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computers are bad computers are bad a newsletter by j b crawford archive subscribe rss computers are bad is a newsletter on the history of the computer and communications industry and sometimes something else it will be thrown directly at your doorstep on a semi regular schedule to enlighten you as to why computers are that way i live in albuquerque new mexico and work as a devops consultant in the software industry i do my best to stay away from my areas of professional qualification though instead i write about things that are actually interesting think mid century telecommunications history legacies of the cold war and the rise and fall of the technology industry s stranger bit players you can read here on the information superhighway but to keep your neighborhood paperboy pedaling down that superhighway on a bicycle please subscribe this also contributes enormously to my personal self esteem there is an rss feed for those who really want it fax delivery available upon request last but not least consider supporting me on ko fi monthly supporters receive eyes only a special bonus edition that is lower effort and higher sass covering topics that don t quite make it to a full article from plesiochronous to synchronous 2026 10 12 up until the 1960s telephone calls were carried as analog signals there was a great deal of frequency division multiplexing onto open wire and sometimes coaxial cables but in the post war period buried multipair telephone cables began to dominate while the network was surprisingly functional long distance calls from coast to coast were still quite intelligible there were fundamental limitations to analog carriers the quality of the call would degrade with each step a problem that was much more acute for the sensitive digital connections that were already the apparent future of the telephone system these were digital signals modulated over the top of telephone lines the telephone system itself still handled them as analog calls just ones that required special care for quality during the second world war it became apparent that many of the long distance network s challenges could be greatly simplified by using digital signaling as the basis of the entire long distance system in 1943 bell labs contributed to the design of an early encrypted voice communications system called sigsaly unlike the voice scramblers and other analog techniques of the early phase of the war sigsaly was recognizably similar to modern encryption the voice data was quantized into numerical values so that digital arithmetic could be used to encode it in the quest to build a cryptosystem for voice bell labs incidentally built the first applied system for pcm digital voice transmission after the war it was an obvious next step to refine this technology and apply it to regular service this didn t necessarily mean direct digital service at least not at first most subscriber loops remain analog to the present day for the first years of the digital network even the exchanges themselves switched purely analog signals between offices though encoding the analog channels into digital ones solved problems from audio quality to microwave path overloading to flexibility in traffic routing digitization became a core part of at t s concept of a carrier just like frequency division multiplexing had in the 1920s that s the background to the 1962 introduction of t carrier the first digital carrier in the commercial telephone system there s more a new world airport and its baggage 2026 09 20 aviation came to denver mainly in the form of mail like much of the inland west the first airfields served a smattering of passenger flights both expensive and uncomfortable in the 1930s and a regular schedule of contract mail carriers postal service air mail contracts built many of the nation s major airlines and its major airports one of denver s simple airstrips denver municipal airport transformed from a mail stop to a busy airport when continental airlines moved its headquarters to denver 1937 and then again when a modern passenger terminal was completed in 1946 along the way it had been renamed for the mayor who oversaw much of its development stapleton the second world war and then the post war return brought both a boom in aviation generally and in denver specifically the city s population grew by almost 10 000 a year from 1940 to 1960 during the 60s stapleton gained an additional runway and a new terminal as the schedule grew from under forty departures a day to over one hundred when airline deregulation prompted a total restructuring of the industry both by consolidation and widespread adoption of a hub and spoke model denver s central location made it an obvious choice of hub united continental western and frontier airlines all made denver stapleton a busy node in their growing networks with growing traffic stapleton showed its age the passenger terminals were too small but moreover the field had become cramped the runways were too close to each other for more than one simultaneous approach during instrument conditions a bottleneck so severe that bad weather in denver would cause flight delays that cascaded nationwide the airfield at stapleton could not be expanded a combination of terrain adjacent land in private ownership and legal disputes with nearby residents and adams county where stapleton was located effectively precluded any runway additions or extensions by the 80s southwest airlines was rapidly expanding beyond its native texas but service to denver was blocked by a lack of available gates at stapleton there s more avalanche technology 2026 09 05 one of the downsides of having written here for six years now is that my messy ever growing text file of topics for future articles contains a bunch of ideas that have been there for about six years part of the problem is that i just have to scroll so far up to even see them now part of it is that some of them are on topics where i do not feel equipped to write a good formal treatment so let s consider this an easy breezy episode of