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Message Digest
Volume 28 : Issue 275 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Re: Western Union's satellite loss
Re: Western Union's satellite loss
Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Re: "Report charge" Long Distance
Does Google index audio files?
Re: Western Union's satellite loss
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Date: Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:43:55 +1100
From: David Clayton <dcstar@NOSPAM.myrealbox.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Message-ID: <pan.2009.10.06.06.43.52.544928@NOSPAM.myrealbox.com>
On Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:57:17 -0400, AES wrote:
> In article <p06240861c6ef1af620ec@[10.0.1.5]>,
> Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> wrote:
>
>> The problem: American cards lack a special chip, now commonly used in
>> many foreign countries, causing the cards to be rejected by some
>> merchants and kiosks.
>>
> Tried to swipe an American credit card in a machine at Charles DeGaulle
> Airport to buy a ticket into Paris on the RER trains a year or so back
> (forget which brand of card, but it was one shown on the machine) and
> couldn't get it accepted. Maybe this was the problem. Had to go to a
> ticket booth and stand in line.
I work with retail EFTPOS/Card systems and there are still country
boundary issues with a lot of the various card types/systems at the moment
- chip or no chip.
As an example, people can use Non-Australian Visa/MC at our shops via our
electronic systems for credit purchases, but not for foreign debit
transactions (apparently coming as soon as the gateway EFTPOS provides get
agreements/links with the various institutions involved - and there are a
lot of them.....)
Some of the issues (I believe) are for currency conversions/fees etc, and
the whole situation sounds messy. Visa and MasterCard are pushing their
Debit card options hard in the marketplace here just because of this
situation.
With the Internet and the ability to have secure comms virtually from
anywhere to anywhere else now, you would think that this sort of thing
would be sorted out by now but there are a lot of vested interests
involved who are doing quite nicely out of the options available now that
cost us consumers big fees for using cards in foreign countries (much like
using phones in foreign places.......)
--
Regards, David.
David Clayton
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a
measure of how many questions you have.
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 20:34:22 EDT
From: Wesrock@aol.com
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Message-ID: <cae.5065cdaf.37fd3c0e@aol.com>
In a message dated 10/5/2009 11:11:46 AM Central Daylight Time,
Telecom Digest Moderator wrote:
***** Moderator's Note *****
> This is related to telecom in a way that might not be obvious: it's
> an indication that society has (or is about to) come full circle,
> and do the things necessary to prevent electronic commerce without
> authority of the person who owns the funds.
>
> The telegraph and (of course) the telephone, were the first
> technical advances to allow information to travel more quickly than
> the paperwork associated with it: before the telegraph, the postal
> system was the fastest way to get an order for goods from place to
> place(1), and also the only commonly available alternative to
> messengers - but the order would, by custom, be accompanied by some
> kind of financial instrument which could either be verified on sight
> at the destination, or used as evidence of good intent in banking
> transactions.
>
> Electronic commerce - it's nothing new, by the way - created entire
> industries dedicated to managing the risks associated with providing
> goods and services without paper-based financial instruments
> changing hands. Codes, ciphers, and passwords - also nothing new -
> had to be improved and made easier to use so that average men could
> use them effectively to assure the identity and good intent of those
> whom they were dealing with. When there's no way to verify the bona
> fides of a person who initiates a commercial transaction - such as
> when a credit card number and expiration date is traded on a pirate
> bulletin board - then the added risks of fraud must be covered by
> insurance, or the added costs must be born by all law-abiding users.
>
> The information superhighway carries crooks and crazies at the same
> speed as civilians, and now - at least in Europe - society is
> putting on the brakes.
Open charge accounts existed far back in history for vendors and
buyers who knew each other or could vouch for the transaction in some
other way - that's what Dun & Bradstreet started out doing for
commercial firms.
The "financial instrument" that you mentioned was probably an Order
Draft, which was sent to the recipient's bank with bank as the drawee,
and the bank would release the order (a negotiable instrument subject
to a written order) when the bank got their money and gave the bill of
lading or other shipping document denoting ownership to the recipient
so he could get his goods from the carrier or shipping company so they
would release the goods to him. The bank then sent the money it
collected to the originating bank for the benefit ot the shipper.
