A year in review: 2025

@Mark Ollig

As 2025 comes to an end, I’ve been looking back on the columns published over the past year.

They contain a mix of technological history and events, along with a few personal experiences.

“Tomorrow is Yesterday and Today is the Future” (Jan. 3) looked back to 1925 and the predictions made about life in 2025.

Some proved surprisingly accurate, while others fell short.

“The wireless ‘Aerial Telegraph’” (Jan. 10) described how Dr. Mahlon Loomis tried to harness atmospheric electricity in the 1860s to send wireless telegraph signals.

He demonstrated the idea with a kite‑and‑wire experiment between two Virginia mountaintops in the mid‑1860s, marking an early effort to transmit signals without telegraph wires.

“The first national radio broadcast of a presidential inauguration” (Jan. 24) described President Calvin Coolidge’s March 4, 1925, inauguration.

It was the first nationwide live radio broadcast, carried by more than 20 radio stations, including a WCCO hookup in Minneapolis.

For many, it was the first national political event they heard live.

“Birth of the telephone directory” (Feb. 21) traced how George Willard Coy’s New Haven exchange produced the first single‑page cardboard directory in 1878.

It listed about 50 subscribers without numbers, so callers relied on the operator to connect them.

In the 1948 Winsted Telephone Company directory, people were identified by party‑line codes instead of street addresses, like Winsted subscriber Glenard Gatz at “10, ring 18.”

“Captain Kirk’s communicator inspired Cooper’s vision” (April 4) explored how science fiction inspired the real-world creation of Martin Cooper’s first handheld cellular phone in 1973.

“Western Electric’s model 1317 magneto wall phone” (April 11) focused on earlier telephone technology, including iron wire and hand-cranked, battery-powered magneto wall phones.

“The Webb Looks Into the Universe” (May 9) explored the James Webb Space Telescope and its technology for producing deep-space images near the time of the Big Bang.

The James Webb Space Telescope, launched Dec. 25, 2021, moved into a looping “halo” orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 point, a stable spot in space about one million miles from Earth.

The articles “The Leich Dial System Kept the Town Talking,” part one (June 13) and part two (June 19), explored the Leich (pronounced “like”) telephone switching system used by the Winsted Telephone Company from 1960 to 1986.

The Leich was replaced Dec. 6, 1986, by the Digital Multiplex System-10 (DMS-10), an advanced digital call-processing switch employing pulse-code modulation and time-division multiplexing.

“Voices of Light Cross the Atlantic on Glass Strands” (July 3) recounted the story of installing the Trans-Atlantic Telephone-8 (TAT-8) fiber-optic submarine communications cable.

Laser technology was used for the first time Dec. 14, 1988, to transmit calls between the US and Europe through the TAT-8 fiber-optic cable.

“The mission to save Skylab” (July 11) showed how ingenuity and engineering judgment rescued America’s first space station after launch.

“Looking at Winsted’s early telephone network” (Aug. 14) revisited the town’s early communications system from the 1910s through the 1930s.

In the early 1910s, telephone poles lined Main Avenue West in Winsted, each holding several wooden crossarms.

These eight-foot crossarms were bolted and braced to the poles, with rows of glass insulators screwed onto wooden pins.

Galvanized iron wires, usually in parallel pairs, sat on the insulators.

In the early days of telephony, wooden magneto telephones transmitted voice audio using an earth-ground connection as the return path to complete the circuit.

They relied on two or three dry-cell batteries for powering the carbon transmitter (microphone) for audio transmission.

A hand-cranked magneto generator in the telephone was used to produce the 70 to 100 volts AC ringing current to signal an operator or other phones on the same line.

“A telephone office visit ‘ringing’ with nostalgia” (Aug. 21) described my personally meaningful return to the Winsted Telephone Company office after more than 30 years.

“A Local Telephone Company’s ‘Giant Leap’ into Fiber Optics” (Sept. 4) recounted how Winsted modernized its long-distance telephone network.

In 1988, Winsted Telephone Company replaced its copper toll cable with single-mode fiber-optic cable interfaced with an NEC RC-28D digital multiplexer using laser diodes for transmission.

“Nightly glow: from phone booths to smartphone screens” (Sept. 11) recalled Winsted payphones from 1950 to the late 1970s, including an Airlight outdoor phone booth on Main Street whose interior glowed at night.

“AI’s benefits, drawbacks, and safety concerns” (Sept. 25) discussed a Pew Research Center survey from Sept. 17.

Pew reported 76% of people felt it was extremely or very important to know if AI or a human had created the content they were reading, yet 53% admitted they were not confident in their ability to tell the difference.

“Lunar Orbiter 1: NASA’s first Moon survey mission” (Oct. 30) explained how NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1 helped map the Moon in 1966.

The mission mapped the Moon to help choose Apollo landing sites, and one standout image was the famous Earth photo taken from lunar orbit, digitally enhanced in 2008.

“AI helps retired telecom tech” (Nov. 13) described my experience turning to ChatGPT for assistance when my LG smart TV’s YouTube TV app failed.

The columns “Revisiting the ‘Mother of All Demos,’ part one” (Dec. 4) and “He Gave Us a Look at ‘Tomorrow’” (Dec. 11) explored Douglas Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” Dec. 9, 1968.

The event showcased his work at the Stanford Research Institute, where he demonstrated display screens, keyboards, a mouse, hyperlinking, and video conferencing.

Engelbart and his team developed real-time text editing and on-screen collaboration that helped shape modern word processing and teamwork tools.

In 1968, most computing ran on large mainframes.

Punch cards were the primary input method, and text-only display terminals were also used.

Output was often printed on wide-line printers that commonly produced 132 columns per page.

Today is my 52nd and final column of 2025.

Thank you for joining me on these weekly journeys.

Happy New Year, everyone.

A composite of photos from previous articles assembled

by Mark Ollig. All photos are archival or personal except

for the header banner and one CONAD illustration, which

are illustrative elements created using ChatGPT 5.2.

Photo composite by Mark Ollig.

The red phone that saved Christmas

@Mark Ollig

This Christmas, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) will once again track Santa Claus and his reindeer as they travel around the world.

First, a word about the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD), NORAD’s predecessor.

In 1955, it was based at Ent Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, CO.

CONAD coordinated the nation’s round-the-clock air defense against potential bomber threats during the Cold War, with its radar watching for Soviet bombers carrying nuclear bombs approaching over the North Pole.

Much of that radar data fed into the developing SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), the air defense system I wrote about in my March 28, 2024, column.

In 1955, the Soviet Union lacked the capability to launch nuclear missiles at the US.

However, the Soviet Union tested the R-7 Semyorka Aug. 21, 1957, their first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the continental United States.

But I digress.

CONAD’s job was to warn the US about possible Soviet bomber attacks so the Strategic Air Command could respond.

When an attack looked imminent, a top Pentagon official would call CONAD’s Combat Operations Center on the red hotline phone.

A Sears newspaper ad in the Dec. 24, 1955, Colorado Springs newspaper showed Santa saying, “Hey, Kiddies! Call me direct . . . Call me on my private phone, and I will talk to you personally any time, day or night,” and inviting children to “Call me direct on my Merry Xmas telephone at ME 2-6681.”

In 1955, rotary telephone dials in North America paired letters with numbers: two with ABC, three with DEF, four with GHI, five with JKL, six with MNO, seven with PRS, eight with TUV, and nine with WXY.

Zero was reserved for the operator, and the letters Q and Z did not appear on standard rotary dials.

Telephone exchanges used the first two letters of an exchange name to represent the first two digits of the local number.

This 2L-5N (two letters, five numbers) system, used across much of the US and Canada, converted those letters into the first two digits of a seven-digit local number.

In this case, M and E fell on the six and three keys.

As a result, “ME” mapped to 63, so ME 2-6681 was the same as dialing 632-6681 in Colorado Springs. At the time, Colorado Springs was in area code 303 – today it is 719.

The Santa telephone number in the Sears ad was off by a single digit, so it didn’t connect to the store’s Santa line.

Instead, it reached an unlisted line at CONAD’s command center, the red desk hotline reserved for urgent military calls.

That phone began to ring Dec. 24, 1955.

Colonel Harry W. Shoup, the operations director at CONAD, heard the red hotline phone ringing and assumed the call was from a high-ranking military officer.

He promptly lifted the receiver and answered smartly, “Colonel Shoup.”

There was no reply.

“Yes, sir, this is Colonel Shoup,” he said.

But there was only silence on the other end.

“Sir, can you read me?” Colonel Shoup asked.

He then heard what sounded like a young girl’s voice: “Is this Santa?”

The colonel paused, taken aback.

Thinking it was a prank, Col. Shoup asked, “Would you repeat that?”

“Is this Santa Claus?” asked the young girl.

Col. Shoup looked around the room and said, “Somebody’s playing a joke on me, and this isn’t funny!”

The staff at the command center were confused and did not know if the call was real or a prank.

