[ih] early competition and networking

[John Day]

Thanks for all the responses.

Interesting. So all of these networks were interconnected. But what was the solution?

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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