In the USA, and I believe in Australia, too, express companies came
into existence in newly-developed places, using stagecoaches or other
vehicles drawn by horses where railroads had not yet penetrated. They
often would take shipments for considerable value consigned to some
distant (or nearby) point COD (collect-on delivery).
Later wire transfers were made by commercial telegrams from one bank
to another.
The "codes" you mentioned were used by many industries, some of whom
had voluminous books distributed to their members, covering about
every commercial possibility that might some up. Some of them were
for the purpose of hiding the content of messages, but a far greater
use was to save on telegraph or cable tolls, charged by the word.
Wes Leatherock
wesrock@aol.com
wleathus@yahoo.com
Date: Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:21:36 +0100
From: Steve Hayes <steve@red.honeylink.blue.co.uk>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Message-ID: <hafcog$2j8s$1@energise.enta.net>
John Levine wrote:
[snip]
>
> It's more directly related than that. European banks developed cards
> with embedded chips so they could be used offline in a reasonably
> secure way, since for a long time it wasn't practical to expect
> merchants across Europe to have a phone line they could semi-dedicate
> to a terminal with a modem. A card could have its withdrawal limit
> loaded into the chip at the bank, then each transaction decreases the
> limit in the chip so it knows when it's overdrawn. These days the
> terminals are all online and they use a sophisticated protocol that
> cryptographically signs the transaction to send it to the bank, which
> only the chip can do.
>
> For a while American Express put a chip in their US Blue cards, but
> they don't any more.
>
> R's,
> John
As I always understood it, the impetus for adding the chip was ballooning
fraud with stolen cards. It was never reasonable to expect a harried shop
assistant on something near minimum wage to closely compare a customer's
signature with the one on the card (which anyway was often stolen from the
post before the owner ever saw it), let alone know what to look for.
Chip and PIN has almost eliminated these frauds but unfortunately has
increased another one. Anyone who can capture the magstripe data and see the
owner inputting their PIN can send the data to a confederate in another
country where the ATMs don't read chip cards. They just write the magstripe
data to a blank card and pop to a nearby ATM.
Previously, the PIN could only be captured at an ATM but now there are
thousands of other places where this can happen.
Of course by controlling fraud, chip and PIN has made unattended terminals
such as pay-at-pump much more practical.
Some banks also issue hand-held devices like pocket calculators which you
slot the card into and enter the PIN for on-line banking transactions. I
have one of these for one account but have never had to use it. Presumably
it displays a one-time password or a response to a challenge.
France was first with a simple version of the technology. The chip is a
contact type using the same pattern as on a GSM SIM. The banks then got
together and agreed new international standards which were incompatible with
the French system so they had to replace their cards (the contact pattern is
still the same though). The new standards are very flexible and allow
multiple applications on one card (e.g. debit and cash cards plus perhaps
I.D., travel and supermarket loyalty functions) but I don't see this being
used in practice. For one thing, the security (phishing) implications would
scare the banks.
Recently, Barclays have done a lot of expensive advertising for a
contactless card but I don't know why. How many merchants are going to
install new terminals just for those?
--
Steve Hayes, South Wales, UK
----Remove colours from reply address----
Date: Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:27:41 +1100
From: David Clayton <dcstar@NOSPAM.myrealbox.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Message-ID: <pan.2009.10.06.23.27.36.674024@NOSPAM.myrealbox.com>
On Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:09:36 -0400, Steve Hayes wrote: .......
> France was first with a simple version of the technology. The chip
> is a contact type using the same pattern as on a GSM SIM. The banks
> then got together and agreed new international standards which were
> incompatible with the French system so they had to replace their
> cards (the contact pattern is still the same though). The new
> standards are very flexible and allow multiple applications on one
> card (e.g. debit and cash cards plus perhaps I.D., travel and
> supermarket loyalty functions) but I don't see this being used in
> practice. For one thing, the security (phishing) implications would
> scare the banks.
........
People should also be aware that these "chip" cards also have privacy
(rather, lack of it) concerns for the individual card users. AFAIK
they can store data about transactions so when used in an off-line
mode the terminal can interrogate the card to determine if it should
approve the transaction without direct confirmation from an on-line
source (probably via algorithms on previous purchasing patterns, I
would say - at a guess).
