36 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981
Copyright © 2018 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.

The Telecom Digest for Tue, 24 Apr 2018
Volume 37 : Issue 97 : "text" format

Table of contents
Re: Caller ID stumperJohn Levine
Re: Does anyone remember the IMTS System?John Levine
'No Company Is So Important Its Existence Justifies Setting Up a Police State'Monty Solomon
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message-ID: <20180422165315.16B16255D734@ary.qy> Date: 22 Apr 2018 12:53:13 -0400 From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> Subject: Re: Caller ID stumper In article <INJCC.1263603$iE.810901@fx05.am4> you write: >My VTech phone (land line) Caller ID stopped working and only displays >"Incoming Call". It is displaying what the cable box sends it, which tells us that the next thing to try is replacing the cable box. R's, John ------------------------------ Message-ID: <20180422170315.4244D255D88A@ary.qy> Date: 22 Apr 2018 13:03:14 -0400 From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> Subject: Re: Does anyone remember the IMTS System? In article <20150521234221.C5063DC3@telecom.csail.mit.edu> On Thursday, May 21, 2015 at 7:43:36 PM UTC-4, Bill Horne wrote: > Here's a trip down memory lane: does anyone remember the IMTS > systems that preceded cellular? We used to go to a church camp on an island ten miles off Portsmouth NH. The original high-speed communication to and from the mainland was carrier pigeons, which would fly out in the morning to tell the kitchen how many people to expect for lunch on the noon boat. When we started going in the 1960s and 1970s they had an IMTS phone mounted in an old phone booth. You'd call them by dialing the operator, asking for the mobile operator in Dover NH, and asking her for JS8-3445. (I don't think that fairly rural exchange ever implemented IMTS dialing.) The operators never could understand that this phone did not move, and if they weren't answering it was not because they had driven out of range. At some point one of the engineers who attended the conferences brought out a point to point phone repeater, with the antennae in the top of the island hotel and the steeple of a church on the mainland. That worked pretty well, so the IMTS phone went away in favor of a POTS phone with a normal phone number. In the 1980s we started bringing out our cell phones and although ten miles from a tower is a long way, line of sight over salt water is ideal for propagation so they worked OK. Around that time the Coast Guard automated the lighthouse on a nearby island and in the process ran a cable out to that island, and let us piggyback on that, so now if you know where to look, there's Ethernet cables in some of the buildings on the island that connect to the Internet. R's, John ***** Moderator's Note ***** John, if you already had the roost, why not just switch to RFC1149? ;-) Bill Horne Moderator ------------------------------ Message-ID: <104AA6A7-7DB9-4F78-AC54-205810A01A63@roscom.com> Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2018 14:49:20 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: 'No Company Is So Important Its Existence Justifies Setting Up a Police State' "No Company Is So Important Its Existence Justifies Setting Up a Police State" A conversation with legendary programmer Richard Stallman on the real meaning of "privacy rights" and why he only ever uses cash. http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/richard-stallman-rms-on-privacy-data-and-free-software.html ------------------------------ ********************************************* End of telecom Digest Tue, 24 Apr 2018

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