Then someone explained to Col. Shoup that the caller was not a prankster, but a child who had dialed the Santa number from a Sears ad that had accidentally printed the CONAD hotline.

Col. Shoup, a father of four, paused, then cheerfully spoke to the little girl as Santa: “Have you been good this year?”

The girl’s mood lifted, and she excitedly shared what presents she hoped to get.

Col. Shoup then spoke with her mother and mentioned the gifts her daughter had asked for.

The red hotline phone kept ringing as more children called in, and Col. Shoup instructed his team to play Santa’s helpers whenever a young caller was on the line.

For a short time, the CONAD hotline became Santa’s hotline, with staff using data from their ground-based long-range search radar network to give children updates on Santa’s location in the sky.

Yes, the red phone saved Christmas for these young children.

Colonel Shoup recognized a public relations opportunity after seeing a doodle of a sleigh on the tracking board.

He then instructed his public relations officer to issue an official press release through military public affairs channels.

This press release stated that “CONAD, Army, Navy, and Marine Air Forces will continue to track and guard Santa and his sleigh.”

The Minneapolis Morning Tribune released an AP story Dec. 24, 1955, from Colorado Springs, reporting that CONAD’s combat operations center was tracking Santa’s journey from the North Pole.

The report stated that early radar and ground observers had detected Santa traveling at 45 knots and an altitude of 35,000 feet, anticipating his arrival in the US later that night for his annual visit.

The US and Canada established NORAD on May 12, 1958, replacing CONAD.

NORAD tracks Santa’s flight using radar, infrared satellites, and jet fighters, all coordinated through its command centers.

Since 1955, NORAD has tracked Santa’s journey, and this year marks the 70th anniversary of the tradition.

The official NORAD Tracks Santa website (www.noradsanta.org) features games, Santa’s Village, holiday music, and follows Santa’s travels on Dec. 24.

For updates on that day, call 1-877-HI-NORAD (1-877-446-6723).

Colonel Harry Shoup, known as the Santa Colonel, supported NORAD’s mission to bring Christmas joy to children around the world.

Harry Wesley Shoup died March 14, 2009, at 91, and is buried at Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver, CO.

Wishing a Merry Christmas to all my readers and to the folks who answered the red phone back on Dec. 24, 1955.

Image generated by Perplexity AI from the column's content. "Dec. 24, 1955: A little girl calling the Sears 

Santa phone number and reaching the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) hotline, answered

by Col. Shoup." Perplexity AI created both images, which I combined and separated with a black vertical bar. 

Per Perplexity AI: "Photo illustration: AI-generated images created with Perplexity AI and combined by the author."

He gave us a look at ‘tomorrow’

@Mark Ollig

In 1968, the most widely used mainframe computers in corporate data-processing centers were IBM System/360 models.

The IBM System/360 Model 40 mainframe handled about 80,000 instructions per second or 0.08 million instructions per second (MIPS).

Today, a modern desktop or laptop central processing unit (CPU) can reach thousands, even tens of thousands of MIPS.

People interacted with 1960s mainframe computing systems using console typewriters or Teletype machines with a keyboard.

Many also typed on IBM’s 2260 display station featuring a cathode ray tube (CRT) screen and keyboard for interaction with the mainframe.

In the 1960s, a programmer entered each line of a computer program, such as a payroll run or an inventory report, into a keypunch machine.

The machine created holes in 80-column paper punch cards.

The completed stack of cards was then transported to the data center, where an operator loaded it into a card reader.

The machine processed the cards sequentially, feeding the program into the mainframe to execute the entire batch job.

It produced printed results, a process that often took several hours.

Human operators managed the computing system via front-panel switches, indicator lights, and console terminals.

Output data from the mainframe was printed on wide “fanfold” paper using printers such as the IBM 1403 or displayed on CRTs.

“Mother of All Demos,” Douglas Engelbart demonstrated advanced NLS (oN-Line System) features from his console terminal in a San Francisco auditorium Dec. 9, 1968, while engineer Bill Paxton worked at the same time from an SRI (Stanford Research Institute) console terminal in Menlo Park, CA.

Both terminals were connected in real time to an SDS (Scientific Data Systems) 940 mainframe running NLS, with Engelbart’s onstage terminal linked over a dedicated four-wire leased telephone circuit.

In the SRI lab, broadcast-style television cameras captured Paxton and his NLS screen.

The video was sent over two microwave links to the auditorium, where it was combined with the shared NLS display.

The final picture was projected on a large screen for the audience.

The demonstration Dec. 9, 1968, was one of the earliest public presentations of shared-screen, real-time collaboration between people in different locations using the same computer system.