Currently only your card issuer has the sum total of all of your
transactions, with individual transaction points only able to see
specific transactions that pass through their systems - now with this
data stored in a location accessible to ALL places that you use the
card (the actual chip on the card itself) and actually used in the
transaction process, who knows how much information individual
retailers/vendors can now collect about your card use at other places?
--
Regards, David.
David Clayton
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a
measure of how many questions you have.
Date: 6 Oct 2009 13:49:45 -0000
From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Message-ID: <20091006134945.60534.qmail@simone.iecc.com>
>Is the "chip" in question an RF chip like those embedded in some Chase
>ATM cards, or gasoline company "just wave it at the pump" credit cards?
>
>Or is it rather a little purpose-built computer-with-RAM-and-ROM, having
>six or eight metallic contacts like the contacts on a GSM SIM chip, such
>as were in use on certain older AmEx "Blue" cards?
The latter. The card must be phyiscally inserted into a reader to
activate the chip.
>And: Any US banks with plans for reissuing their cards in
>mag-strip-plus-chip (plus PIN) form?
Several US banks issue contactless cards, Mastercard Paypass and Visa
PayWave, which are logically but not electrically compatible with the
chip used in European cards. (The technology is known as EMV.) There
are also some contactless cards in Europe that also have the regular
chip. I see no bank in North America planning to issue chip cards,
but Maybe everyone will go contactless.
I have a contactless HSBC debit card, but I've never used it other
than as an ATM card.
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 15:16:07 +0000 (UTC)
From: ranck@vt.edu
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Message-ID: <hafmvn$gkf$2@solaris.cc.vt.edu>
tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net> wrote:
> Questions, if I may, please:
> Is the "chip" in question an RF chip like those embedded in some Chase
> ATM cards, or gasoline company "just wave it at the pump" credit cards?
No.
> Or is it rather a little purpose-built computer-with-RAM-and-ROM, having
> six or eight metallic contacts like the contacts on a GSM SIM chip, such
> as were in use on certain older AmEx "Blue" cards?
Yes. I lived in Paris for a little over a year in 1993-1994 and my
French bank issued Visa had a chip in it then. It was visible and
had the contact pads on the surface of the chip. This is not new
technology. It was well established in 1993 such that even a little
bistro in some remote small town would have a hand-held credit card
machine that would accept my pin and process the transaction off-line
and print a receipt right at the table. A US type card would not work
in those machines.
> And: Any US banks with plans for reissuing their cards in
> mag-strip-plus-chip (plus PIN) form?
No idea, but one would hope so. I never had any trouble using
my US bank's ATM card in most French (or German or Italian or British)
bank machines to get cash, and that still worked as of 2 years ago
when I went for a vacation. My US issued Visa worked fine at motels
or similar places where a telephone connected machine was in use.
Bill Ranck
Blacksburg, Va.
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 14:45:47 -0500
From: John Mayson <john@mayson.us>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Message-ID: <6645152a0910061245t2184f0b9wc3304fbadc48bb78@mail.gmail.com>
On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 10:16 AM, <ranck@vt.edu> wrote:
> Yes. I lived in Paris for a little over a year in 1993-1994 and my
> French bank issued Visa had a chip in it then. It was visible and
> had the contact pads on the surface of the chip. This is not new
> technology. It was well established in 1993 such that even a little
> bistro in some remote small town would have a hand-held credit card
> machine that would accept my pin and process the transaction
> off-line and print a receipt right at the table. A US type card
> would not wo rk in those machines.
I'm really not one who generally criticizes his own country and I
enjoy a heaping plate of "freedom fries" as much as the next guy. But
sometimes I wonder why we're so technologically backward.
When Linus Torvalds first moved to the United States he commented on
how shocked he was to learn how backwards our banking system was. I
forget the exact details, but if I recall correctly consumers hardly
used checks in Finland even back then. Everything from bill pay to
statements were electronic.
Around 1990 or so I was in rural, eastern Tennessee. I stopped for
gas. They didn't have pay at the pump, so I went into the store. It
was a national chain and I had a credit card issued by this chain. I
handed him my card and he wasn't sure what to do with it. He had what
appeared to be a mechanical cash register, nothing he could use to run
the card. He pulled the shoe box sized apparatus to make a carbon of
my credit card, but had to pull out the manual to figure out how to
use it. I hadn't seen one of these devices in many years. Even
though I've never worked in a retail location that took credit cards,
I knew how to adjust the levers to set the price, where to place the
card, and how to slide the roller over it all. So I did it all for
him. I could've ripped him off by setting the wrong price, but I
didn't.
In 1997 I was near Valdosta, Georgia at another national chain. I
went in to pay. She asked how much I had pumped. I sarcastically
thought, didn't say, "Why not look it up on your fancy adding
machine?". Their system was to use binoculars to read the pump.
Maybe because I'm a telecom and computer geek I have unreasonable
expectations for our nation's technological advancement. But when I
hear stories like those from Bill R. I think it's not just me.
John
--
John Mayson <john@mayson.us>
Austin, Texas, USA
***** Moderator's Note *****
My wife was vacuuming the rug when I came in tonight, and swearing at
the machine because it wasn't doing a good job. I reached over and
switched the vacuum line from "hose" to "floor", and after that it
worked OK.
No, you're not alone.
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 12:08:33 -0400
From: T <kd1s.nospam@cox.nospam.net>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Message-ID: <MPG.2535358dd21fc3f989ba1@news.eternal-september.org>
In article <op.u1cy9bndo63xbg@acer250.gateway.2wire.net>,
mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net says...
> Questions, if I may, please:
>
> Is the "chip" in question an RF chip like those embedded in some Chase
> ATM cards, or gasoline company "just wave it at the pump" credit cards?
>
> Or is it rather a little purpose-built computer-with-RAM-and-ROM, having
> six or eight metallic contacts like the contacts on a GSM SIM chip, such
> as were in use on certain older AmEx "Blue" cards?
It's the latter. In essence a SIM card.
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 07:30:19 -0700 (PDT)
From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Western Union's satellite loss
Message-ID: <0d406f76-95a2-4871-9bec-af35ea4dbd19@o21g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>
On Oct 6, 1:52 am, Bill Horne <b...@horneQRM.net> wrote:
First, many thanks for obtaining the information from Mr. Wades. Very
interesting!
> By 1972, when I was hired into toll, composite signalling was used only
> for supervision on tie lines between PBX's, at least in the Boston area,
> on tie lines run by N.E.T. I didn't even know that toll technicians were
> expected to know Morse code (I assume it was American Morse) for
> communicating between toll offices in earlier times. I never saw any
> Morse sounders or other instruments, so they'd been gone for a while by
> then.
I believe it was the No. 5 toll test board that had Morse keys on the
keyshelf as part of the testing tools. The Morse probably wasn't used
for many years although the No. 5 test board remained in service.
Perhaps in later years the Morse keys were removed.
> That's another thing that puzzles me: how could a railroad save money by
> replacing simple, reliable metallic control circuits with new equipment
> that's more complicated, more expensive, and which requires more expert
> installation and maintenance? How does that create savings?
I would suspect because the new equipment could do more things and do
them faster.
"CTC" is Centralized Traffic Control, whereby a dispatcher in a
_distant_ place has control over switch junctions over a long stretch
of railroad. This is more efficient than have an individual manned
tower at each switch point, but it was expensive. CTC sent out coded
signals directing a particular switch or signal to do something and
received back an acknowledgement that it was done. The pulse rate, by
today's standards, was rather slow and limited. A more modern system
would operate faster and provide more options, such as multiple levels
of permissable speed. It might be more reliable than open wire on
poles. Also, the old systems, though fail safe, were very labor
intensive, and many were old, dating from the 1940s or 1950s and worn
out.
> Not only the stock exchange: the commercial paper industry, the credit
> reporting industry, and the Federal Reserve System were all made
> necessary and possible by the telegraph. By allowing orders and credit
> to flow faster than the old paper-based financial instruments, the
> telegraph caused a revolution in the industrial way of life: many of the
> "recent" inventions we now take for granted, such as "instant" hotel
> reservations, easy access to credit from any point on the globe, and
> just-in-time inventory, were impossible before the telegraph and became
> common very quickly after it was introduced.
Oslin's book goes into detail over this. I believe it was in the
1960s when WU introduced its "900" stock ticker system to provide
faster throughput given the higher volume of trading on the stock
exchanges.
WU built numerous private line teleprinter networks for government,
large corporations, banks, and brokerage houses. In the 1960s it
hoped these networks would be its future. It also hoped to (or
actually did) install broadband and voice on these networks. This was
one area where WU competed head to head with AT&T. WU felt that FCC
decisions in that era favored AT&T over WU at WU's expense (per Oslin)
in "record message" (data) communications.
WU was also involved in "Computer I" policy debates which were to
define the boundary between common carrier and end user as applied to
computer communications. Back then the common carriers were worried
that computer owners would use their computers and private networks to
do message switching and transmission.
It's ironic because in communications today the concept of a tightly
regulated "common carrier" has far less significance than in those
days.
Although, with the big Bell System gone, who manages the national
communications network? What happens if a big physical chunk of it
becomes disabled or segments become overwhelmed with traffic and fail?
Thanks again for the background information.
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 20:50:49 EDT
From: Wesrock@aol.com
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Western Union's satellite loss
Message-ID: <ce8.60bc5abb.37fd3fe9@aol.com>
In a message dated 10/5/2009 1:44:52 PM Central Daylight Time,
hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com writes:
> Note that there was another company, Postal Telegraph, that had its
> own network. It wasn't as large as WU and was eventually merged
> into WU. (FWIW, when my father was a boy he worked as a messenger
> for Postal. I wish I had asked him more about it.)
Most of the railroads had historical connections with Western Union.
Very few of them had relationships with Postal-Telegraph, which put
Postal at a considerable disadvantage.
At the beginning of World War II, the goverment forced the merging of
W.U. and Postal [Telegraph].
However, Pacific Telegraph continued to operate (a service of Pacific
Bell), along with Canadian Pacific Telegraphs, which operated in Maine
and also some places in the border area north of Minnesota. Western
Union tariffs singled out these places and the rate was often the
combination of rates.
Most manned railroad stations were also W.U. branches, with the
operators getting a stipend or payment from W.U. for their work as
W.U. operators. This was cosidered normal by the railroad as well
and not as doing other work on company time.
Conductors on passenger trains would receive telegrams from passengers
on the train and give them to the operator at the next station to
send. They would also take messages the operator received for a
passenger on their train. A practice that was much more common before
the telephone became so dominant.
In small towns, the railroad operator would often be the only Western
Union office. In somewhat larger places, the railroad W.U. office
might be open longer hours.
Wes Leatherock
wesrock@aol.com
wleathus@yahoo.com
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 19:28:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: Joseph Singer <joeofseattle@yahoo.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad
Message-ID: <208384.54542.qm@web52711.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:13:49 -0400 tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net> wrote:
> Is the "chip" in question an RF chip like those embedded in some
> Chase ATM cards, or gasoline company "just wave it at the pump"
> credit cards?
>
> Or is it rather a little purpose-built computer-with-RAM-and-ROM,
> having six or eight metallic contacts like the contacts on a GSM SIM
> chip, such as were in use on certain older AmEx "Blue" cards?
The RFID in cards is not the same. It is like the AmEx cards or like
the stored value phone cards used abroad (and for a while in the US in
Nortel "Millennium" phones used first by US West/Qwest and by other
carriers often in airports.) It's "smart cards" similar but not the
same as SIM cards. They have "gold" contacts on one side. Smart
credit cards have their "data" business on the opposite side as mag
stripe cards.
Eventually I suppose those of us on the left side of the big pond will
get the technology as well.
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 20:36:46 EDT
From: Wesrock@aol.com
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: "Report charge" Long Distance
Message-ID: <cee.657d3526.37fd3c9e@aol.com>
In a message dated 10/5/2009 10:32:04 AM Central Daylight Time,
hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com writes:
> Previously on this newsgroup people described the common practice of
> making a person-to-person call to one's self so as to discretely
> send a message back home (eg "I arrived safely") without incurring a
> long distance charge.
The common method was make a collect call giving yourself as the
calling party, thus notifying the called party you had arrived at
wherever. The called party would then refuse the collect call.
Also various kinds of codes were worked out in advance and the name
given to the operator as the calling party was actually the code words
for the message the caller wished to convey. Again the called party
would refuse the call.
> Apparently back in the 1950s or earlier AT&T imposed a "report
> charge". If a person to person or collect call could not be
> completed, there was still a charge imposed for the effort.
The report was made and the calling party was given the report each
time the operator made an attempt, and the report charge applied.
