6 ms·

I loved the Bell Labs Technical Journal (then AT&T Technical Journal) for as long as it was freely available in the 90s. A lot of the content revolved around t

I loved the Bell Labs Technical Journal (then AT&T Technical Journal) for as long as it was freely available in the 90s. A lot of the content revolved around technologies like SS7 or the large AT&T ESS switches, which were not relevant to me. But there were always very interesting ideas in the papers which let me think a bit outside the box. I remember reports like "The AT&T Switching Evolution Challenge", "Software in Large", "Improving on the Best: Like a 1A, Only Better", "Components for Software Fault Tolerance and Rejuvenation", or scientific reports like " Studies of Large-Scale Earth Potentials Across Oceanic Distances". After more than thirty years, I still have many of them in a thick folder. Thanks to everyone who inspired me back then and gave me an peek into a different IT world!

WorldMaker 3y ago
Entirely a tangential aside, but related to SS7, so maybe a fun aside: I got nerd sniped by a Facebook meme joking on a Gen Z "text chat" caption to a "Gone with the Wind" still that said "tbh bae idgaf" in place of the infamous Clark Gable line and how incomprehensible that seemed and might be to past generations. All the individual pieces existed in 1940 when "Gone with the Wind" released to figure it out (TBH was already well established as an acronym, babe as a term of endearment was too though the bae form is a very recent twist, IDGAF was easily explainable/guessable as an acronym, especially to anyone familiar with military acronyms at the time and/or the quote in context). That lead to the idea of writing a short story about what if Bell Labs accidentally got that MMS message in 1940, which has lead to fun micro-research like some of the basics of SS7 (the true backwards compatibility point of no return for MMS) and how much Bell Labs might recognize SS7 from the 1940's era of basically "SS3.5", and how much any of it might look like AT&T technology to them if they were staring at printouts. I'm absolutely taking fictional liberties with it as the answer is probably that SS7 would be a massive stretch for 1940s tech even with IBM's involvement (which makes for a silly semi-cooperative antagonist of sorts in the story). UTF-8's ASCII compatibility (emoji are a running undecodable debate in the story), and Unix's epoch timestamps would probably feel familiar to AT&T/Bell Labs (even if they probably would not have guessed the epoch start date of 1970 from 1940). I even felt like giving IBM a small "win", for the sake of interesting fiction, in guessing that IBM might have helped design JPEG (they did, in the 1990s), though I'm currently assuming that JPEG would have been undecodable in 1940 (even the math for wavelet compression was decades away) and 40s IBM would probably be upset JPEG encodes small bits of ASCII and Unix epoch timestamps. (40s IBM in my story was also upset by "new phone who dis?" Our world really does kind of look like "What if AT&T did win at computers like their 50s/60s ads thought they might?" but for many of the wrong reasons and twists neither AT&T nor IBM would have expected.) It's been a fun, silly story to write (I start with AT&T Bell Labs/IBM combined spending a bunch of time decoding a "u up?") with the excuse to at least do some light dives into the crazy backwards compatibility stories of some of the technology we just sort of take for granted today.

WorldMaker 3y ago

Entirely a tangential aside, but related to SS7, so maybe a fun aside: I got nerd sniped by a Facebook meme joking on a Gen Z "text chat" caption to a "Gone with the Wind" still that said "tbh bae idgaf" in place of the infamous Clark Gable line and how incomprehensible that seemed and might be to past generations. All the individual pieces existed in 1940 when "Gone with the Wind" released to figure it out (TBH was already well established as an acronym, babe as a term of endearment was too though the bae form is a very recent twist, IDGAF was easily explainable/guessable as an acronym, especially to anyone familiar with military acronyms at the time and/or the quote in context). That lead to the idea of writing a short story about what if Bell Labs accidentally got that MMS message in 1940, which has lead to fun micro-research like some of the basics of SS7 (the true backwards compatibility point of no return for MMS) and how much Bell Labs might recognize SS7 from the 1940's era of basically "SS3.5", and how much any of it might look like AT&T technology to them if they were staring at printouts. I'm absolutely taking fictional liberties with it as the answer is probably that SS7 would be a massive stretch for 1940s tech even with IBM's involvement (which makes for a silly semi-cooperative antagonist of sorts in the story). UTF-8's ASCII compatibility (emoji are a running undecodable debate in the story), and Unix's epoch timestamps would probably feel familiar to AT&T/Bell Labs (even if they probably would not have guessed the epoch start date of 1970 from 1940). I even felt like giving IBM a small "win", for the sake of interesting fiction, in guessing that IBM might have helped design JPEG (they did, in the 1990s), though I'm currently assuming that JPEG would have been undecodable in 1940 (even the math for wavelet compression was decades away) and 40s IBM would probably be upset JPEG encodes small bits of ASCII and Unix epoch timestamps. (40s IBM in my story was also upset by "new phone who dis?" Our world really does kind of look like "What if AT&T did win at computers like their 50s/60s ads thought they might?" but for many of the wrong reasons and twists neither AT&T nor IBM would have expected.) It's been a fun, silly story to write (I start with AT&T Bell Labs/IBM combined spending a bunch of time decoding a "u up?") with the excuse to at least do some light dives into the crazy backwards compatibility stories of some of the technology we just sort of take for granted today.