[ih] early competition and networking

[John R. Levine]

On Sun, 14 Apr 2024, John Day wrote:
> Thanks for all the responses.
> Interesting. So all of these networks were interconnected. But what was the solution?

They were all different.  Interconnecting telephone networks was a 
political rather than technical problem since in practice all US phone 
networks used AT&T's conventions and often their equipment.  I also don't 
think there were many technical barriers to interconnecting telegraph and 
telex networks.  Even translation between Baudot Telex and ASCII TWX was 
pretty straightforward and didn't have to work for every possible obscure 
character.  (The 103 modems had a "restrain" light which temporarily 
stopped the paper tape reader so the ASCII to Baudot translator at the 
other end could catch up.)

Much later, 1950s and 1960s, interconnection had some technical issues 
because North American networks worked differently from CCITT networks 
everywhere else, but the semantics were close enough, e.g., this is a 
phone number, that is a 56Kbps encoded voice channel, that it wasn't a big 
deal to translate.

I can't think of anything as different as the various flavors of e-mail 
that people tried to glue together.  Look at RFC 987, 69 pages of mappings 
between X.400 mail and SMTP mail.  In that case, the solution turned out 
to be that SMTP won and everything else disappeared.

R's,
John


>
> And in particular were these the solution that was used for the Internet?
>
>> On Apr 14, 2024, at 17:54, John Levine via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>> It appears that Dave Crocker via Internet-history <dcrocker at bbiw.net> said:
>>> On 4/14/2024 1:07 PM, John Day via Internet-history wrote:
>>>>  It is unclear to me what precisely the solution to internetworking was?
>>>
>>> Apparently there used to be at least some competition, with multiple
>>> telegraph companies.
>>
>> George Oslin's "Story of Telecommunications", published by Mercer
>> University Press, is the best history I know of the telegraph business.
>>
>> Western Union consolidated most of the telegraph companies before
>> 1900, other than Postal Telegraph which struggled along until WW II.
>> It was much smaller than WU and often had to pay WU to deliver
>> telegrams to places its wires didn't go. By the 1930s it was owned by
>> Sosthenes Behn's well connected ITT, and finally was merged into WU in
>> 1945 by congressional action on extremely favorable terms to Postal
>> employees, a wound from which Oslin (a WU lifer so not a impartial
>> source) says WU never recovered.
>>
>> Starting in the 1930s there was also AT&T's TWX, competing with WU's
>> Telex. There were many missed opportunities, as when WU could have
>> bought the Teletype company, making AT&T's TWX a captive customer, but
>> Behn said no so they sold to Western Electric. Telex and TWX
>> interconnected sometime in the 1950s but Oslin doesn't give details.
>>
>> The best reference on the history of telephone interconnection and
>> consolidation is Milt Mueller's thesis which he published as
>> "Universal Service: Competition, Interconnection and Monopoly in the
>> Making of the American Telephone System." It is now online (legally)
>> at https://surface.syr.edu/books/18/
>>
>> Since it's Milt, I'd check the references, of course.
>>
>> R's,
>> John
>> --
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>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
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>
>

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly