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I've heard Douglas Comer talk about how he used to get ribbed by the Bell Labs guys about "when are you going to come work on The Network, instead of that 'inte
by LukeShu 4y ago
I've heard Douglas Comer talk about how he used to get ribbed by the Bell Labs guys about "when are you going to come work on The Network, instead of that 'internetwork' toy?" There definitely was a cultural divide between the two groups, at least in the early days.
That said, I'd believe it if someone told me that that people kept talking about "bellheads vs netheads" divide long after the divide stopped actually existing.
- aidenn0 4y agoComer taught at my school and I interned at a company making hardware to locate in RBOCs back when local loop unbundling was a thing and there definitely was a divide. The general thought of bellheads was that voip was much lower audio quality and that nobody wanted to have to reboot their phone. Both are true, but people got used to lower quality with mobile phones, and it's not clear that they ever wanted to pay a premium for reliable voice quality, when they can get "probably good enough" for substantially cheaper.
- aidenn0 4y agoI should also say that Comer had his own biases. He had an extremely dim view of ATM[1], but ATM is a great protocol if you want to keep POTS[2] latency low and still share the network with non POTS data. ATM was a good technical solution to the specific problem. Whether or not it was a problem worth solving is another question. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_Transfer_Mode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_Transfer_Mode 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service