Voice
Communication in Business Volume 1
Essays on telecommunications,
1969-1980
Part IV:
Toys, Add-ons and Miscellaneous
Let's face it: the
computer is the greatest toy to come down the pike since the yoyo.
My own little computer lets me be a scientist, engineer, writer,
star ship commander and half a dozen other things, simply by
plugging in the right floppy disk. How much of me actually exists
any more and how much is called up like a genie from a magnetic
bottle is hard to say. But the results are a lot of fun.
Needless to say, the
computer has its serious side. It can do various jobs in industry
very easily that could only be done with great difficulty with
earlier devices. However, a computer is sort of like a brain; it
can't do anything by itself. It has to have eyes and hands, input
and output devices, and it has to have lots of training (programs)
to know what to do in various circumstances.
The telephone industry
is one vast array of input/output devices just waiting for a
computer to come along and operate them easily and economically.
Bell of Canada and Bell Northern Research differed from AT&T and
Bell Labs in developing computer control of existing hardware (the
SP series of CO switches, for instance) rather than doing the whole
job from the ground up (the Morris field trial that proceeded No. 1
ESS, and, ultimately, No. 1 ESS itself). Although strict application
of Gebhardt's law (you can make anything run on pure money) has made
No. 1 ESS a success, there is still much to be said for the other
approach.
With the coming of
interconnect, anybody could try his hand at developing telephone
equipment, and quite a few anybodies did. Some of them knew a lot
about computers, and turned that knowledge to account. However, not
everybody knew very much about telephony as it was practiced, to say
nothing about how it SHOULD have been practiced. Thus results were
not always what the customer had hoped for.
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