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.

Carterfone ruling opens phone network to competition

@Mark Ollig


The 1968 Carterfone decision was an important event in telephone history, but it is often mistakenly associated with President Jimmy Carter.

It is actually named after Thomas F. Carter, an inventor from Texas, who invented a device which acoustically interfaces with a telephone called the Carterfone.

The FCC changed the AT&T Bell System’s phone company rules May 16, 1957, known as tariffs, in response to the 1956 Hush-A-Phone Corp. v. United States decision.

This decision allowed customers to use a small plastic Hush-A-Phone cup, invented by Harry C. Tuttle, to reduce noise and improve privacy on their telephones, provided it didn’t harm the network.

Following this case, the Bell System was required to permit such mechanical attachments.

However, AT&T’s rules still banned most other “foreign attachments,” especially electrical connections not provided by the company, including the Carterfone, from being used on the national telephone network.

In 1959, Thomas F. Carter invented the Carterfone, an acoustic coupler that allowed two-way radios to connect to the public telephone network without any electrical link to the Bell System.

The Carterfone’s base unit, about the size of a shoebox, connected by wire to a separate remote speaker used for monitoring and volume control.

A standard Bell telephone handset rested in the Carterfone cradle, its receiver and transmitter seated in paired rubber cups.

Inside the base were a small microphone, audio circuitry, and a voice-activated switch.

The FCC opinion later described this as a “voice control circuit” that keyed the radio transmitter when the telephone caller spoke.

In a typical setup, the mobile vehicle carried a standard two-way radio, and the base office had the matching base-station radio, a Bell telephone on a POTS line, and the Carterfone.

When a driver needed to reach someone on the telephone network, they first called the dispatcher over the mobile radio.

The dispatcher answered on the base-station radio, lifted the telephone handset, and placed it into the Carterfone’s rubber cups, and dialed the destination number.

On the telephone side, the caller’s voice traveled over the copper POTS line to the handset.

Sound from the handset’s receiver entered the Carterfone’s rubber cup, where the microphone and voice-activated circuit detected it and keyed the base-station radio transmitter.

This sent the audio out over the two-way radio channel to the driver.

The return audio followed the opposite path.

When the driver spoke into the vehicle’s radio microphone, the mobile radio carried the sound back to the base-station radio, which fed it through a cable to the Carterfone’s separate speaker.

That speaker directed the sound into the rubber cup at the telephone mouthpiece, allowing the distant party on the POTS line to hear the driver’s voice, still without any direct electrical connection to the Bell System.

The Carterfone used electrical connections only on the radio side, while the telephone side operated purely through sound.

This acoustical arrangement enabled two-way radios to be linked to the public telephone network without touching the Bell System’s wiring.

AT&T would not allow the Carterfone to connect to its network, calling it a foreign attachment under its rule that allowed the company to cut off service to any device not supplied by them.

As a result, AT&T could disconnect customers who used the Carterfone, even when it was providing vital service in remote areas.

Facing restrictions that threatened his business, Thomas F. Carter and Carter Electronics Corporation sued AT&T Nov. 29, 1965, in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

Carter argued in his antitrust suit that AT&T used its tariffs to control which devices could connect to the network.

The federal court then referred the tariff issue to the FCC for review.

In August 1966, the Fifth Circuit upheld that referral, and the FCC proceeded with a formal investigation.

Carter filed a complaint under the Communications Act Dec. 21, 1966, claiming the tariff restricted trade.

During hearings in 1967, AT&T said its tariff rule was needed for safety, but Carter and others argued it was anti-competitive.

The FCC determined June 26, 1968, that AT&T’s tariffs were unlawful, allowing customers to connect their own devices provided they did not harm the network.

The Minneapolis Tribune reported June 28, 1968, that the FCC voted six to zero to overturn the rule allowing phone companies to block customer attachments.

The ruling ended AT&T’s de facto equipment monopoly and opened the door to competition in the sale of telephones, modems, answering machines, and business telecommunication systems.

A Minneapolis Tribune story on March 11, 1969, reported that Data Communications Systems, Inc., of Columbia Heights had completed its acquisition of Carterfone Communications Corporation of Dallas, TX.

