pure Bell Labs UNIX V7 years
| before BSD.
|
| Much of what happened in the early days of UNIX was
| driven by licensing cost. That's a long story well
| documented elsewhere. Licensing cost is why Linux exists.
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_3Com3ComUN_1019
| 199/pag...
| thaliaarchi wrote:
| > The resulting units may be called binary digits, or more
| shortly, bits.
|
| It's interesting to read this early use of "bit", before
| the term became commonplace. The first publication to use
| "bit", also by Shannon, was only a year prior[0].
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit#History
| sandwall wrote:
| Shockley and the transistor...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley
| neelc wrote:
| Modern AT&T isn't really Ma Bell, it's SBC who bought AT&T and
| kept the AT&T name. That's why AT&T is based in Dallas and not
| New Jersey.
|
| Ma Bell today is really AT&T, Verizon and parts of Lumen,
| Frontier and Consolidated.
|
| AT&T also is worth less than Verizon due to bad mergers (DirecTV
| and non-cable Time Warner) which added a lot of debt, money that
| should've been used for fiber and 5G or even a bidding war
| against T-Mobile for Sprint if you had to buy your competitor.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| I work for (current) AT&T, in Atlanta. SBC also bought Atlanta-
| based BellSouth in 2006, and some of my coworkers who are ex-
| BellSouth complain that working for this company hasn't been
| the same since. But I haven't heard that as much lately - a lot
| of those people have retired by now.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Dont forget the takeover of Cingular. That always seemed to
| be when the old DNA was comprehensively switched out for the
| new. No more ATT with sleepy offices in San Antonio, now it
| was a mobile company based out of Dallas.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Yep - those were around the same time so I think people
| might find it hard to disentangle the two, especially when
| they're just complaining instead of trying to do serious
| corporate history.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Nice article. One tactical detail that arguably didn't belong in
| it, but which is still awesome as hell, was when they moved (and
| rotated) the Indiana Bell central office building _without
| dropping a call._ (https://www.archdaily.com/973183/the-building-
| that-moved-how...).
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