[ih] AT&T, carterfone, the 103, and why didnt BBSs start earlier?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Larry Press <lpress at csudh.edu>

    > a court case that overruled an FCC ban on his Hush-a-Phone
    > ...
    > hard to see why the FCC would have banned it.

Umm, because they were a rubber stamp for the Bell System? :-)


    > Also check out Whirlwind from MIT which led to the SAGE air-defense
    > network and trained a significant number of programmers 

Yeah, I'd passed over that, but it too had a significant communication
component. (In fact, IIRC, some of the first modems were constructed for a
predecessor system that sent radar data from somewhere to Cambridge.)

It did a _whole bunch_ of things first (too long a list to list here, and
from memory). It was the first significant real-time system; first replicated
system for reliability; first user interface via display and pointing device
(light pen), among many other things.

There are a couple of good books about it:

	John F. Jacobs, "The SAGE Air Defense System: A Personal History",
		MITRE, Bedford, 1986		
	Kent C. Redmond, Thomas M. Smith, "Project Whirlwind: The History of
		a Pioneer Computer", Digital, Bedford, 1980
	Kent C. Redmond, Thomas M. Smith, "From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D
		Story of the SAGE Air Defense Computer",
		M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, 2000

and others that cover it as part of their coverage of other stuff:

	Robert Buderi, "The Invention That Changed the World: How a Small
		Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched
		a Technical Revolution", Simon and Schuster, Riverside, 1998

is one I recall off the top of my head (that's a truly fabulous book, one
everyone with an interest in the history of technology should have).

And there's a complete issue of the 'IEEE Annals of the History of Computing'
about it: Volume 5, Number 4.


	Noel