The Carterfone decision pushed back against AT&T’s control over customer equipment.

In response, the company updated its tariffs to require any customer-owned devices to connect through a Bell-owned Protective Connecting Arrangement (PCA) box.

This was a physical interface installed by the Bell Telephone Company between their wiring and the customer’s equipment, with every device wired through it.

Similar to the later network interface device (NID), the PCA marked the handoff point between customer and company, but unlike the NID, which gave customers direct access to their inside wiring, the PCA kept that wiring entirely under Bell’s control.

Because it sat at the handoff point and was off-limits to customers, it restricted their access to their own wiring and limited many of the benefits promised by the Carterfone ruling.

In 1975, the FCC established Part 68 rules in Title 47 of the Code of Federal Regulations for connecting customer-owned equipment to the telephone network.

These rules helped pave the way for the NID, which telephone companies increasingly installed on the outside of buildings after the 1984 breakup of the Bell System, as the handoff demarcation point between their wiring and the customer’s wiring.

These rules replaced the PCA requirement and defined “harm” as hazards to staff, damage to network equipment, billing issues, or degraded service.

The FCC set national standards and introduced a registration program, enabling phone companies to block harmful devices.

This change enabled connecting non-Bell devices, such as consumer telephones, answering machines, modems, and business phone systems, via standardized modular connectors known as registered jack (RJ) connectors.

Among these, RJ11 emerged as the standard modular jack used with single-line telephones.

Part 68 promoted a competitive market by allowing consumers to purchase phones and other equipment from various manufacturers, effectively ending the equipment monopoly held by AT&T and its manufacturing division, Western Electric.

Thomas F. Carter passed away Feb. 23, 1991, at 67.

Today, a Carterfone is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History as part of its telecommunications collection.

‘Secret Communication System’ truly ahead of its time

@Mark Ollig

Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr and American composer George Antheil filed a US patent application June 10, 1941, Serial No. 397,412, titled “Secret Communication System.”

Issued as US Patent No. 2,292,387 Aug. 11, 1942, during the height of World War II, their invention described a system designed to make radio communications difficult to discover or decipher.

On the patent, Lamarr was listed as Hedy Kiesler Markey, her legal name at the time, which blended her maiden surname with her married name.

They proposed a frequency-hopping system in which the transmitter and receiver switched in sync among as many as 88 preset frequencies.

This rapid, synchronized hopping, with both ends changing in the same order at the same time, kept their link in step and, in principle, would make the intended torpedo control signals much harder to jam or intercept.

The patent states, “This invention relates broadly to secret communication systems involving the use of carrier waves of different frequencies, and is especially useful in the remote control of dirigible craft, such as torpedoes.”

It continues, “An object of the invention is to provide a method of secret communication which is relatively simple and reliable in operation, but at the same time is difficult to discover or decipher.”

As a child in Vienna, Lamarr’s father taught her about machines, such as streetcars and printing presses, which sparked her technical interest in inventing and solving problems.

While still in her teens, Lamarr studied acting in Vienna and caught the attention of pioneering theater director Max Reinhardt, who helped launch her professional stage and film career.

In 1933, Lamarr married industrialist Fritz Mandl, attending his meetings with scientists and defense experts, where she gained knowledge about weapons and radio technology, including how jamming could disrupt radio connections.

In 1937, just before World War II erupted in Europe, she met Louis B. Mayer in London.

He was the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), a Hollywood studio based in Culver City, CA, known for its high-quality films and roster of major stars.

She accepted an MGM contract during the ocean voyage to the United States and then moved to Hollywood to begin her new career under the stage name Hedy Lamarr.

Hedy Lamarr starred in films like “Algiers” (1938), “Ziegfeld Girl” (1941), and “Samson and Delilah” (1949).

During her movie career, she became interested in a specific wartime issue: how to keep enemy forces from jamming the radio signals used to guide Allied radio-controlled torpedoes.

In 1940, while war raged in Europe and the United States had not yet entered the conflict, Lamarr met composer George Antheil at a Hollywood dinner party.

