[ih] How long did it take?

[John Day]

;-)

> On Sep 17, 2026, at 20:41, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff at iconia.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Sep 17, 2026 at 5:27 PM John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net <mailto: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 <mailto:geoff at iconia.com>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Wed, Sep 16, 2026 at 5:10 PM John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto:Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com>
>>> living as The Truth is True
>>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com <mailto:Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com>
> living as The Truth is True
>