[ih] How long did it take?

Thu Sep 17 17:41:26 PDT 2026

On Thu, Sep 17, 2026 at 5:27 PM John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:

> Thanks. That tells me what I wanted to know.  Kinda scary that Grok is a
> better source than Internet-History, but I guess I should expect it.
>

you're most welcome john... yours truly is now summarily curious if this *"Grok
is a better source than Internet-History, but I guess I should expect
it."* should
be `classified'/'thought of' as

AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
-or-
ASI (Artificial SuperIntelligence) ala "Colossus: The Forbin Project" ?
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177]

:),
g

>
> (What I really like is what this says about American innovation. In
> something Baran wrote in the 2000s, he says he didn’t think they would
> really try to make it work. From what was said earlier about the X.25
> network they finally did and lost a billion dollars, he was right.
>
> On Sep 17, 2026, at 20:20, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <
> geoff at iconia.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Sep 16, 2026 at 5:10 PM John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> Yes of course we know that. But that wasn’t what I asked.
>>
>
> ok, so how about this Grok conversational exchange then:
>
> TO GROK:
> *it's said that in the 60s, Paul Baran backed out of an offer from AT&T to
> build a packet switched network because he sensed wisely they didn’t
> believe in it and would not put the effort into to make it real.  any ideas
> of when did AT&T start to take packet switching seriously?*
>
> GROK REPLY:
> "The story is essentially right in spirit, though the mechanics were a bit
> different from “AT&T made him an offer and he walked away.”
>
> In the mid-1960s the Air Force was interested in Baran’s distributed
> “message-block” (packet) design. AT&T was the obvious builder. AT&T
> engineers rejected it on technical and institutional grounds—“it can’t
> work, and if it did we don’t want a competitor to ourselves”—and the
> Defense Communications Agency that would have overseen any implementation
> was staffed largely by people with analog-circuit backgrounds. Baran
> concluded they would either botch the project or quietly kill it, so he
> recommended that the whole effort be shelved rather than handed to them.
> The project was quietly dropped around 1966. ARPA later picked up the ideas
> (plus Donald Davies’s independent work) and built ARPANET without AT&T.
> When the Pentagon asked AT&T in the early 1970s whether it wanted to take
> over ARPANET and turn it into a public service, AT&T declined again. [
> https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/technology/28baran.html]
>
> AT&T’s own conversion happened in stages:
>
>    - Late 1970s–early 1980s: Bell Labs (Sandy Fraser) developed Datakit,
>    a proprietary virtual-circuit packet switch. Internal test switches
>    appeared around 1979; it became an AT&T product in 1983 and was widely used
>    inside the Bell System for operations-support systems. This was the first
>    time the company treated packet switching as something it would actually
>    build and operate at scale. [
>    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojRtJ1U6Qzw]
>    - 1984: AT&T launched Accunet Packet Service, a public X.25 network
>    (tariff effective August 1984). That was its first commercial packet
>    offering to customers. [
>    https://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dataDecisions/1985_Communications_Systems/Vol2_810.pdf
>    ]
>    - Early 1990s: Frame Relay and ATM services followed.
>    - Late 1990s: AT&T installed its last new 4ESS circuit switch (1999)
>    and publicly described the future of the network as packet-based. Data
>    traffic overtook voice on the AT&T network around 2000 [
>    https://web.archive.org/web/20070107114157/http:/www.corp.att.com/history/nethistory/milestones.html
>    ]
>
>
> So the company began taking packet switching seriously for its own
> internal use in the late 1970s and for paying customers in 1984—roughly
> 15–20 years after Baran’s original proposal and a decade after Telenet and
> Tymnet had already commercialized it."
>
> ➔➔https://x.com/i/grok?conversation=2100738437875892246
>
> On Sep 16, 2026, at 20:05, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <
>> geoff at iconia.com> wrote:
>>
>> Grok sez:
>>
>> AT&T operated X.25 packet-switched networks in the 1980s.
>>
>> The main one was ACCUNET Packet Service, a public data network that AT&T
>> launched as a regulated basic service. The FCC tariff took effect 18 August
>> 1984. By 1986 it had 99 service points in the U.S. Subscriber interfaces
>> followed CCITT X.25 (1980 recommendation, with a later move toward the 1984
>> version). It offered switched virtual calls and permanent virtual circuits
>> over access lines at 4.8, 9.6, and 56 kbps (via Dataphone Digital Service
>> or analog private lines). Nodes were interconnected with 56 kbps DDS
>> facilities.
>>
>> AT&T also ran a separate value-added X.25 service called Net 1000
>> (AIS*Net 1000) through its unregulated subsidiary (American Bell / AT&T
>> Information Systems). That offering added protocol conversion, processing,
>> and storage on top of an underlying X.25 packet network supplied by the
>> regulated side of AT&T. It was withdrawn in 1986 after large losses.
>>
>> After the 1984 breakup, the long-distance AT&T entity continued ACCUNET
>> Packet Service while the Regional Bell Operating Companies offered their
>> own intra-LATA X.25 packet services (some of those RBOCs later became part
>> of today’s AT&T). Bell Labs also did packet-switching research and built
>> systems such as LADT that used X.25 internally.
>>
>> AT&T was late to commercial packet switching compared with Telenet and
>> Tymnet, but it did own and operate X.25 networks once it entered the market.
>>
>> ➔➔https://x.com/i/grok?conversation=2100374688069489036
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 16, 2026 at 4:07 PM John Day via Internet-history <
>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>>> In the 60s, Baran backed out of an offer from AT&T to build a packet
>>> switched network because he sensed wisely they didn’t believe in it and
>>> would not put the effort into to make it real.
>>>
>>> We also all know the story from the ARPANET demo at ICCC72 when Bob
>>> Metcalfe was demoing the TIP to several AT&T attendees. The TIP crashed and
>>> re-booted from its neighbors. Bob thought this was a great aspect of the
>>> system. The AT&T guys thought it showed the ARPANET was a joke and not
>>> serious.
>>>
>>> So when did AT&T start to take packet switching seriously?
>>>
>>> Take care,
>>> John
>>> --
>>>
>>>
> --
> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
> living as The Truth is True
>
>
>

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True