She was quoted as having discussed her discomfort with making money while Europe was in crisis.
Lamarr and Antheil’s later conversations turned to the use of radio control and jamming techniques, which led to a design for protecting radio-guided torpedoes from interference.

As World War II unfolded in Europe, they worked together on a frequency-hopping control method to counter Axis jamming of Allied radio-guided torpedoes.

Antheil, a pioneering composer, explored the idea of syncing several player pianos playing simultaneously via perforated paper rolls during his live performances.

His most famous work, Ballet Mécanique, was originally scored for 16 synchronized player pianos.

That work gave him a practical sense of timing, coordination, and expertise to control multiple machines simultaneously.

He drew on that experience when he helped Lamarr design the patent’s synchronization mechanism for the frequency-hopping system, using as many as 88 preset frequencies, matching the 88 keys on a piano keyboard.

Lamarr and Antheil developed a method to rapidly switch between preset radio frequencies, with only the sender and receiver aware of the pattern.

Their idea used matching perforated paper rolls in both the transmitter and receiver, each programmed with the same hopping sequence, a preset pattern of frequency changes, ensuring both sides remained in step as the radio frequency changed.

As the rolls moved forward together, the connection stayed in sync even as the carrier frequency changed.

This coordinated hopping pattern is often cited as an early analog example of what is now known as spread-spectrum signaling, a concept that later engineers adapted into electronic and digital forms.

The Navy rejected it in 1942 because the paper-roll synchronization mechanism was too cumbersome for a torpedo.

It is also clear to me that the vacuum-tube electronics of that era would have added unnecessary size and complexity to any practical version of their device meant for use inside a torpedo.

Lamarr and Antheil’s patent was granted during World War II, but it wasn’t until transistor technology emerged in the 1950s that their idea became practical for use in compact electronic devices.

In 1957, during the Cold War, as solid-state electronics progressed, engineers at Sylvania explored developing a version of Lamarr and Antheil’s patented system using solid-state transistors.

In the following years, as new technologies matured, the military began implementing spread-spectrum and frequency-hopping techniques.

The development of spread-spectrum and frequency-hopping technologies paved the way for Bluetooth, invented in 1994, which uses frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) in the 2.4 gigahertz band to reduce interference.

The Global Positioning System (GPS), which became fully operational in the mid-1990s, also uses direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) for improved signal reception.

The first Wi-Fi standard, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 specification, released in 1997, employed methods such as frequency hopping and DSSS.

In 1999, IEEE 802.11a introduced orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) in the 5 gigahertz band for faster data rates.

This evolution of wireless standards continues to this day.

As of this year, Wi-Fi 6 (using the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands) and Wi-Fi 6E (which adds the 6 GHz band) are commonly found in new routers, offering maximum theoretical speeds of approximately 9.6 Gbps.

Also, Wi-Fi 7 (IEEE 802.11be) is now available in high-end devices, offering multi-gigabit speeds with peak data rates of around 40 Gbps under optimal conditions.

Lamarr and Antheil’s collaboration played a key role in shaping the “truly ahead of its time” wireless technologies we rely on today.

George Johann Carl Antheil was born July 8, 1900, in Trenton, NJ, and died Feb. 12, 1959, in New York City, NY, at age 58.

Hedy Lamarr, born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler Nov. 9, 1914, in Vienna, Austria, died Jan. 19, 2000, in Casselberry, FL, at age 85.

AI helps retired telecom tech

@Mark Ollig

The other evening, I turned on my LG smart TV and opened the YouTube TV app to watch some live-streaming channels.

Lately, the video had been a bit blurry and choppy.

That night, it froze after about a minute, and all I saw was a spinning icon circle; it felt like seeing the Windows “blue screen of death.”

I could hear “Star Trek’s” Dr. Leonard McCoy saying, “The YouTube TV app is dead, Jim.”

As a retired telecom engineer, I used to resolve complex hardware and call routing problems involving multimillion-dollar digital and optical signaling network systems.

Before retirement, I diagnosed issues in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) switching environments.