> I think they gave 24 hours to complete the call. This was back when
> toll operators did a lot more work to put a call through, indeed,
> almost acting as a secretary to search out the desired party. Part
> of this was necessary since back then calls might not have been
> completed right away due to limited capacity.
"MX precedence" the originating operator would announce on a multi-switch
call to each operator on the line as she was advancing the call.
> It was common way back to place toll calls by name, "Get me John
> Jones in Los Angeles" and the toll operator would have to call DA
> first to get the number. The Bell System literature urged the
> public to call by number.
That's why with the adoption of DDD they made nationwide Directory
Assistance available as (area Code)+555-1212.
> People could also leave the long distance operator in advance a list
> of calls to be made at a certain time. (1949).
>
> Would anyone know when the "report charge" was discontinued?
>
> I also read of way back there was a messenger charge; where they'd
> send out a messenger.
The operator would first check for a "nearby" who might be willing to
go next door or across the street to get the called party to the
phone. If not, they would send out a messenger after first getting
the called party's agreement to pay the messenger charge.
> Anyone know of other discontinued long distance toll services?
Yes: "Collect-to-coin."
Wes Leatherock
wesrock@aol.com
wleathus@yahoo.com
Date: Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:41:43 -0700
From: AES <siegman@stanford.edu>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Does Google index audio files?
Message-ID: <siegman-873562.11414306102009@news.stanford.edu>
Google has POG ("Plain Old Google"). Google Video, Google Images, Google
Scholar, and numerous others. Is there a "Google Audio", or something
similar, that will index downloadable MP3 and other audio files?
I've just started looking into this, and not many such files seem to
appear in basic POG (note: I'm after things like seminar talks and
lectures, much more than music files).
[And apologies if this is not the right NG for this query, but it seems
telecom related, and I'm not sure where else to go.]
Date: Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:40:38 -0500
From: Jim Haynes <jhaynes@cavern.uark.edu>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Western Union's satellite loss
Message-ID: <slrnhcnaq5.4tr.jhaynes@localhost.localdomain>
Thanks for the Jim Wades article; he's an authority in the field.
It was along a stretch of Missouri-Pacific (now Union Pacific) where I
saw the railroad pole line on one side of the track and the W.U. pole
line on the other.
As has been mentioned, Postal Telegraph built along roads, and I
presume that is because it came a lot later historically, when the
public road system was a lot better developed than it had been in
1850.
George Oslin's book "The Story of Telecommunications" was mentioned,
and it is a must-read in spite of its faults. A complement to this
book is "The Telegraph" by Lewis Coe. I don't know if Coe was
associated with Postal but he seems to be telling much of the story
from a Postal point of view.
Western Union operated ground-return duplexed
time-division-multiplexed teleprinter circuits until about 1950, when
they switched over to frequency division multiplexing, otherwise known
as carrier. The changeover was painful, because their pole lines were
not designed for metallic circuits (meaning two-wire, no ground
return) as required by the carrier systems. They couldn't just start
with two wires that were on adjacent pins at one end of a pole line
and assume those two wires would stay on adjacent pins for the length
of the run. And two wires on adjacent pins were not necessarily of
the same wire gauge or material.
Postal may have been behind W.U. in its state of development because
of limited funds, but it was not lacking for good people. One example
was Gilbert Vernam, who invented the Vernam cipher when he was working
for AT&T back in the first world war period, then went to Postal and
then to W.U. when they acquired Postal. He was a prolific inventor in
the field of automatic switching. Another was Walter Marshall, who
was president of W.U. back when it was still a successful company.
***** Moderator's Note *****
You bring up an excellent point about the ground-return wire layouts,
and you remind me of something else which would have been a problem:
inter-pair capacitance.
On open-wire telephone lines, when there's more than one pair of wires
on the pole, each pair had to be periodically reversed to equalize the
capacitance between it and adjacent pairs. If this wasn't done, the
lines suffered from crosstalk, so (especially for carrier systems,
where managing noise is critical) W.U. would not only have had to
create pairs from individual wires, but they would have had to install
crossover arms on a subset of the poles, educate their field forces to
perform multiple transpositions (it got quite complicated, because
every lead had to be equalized to every other).
I wonder if Western Union retrofit their existing pole plant, or just
installed new poles for the carrier circuits. Come to think of it, how
did they deal with electrical noise from electrified train lines?
Bill Horne
Moderator
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