2024-12-21 something over New Jersey

So we all know about twisted-pair ethernet, huh? I get a little frustrated with a lot of histories of the topic, like the recent ~~neil breen~~ serial port video, because they often fail to address some obvious questions about the origin of twisted-pair network cabling. Well, I will fail to answer these as well, because the reality is that these...

Histories of radio broadcasting often make a particular focus on the most powerful stations. For historic reasons, WBCT of Grand Rapids, Michigan broadcasts FM at 320¸000 watts. Many AM stations are licensed to operate at 50,000 watts, but this modern license limit represented a downgrade for some. WLW, of Cincinnati, once made 500,000. Less is...

At the very core of telephone history, there is the telephone operator. For a lot of people, the vague understanding that an operator used to be involved is the main thing they know about historic telephony. Of course, telephone historians, as a group, tend to be much more inclined towards machinery than people. This shows: websites with...

As an American, I often feel an intense jealousy of Ceefax, one of several commercially successful teletext services in the UK and Europe. "Teletext" is sometimes a confusing term because of its apparent relation to telecom-industry technologies like the teletypewriter and telegram, but it refers specifically to a "broadcast text" technology...

I have quipped before about "underground datacenters," and how they never succeed. During the late decades of the Cold War and even into the '00s, the military and (to a lesser extent) the telecommunications industry parted ways with a great number of underground facilities. Missile silos, command bunkers, and hardened telephone exchanges were...