“I’ve just had my eyes opened… to the fact that some of our business problems were really communications problems!” (Apr, 1965)
“I’ve just had my eyes opened… to the fact that some of our business problems were really communications problems!”
An active business is constantly changing. It broadens its products, expands its market, hires more people, gains more customers, faces more competition. And with these changes come problems.
A lot of those problems involve communications . . . because communicating is vital to nearly all business operations.How do you spot those problems? How do you know if and where you need better communications?
Simple. You call in a Bell System Communications Consultant. He does a thorough, expert study of your operations and gives you a full report and recommendation. The analysis costs you nothing.
Try it. Just call your Bell Telephone Business Office and ask for the services of a Communications Consultant.
Bell System
American Telephone and Telegraph Co. and Associated Companies
Now we have “press 1 for English” , “press 2 for billing questions” etc. By the time I get to where I need to be I could have redialed at least a half a dozen times manually. Oh, my very favorite, “All of our agents are busy, your call will be answered in the order that it was received”. When I get this message I almost wish I could knit, could probably knock off a couple of sweaters for Xmas gifts while I’m waiting.
“This call may be recorded for training purposes and if you’re really dumb, also for entertainment at our office Christmas party.”
Can you imagine running an online account with that vintage teletype?
@Kosher Ham
Pimp up that teletype with some brass gears, fittings, and Victorian charm and you have a steam-punk home/business based IM device.
Hey I twit on a teletype! (Nah, thats a lie, I don’t twit.)
> Can you imagine running an online account with that vintage teletype?
I don’t have to imagine it, that’s what I started on.
Our high school was part of an NSF-funded study to see if high-school students could learn to program computers in the brand-new BASIC language. We had a 110Baud link through an acoustic coupler to a GE timesharing system – blindingly fast! Unlimited storage, as long as the roll of paper tape held out, and there’s still something magic about that cylindrical type ball bouncing up and down and spinning around, leaving nearly perfect capital letters on the roll of manilla paper…
Mike, we had the same set up at my high school. So that program is responsible for all the code I’ve been spewing out over the decades since then.
I showed this ad to my father, who happened to work for Bell at the time, and this is was his response:
http://dailyexhaust.com…
Regarding that link, equalization was still needed to condition the copper; the 300bps modems were slow enough they did not need equalization; by the time a 2400bps modem came out, they had automatic adavaptive (per-call) equalization. The 9600bps+ modems usually had error correction as well, and had a “retrain” mode where it would periodically stop what it was doing (i.e. stop passing any data) and readjust the equalization and so on; it was a black art among modem makers how often and what conditions to retrain; too often just wastes everyone’s time, since the modem is not passing data for several seconds each time; too infrequently, and speeds would degrade as the line conditions drifted, or the connection could even fail and the modems would hang up.