But there I was, in my living room, staring at a frozen YouTube TV video stream.

My other smart TV apps, Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount+, all worked fine.

I also verified that the YouTube TV app played smoothly on my Hewlett-Packard laptop, my Google Assistant smart display, and my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

All devices were connected, including my smart TV, via Wi-Fi through a wireless local area network (WLAN) on my Verizon 5G Home Internet gateway, the router in my home.

Since I have written about artificial intelligence (AI), I asked ChatGPT-5 from OpenAI for assistance.

I typed out the problem, listed what I had tried, and uploaded photos from the LG manual, the smart TV model label, the LG remote, and the on-screen messages I was seeing.

ChatGPT identified a likely adaptive bitrate (ABR) representation switch issue in the YouTube TV app’s webOS media player.

LG’s webOS is a Linux-based operating system.

When the app tried to improve video quality on my smart TV, it likely switched to a higher-bitrate segment of the same codec at a keyframe, known as an Instantaneous Decoder Refresh (IDR) frame.

Most video frames store only changes from prior frames, but a keyframe contains the complete picture.

When the video player encounters an IDR keyframe during an adaptive-bitrate (ABR) switch, it can discard older data, reset the decoder, and start again from that point without visual glitches or interruptions.

At that moment, the TV’s video pipeline should clear any buffered video data and reset the decoder. It should then load the next segment and continue playing.

A recent update to webOS or the YouTube TV app may have caused the playback issue, as the app froze during an adaptive-bitrate (ABR) transition because the reset did not complete.

And yes, I had deleted and reinstalled the YouTube TV app and reset the smart TV, but this did not immediately resolve the problem.

After completing a clean reinstall and full power reset, the newly installed app replaced the previous install, which a background update likely left in a bad state.

Reinstalling cleared cached files and settings, and the power reset cleared the TV’s memory and video decoder.

With a clean start, the player pulled a fresh playlist, picked a stable bitrate, and the video resumed.

The channels on the YouTube TV app played smoothly again on my LG smart TV.

Video playback for the YouTube TV app has been stable at high definition (HD) 720p and 60 frames per second (fps).

The smart TV is now set to auto update, which lets webOS refresh the system software and individual apps automatically.

I did some research on the history of smart TVs, with a focus on LG and its operating system, webOS.

Released in 2008, Samsung’s Series 7 (PAVV Bordeaux 750) was among the earliest connected TVs.

In 2009, Samsung added Yahoo-powered Internet@TV widgets (news, weather, stock) on select models.

It was the forerunner to today’s smart TVs.

Samsung introduced its Yahoo-powered “Internet@TV” widgets in 2009 on select models, offering on-screen apps like weather, news, and videos.

Google introduced Google TV, a smart TV platform, in May 2010.

“We want to use the internet to change the television experience. We’re putting a browser in the TV to enable a whole bunch of things,” said Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology, in the Aug. 19, 2010, Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Sony introduced the first high-definition TVs (HDTVs) powered by Google TV in October 2010.

LG’s history began in 1947 with the founding of Lucky Chemical Industrial Corporation by Koo In-hwoi (1907 to 1969).

In 1958, 11 years after founding his first company, In-hwoi started GoldStar Co., Ltd., marking his entry into the electronics industry.

For many years, Lucky Chemical focused on chemicals, while GoldStar focused on electronics.

In 1983, the parent company officially adopted the name Lucky-Goldstar, bringing Lucky Chemical and GoldStar together under one brand, now known as LG.

In 2009, Palm developed webOS, a Linux-based operating system, in Sunnyvale, CA. Hewlett-Packard acquired Palm in 2010 for $1.2 billion.

LG’s early NetCast smart TVs gained popularity by 2009, and the LG Smart TV brand was officially launched at CES 2011.

In 2013, LG acquired webOS from Hewlett-Packard and integrated it into its TV platform in 2014.

LG’s main office is in the LG Twin Towers in Seoul, South Korea.

I’m writing this four days after the clean reinstall and power reset, and the YouTube TV app continues to run smoothly on my smart TV.

With a bit of help from AI, this retired telecom tech solved one more problem.