In 1968, Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center at SRI had 17 staff members.

It received funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).

Support also came from the Rome Air Development Center at Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, NY.

SRI held the mouse patent, US Patent 3,541,541, filed in 1967 and granted in 1970, and collected licensing fees as the patent holder.

Engelbart and his colleagues later explained in interviews and oral histories that while they patented the mouse, they did not seek patents for their other groundbreaking interface ideas.

Features such as on-screen windows and hypertext linking were never patented.

This decision meant these innovations could be freely adopted.

Therefore, companies like Xerox, Apple, and IBM were able to integrate Engelbart’s concepts into their own graphical systems without restriction.

Engelbart’s lab at SRI was among the first places connected to the ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network.

At SRI, the Network Information Center (NIC) used Engelbart’s NLS tools to offer online directories and services for ARPANET users.

From 1972 to the late 1980s, Elizabeth Jocelyn Feinler (now 94) and her NIC team managed host name tables, handbooks, and early request for comments (RFC) documents.

In a 2009 oral history at the Computer History Museum, Feinler recalled, “In 1972, Engelbart asked me to take over [the NIC] as principal investigator . . . that’s when we really began providing service to the ARPANET.”

She helped manage the first domain names on the ARPA network, which later became today’s internet.

The Xerox Alto, an experimental workstation developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the early 1970s, was heavily influenced by Engelbart’s work at SRI.

PARC was the research lab founded by Xerox in 1970 in Palo Alto, CA.

Some of Engelbart’s key team members moved to PARC.

They brought many features from the 1968 “Mother of All Demos” to the Alto, such as the graphical user interface and the mouse.

The Xerox Alto, developed in 1973 at PARC, was one of the earliest computers with a graphical user interface featuring windows, icons, and a mouse, but it wasn’t sold to the public.

Its portrait-oriented screen, three-button mouse, and graphical user interface (GUI) enabled users to point and click rather than type commands.

Designed for Ethernet Local Area Networks (LANs) and laser printers, the Alto allowed sharing of files, email, and resources within Xerox offices.

About 1,500 to 2,000 Altos were manufactured for company and research use.

In 1978, during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, a Xerox Alto desktop computer with a graphical user interface and a mouse was installed in the Oval Office, but was removed in 1981 during the Reagan administration.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 and witnessed how people there used Alto computers with graphical user interfaces and a mouse.

Jobs later said he realized that someday all computers would work this way.

In April 1981, Xerox introduced the Xerox Star 8010, a public business computer workstation developed from its PARC research, complete with a graphical interface and a mouse.

Although it was the first commercial personal computer to offer graphical windows, icons, and mouse control, sales lagged due to its steep price of $16,595 (about $60,500 today).

In 1981, Apple and IBM offered systems with business configurations typically priced around $4,000, far less than the Xerox Star 8010, which was discontinued by 1985.

President Bill Clinton presented Douglas Engelbart with the National Medal of Technology Dec. 1, 2000, for creating the foundations of personal computing, including the mouse, hypertext, text editing, and shared-screen teleconferencing.

Douglas C. Engelbart died July 2, 2013, at age 88.

In 1968, he gave us all a look at tomorrow.

Revisiting the ‘Mother of All Demos,’ part one

@Mark Ollig

On your computer screen, there are various icons, program windows, and documents.

A small pointer, or cursor, moves fluidly as you operate a mouse or swipe your finger across the surface.

This familiar visual interface owes much to Douglas Carl Engelbart, a pioneering engineer born in Portland, OR, Jan. 30, 1925.

A Minnesota connection: his paternal grandfather, Louis Brainerd Engelbart, was born June 30, 1868, in New Ulm. He died Jan. 22, 1944, in Colfax, WA.

In 1942, Douglas Engelbart began studying electrical engineering at Oregon State College, but his studies were put on hold when he served in the US Navy during World War II as a radio and radar technician in the Philippines.

Upon returning from military service, he completed his BS in electrical engineering in 1948 at Oregon State College, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1957, he joined the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, CA, to explore how computers could enhance human thinking and problem-solving.

He established the Augmentation Research Center to develop concepts for the oN-Line System (NLS) computer program.

Starting in 1959, with support from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Engelbart began a research program at SRI to improve the management of digital information.

By the early 1960s, with support from the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), Engelbart and his team at SRI developed the networked, interactive oN-Line System (NLS), which some historians consider an important influence on the early internet.

The NLS was an experimental software environment running on a Scientific Data Systems (SDS) 940 time-sharing computer, providing a networked interactive system for multiple users.