computers are bad as i knock out one of those items one of these o g topics line three is avalanche technology i will admit that i am a little fuzzy on what this originally meant but i have a few good guesses first though let s just take a step back and talk a little bit about the practicalities of the avalanche for a lot of you avalanches are probably a pretty abstract issue for me as well i snowboard but i m not that good at it and the kind of mid tier ski area where you will find me tumbling down the hill ski santa fe towards totemoff s manages their slopes to avoid the potential for avalanche as much as possible this requires some expertise in avalanche risks and it s never quite perfect but it s pretty good snow that is regularly groomed by machines like pistenbullys will become coherently packed such that avalanches can t really propagate the bigger risk on groomed ski slopes generally comes from up above and here in new mexico our mountains are of such a height that we re usually starting down from the very top anyway still avalanches pose a real hazard the department of homeland security when it can be distracted from terrorizing well meaning migrants tells us that avalanches claim about 28 lives each year in the united states globally the number is much larger and avalanche fatalities seem to be generally more common in europe i m not sure if that reflects european weather geography or recreation habits more but it s the way things pan out and means that northern europe tends to be the center of avalanche technology as it is in alpine technology in general there s more the figure of the earth 2026 08 22 brigadier martin hotine is not quite the image of a decorated officer his name is styled with trailing acronyms that make it no surprise that there is an official portrait yet in that painting he appears disheveled his tie far off center in the collar of his jacket he leans off to one side not quite like he is sitting for a portrait but more like he was caught in the middle of something photos of the man are often similar he s distracted looking down at his desk or staring into space his mind seems to be elsewhere hotine had a lot to think about his duties in the first and second world wars had only been a distraction from the real work of his career the precise measurement of the whole british empire late in hotine s career he was honored not only by his own country as a commander of the order of the british empire but by the united states as well named an officer of the legion of merit most of his awards though reflected the technical nature of his work the founder s medal of the royal geographical society and shortly after his death in 1968 the gold medal of the united states department of commerce ribbons and medals though do not quite capture the breadth of hotine s work his greatest memorial is an artifact of his work squat concrete pillars surmounted by a triangular brass plate found atop mountains and hills throughout the united kingdom these trig points designed by hotine himself are the physical references of the retriangulation of great britain this effort spanning from 1935 to 1962 with the interruption of wwii revised an original triangulation initiated in the 18th century as the basis for british surveying through the course of this effort hotine developed methods that would revolutionize the field of geodesy his collaboration with mapmakers from the united states a continuation of his wartime surveying for the allied forces set the stage for one of geodesy s most ambitious projects a measurement taken across the atlantic ocean there s more telephones caught in between 2026 08 02 during the heyday of at t it was often said that the telephone system was the largest machine ever built the hello machine certainly was vast but whether or not you consider it to be a single machine raises challenging questions of definition the internet i think we can all agree is not a single machine but a system of interconnected ones the telephone network though felt a lot more like one device one policy one system universal service was once the slogan of at t a message that the telephone network is more than just a sum of parts the third of these principles universal service is a key point around which telecom policy pivots even today as the telephone system was at its apex universal service became its undoing we know the internet to be a network of independent devices in part because of the wide variety of ways that we access it computer networks almost to their origin have emphasized independent implementations of standardized interfaces computers as network nodes are interchangeable as a result much of the complexity must be pushed to the edge where end user systems are most able to adapt to the unique needs of well the end user the telephone system was much different few types of telephone instrument existed largely from a single manufacturer complexity was drawn into the center where telephone offices could house the huge machinery required by mid century automation all of it was for a very long time hard wired central office switches and customer telephones were designed and installed to suit each other this core difference between the flexibility of computer networks and the central caretakership of telephone networks was a core issue in the series of changes that rocked the telephone business in the early 1980s 1984 is the k t line of telecommunications the year the sea peoples came it is difficult to overstate the extent to which telephone technology the communications industry and the basic concept of what a telephone is changed between the 1970s and the 1980s this was not a single well planned carefully executed reform the way some accounts of divestiture can make it out to be in practice it was chaotic messy and often drawn out there s more 5 years of articles in the archive with love j b crawford me computer rip this communication is privileged and confidential support me on ko fi and receive eyes only a monthly or more special edition get social mastodon youtube bluesky bridge matrix chat room