NLS lets users operate networked display workstations using a typewriter-style QWERTY keyboard, mouse, hyperlinked text, and a chorded keyset (a small five-key device for entering commands by pressing key combinations).

In October 1962, Engelbart published a technical report titled “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

The report described using a screen to control a computer in real time, share linked documents, and collaborate with others over networked display workstations.

These ideas outlined much of what became modern personal computing, including interactive displays, shared workspaces, hypertext, on-screen windows, and online collaboration.

The report helped Engelbart secure added funding so his lab could build the hardware and software that became NLS.

NLS ran on a Scientific Data Systems (SDS) 940 time-sharing mainframe at SRI and connected to custom-built NLS display workstations over dedicated data lines and coaxial cabling that carried input from the keyboard, mouse, and chorded keyset and output to the screens.

The SDS 940 was a 24-bit time-sharing mainframe introduced in 1966 that used magnetic-core memory with up to 64,000 words.

It had its own display, keyboard, a chorded keyset with five narrow, piano-like keys for rapid commands (macros), and a small wooden pointing device that rolled on two wheels, one for horizontal and one for vertical motion.

The original mouse, officially titled “X-Y position indicator for a display system” in Engelbart’s US Patent 3,541,541 issued Nov. 17, 1970, was a small wooden block equipped with a cable and two metal wheels set at right angles.

This configuration allowed it to track horizontal and vertical movements across a flat surface.

The cord’s resemblance to a tail led users to call it a mouse, a name that stuck.

Douglas Engelbart and 17 researchers from the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute gave a public demonstration of their fully functional oN-Line System, or NLS, Dec. 9, 1968.

Running on an SDS 940 mainframe at SRI, NLS supported multiple users at separate display workstations and managed special display hardware for monitors and large screens used in the exhibition.

The demonstration took place during the three-day Fall Joint Computer Conference, hosted Dec. 9 to 11, 1968, in San Francisco, CA.

Engelbart’s session, “A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect,” was on the third floor of the Civic Auditorium, with about 1,000 attendees.

The Eidophor projector, an oil-film system used commercially since the 1940s, displayed Engelbart’s terminal on a 22-foot screen.

The projector used three-phase power, and basic models only projected in black and white.

I learned that NASA’s Mission Control in Houston, TX, used Eidophor projectors to display the flight and video data during the Apollo era.

Engelbart’s ergonomic console terminal and display workstation, set up on stage in San Francisco, connected to the SDS 940 computer at SRI in Menlo Park over a 40-mile full-duplex, four-wire leased telephone circuit.

We older telecom technicians called this a “nailed-up” connection, a dedicated circuit that stayed active all the time.

The leased circuit used a pair of custom-built 1,200-baud modems to carry Engelbart’s keyboard, chorded keyset, and mouse signals between the San Francisco Civic Auditorium and the SDS 940 in Menlo Park.

The leased circuit, provided by Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company, the local Bell operating company for Menlo Park in 1968, was carried over a twisted-pair copper cable.

Pacific Telephone & Telegraph’s main offices and switching infrastructure were based in San Francisco.

Two separate microwave links carried the live video between the SRI lab and the civic auditorium: one for the camera feed of Engelbart’s colleagues at SRI to appear in a window on the large screen, and the other to send the complete mixed video signal of the presentation to SRI for recording and monitoring.

Overhead video cameras on stage above Engelbart’s workstation captured close-up views of him and his workstation screen and controls.

The combined camera feed projected his real-time NLS session onto a 22-foot screen as he explained and demonstrated the system’s software and hardware features.

He demonstrated the computer mouse, hyperlinking and hypertext, real-time text editing, multiple on-screen windows, shared-screen collaboration, an early graphical user interface, and video conferencing.

I watched the demo and was impressed by how he used NLS to type, edit, and rearrange ordinary text on the screen, in what we now call word processing, and remember, this is 57 years ago.

Viewers could see him enter and revise “text words” in real time as he worked inside linked on-screen documents.

The audience saw live video feeds of Engelbart and a remote colleague collaborating and editing the same document simultaneously.

People would later refer to the demonstration as “The Mother of All Demos.”

The Dec. 9, 1968, presentation can be seen in three separate videos on the official Doug Engelbart Institute’s YouTube channel:

Reel No.1: https://bit.ly/4afpLHl.

Reel No.2: https://bit.ly/4p92onl.

Reel No.3: https://bit.ly/4oXQnB9.

Read next week’s Bits and Bytes for part two.