The Rotary Club will take immediate action on the Ellis ranch loop project. The Rotarians reached this decision at their weekly luncheon, held yesterday at the Albarado hotel.

The club's plan is not merely to give Albuquerque a good, short road to the Ellis ranch... They embrace the building of a seventy-mile scenic loop. ¹

Many Western cities are defined, in part, by their mountains. Those moving from town to town often comment on the disorientation, the disruption, caused by a change in the city's relation to the peaks. If you have ever lived in a place with the mountains on the west, and then a place with the mountains on the east, you will know what I mean. We get used to living in the shadows of mountains.

One of the appeals of mountains, perhaps the source of their mysticism, is inaccessibility. Despite their close proximity to Albuquerque, steep slopes and difficult terrain kept the Sandias a world apart from the city, even to this day. Yet we have always been driven to climb, to ascend to the summit.

Humans climb mountains not only as a matter of individual achievement, but also as a matter of infrastructure. Whether the inaccessibility of mountain peaks is a good thing or a bad thing depends on the observer; and even the most challenging mountain ascents are sometimes developed to the scale of an industrial tourism operation.

And somewhere, in between, are the Sandias. Not technically part of the Rocky Mountains but roughly aligned with them, the Sandias lack a clear peak. Instead, the range is an elongated ridge, making up the entire eastern boundary of the city of Albuquerque and extending some distance further north into the Sandia Pueblo. The highest point is at 10,679', relatively modest for the mountain states---but still one of the most prominent in New Mexico, moreso even than the higher-elevation Mt. Taylor and Wheeler Peak.

Few aspects of commercial telecommunications have quite the allure of the T-carrier. Well, to me, at least, but then I have very specific interests.

T-carrier has this odd, enduring influence on discussion of internet connections. I remember that for years, some video game installers (perhaps those using Gamespy?) used to ask what kind of internet service you had, with T1 as the "highest" option. The Steam Hardware Survey included T1 among the options for a long time. This was odd, in a lot of ways. It set T1 as sort of the "gold standard" in the minds of gamers, but residential internet service over T1 would have been very rare. Besides, even by the standards of the 2000s T1 service was actually pretty slow.

Still, T1 involved a healthy life as an important "common denominator" in internet connectivity. As a regulated telephone service, it was expensive, but available pretty much anywhere. It also provided a very high standard for reliability and latency, beyond many of the last-mile media we use today.

Telephone Carriers

We think of telephone calls as being carried over a pair of wires. In the early days of the telephone system, it wasn't all that far off to imagine a phone call as a single long circuit of two wires that extended all the way from your telephone to the phone you had called. This was the most naive and straightforward version of circuit switching: connections were established by creating a circuit.

The era of this extremely literal form of circuit switching did not last as long as you might think. First, we have to remember that two-wire telephone circuits don't actually work that well. Low install cost and convenience means that they are the norm between a telephone exchange and its local callers, but for long-distance carriage over the phone network, you get far better results by splitting the "talk" and "listen" sides into two separate pairs. This is called a four-wire telephone circuit, and while you will rarely see four-wire service at a customer's premises, almost all connectivity between telephone exchanges (and even in the internals of the telephone exchange itself) has been four-wire since the dawn of long-distance service.

An opening note: would you believe that I have been at this for five years, now? If I planned ahead better, I would have done this on the five-year anniversary, but I missed it. Computers Are Bad is now five years and four months old.

When I originally launched CAB, it was my second attempt at keeping up a blog. The first, which I had called 12 Bit Word, went nowhere and I stopped keeping it up. One of the reasons, I figured, is that I had put too much effort into it. CAB was a very low-effort affair, which was perhaps best exemplified by the website itself. It was monospace and 80 characters wide, a decision that I found funny (in a shitposty way) and generated constant complaints. To be fair, if you didn't like the font, it was "user error:" I only ever specified "monospace" and I can't be blamed that certain platforms default to Courier. But there were problems beyond the appearance; the tool that generated the website was extremely rough and made new features frustrating to implement.

Over the years, I have not invested much (or really any) effort in promoting CAB or even making it presentable. I figured my readership, interested in vintage computing, would probably put up with it anyway. That is at least partially true, and I am not going to put any more effort into promotion, but some things have changed. Over time I have broadened my topics quite a bit, and I now regularly write about things that I would have dropped as "off topic" three or four years ago. Similarly, my readership has broadened, and probably to a set of people that find 80 characters of monospace text less charming.

I think I've also changed my mind in some ways about what is "special" about CAB. One of the things that I really value about it, that I don't think comes across to readers well, is the extent to which it is what I call artisanal internet. It's like something you'd get at the farmer's market. What I mean by this is that CAB is a website generated by a static site generator that I wrote, and a newsletter sent by a mailing list system that I wrote, and you access them by connecting directly to a VM that I administer, on a VM cluster that I administer, on hardware that I own, in a rack that I lease in a data center in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico. This is a very old-fashioned way of doing things, now, and one of the ironies is that it is a very expensive way of doing things. It would be radically cheaper and easier to use wordpress.com, and it would probably go down less often and definitely go down for reasons that are my fault less often. But I figure people listen to me in part because I don't use wordpress.com, because I have weird and often impractical opinions about how to best contribute to internet culture.

I have an ongoing fascination with "interactive TV": a series of efforts, starting in the 1990s and continuing today, to drag the humble living room television into the world of the computer. One of the big appeals of interactive TV was adoption, the average household had a TV long before the average household had a computer. So, it seems like interactive TV services should have proliferated before personal computers, at least following the logic that many in the industry did at the time.

This wasn't untrue! In the UK, for example, Ceefax was a widespread success by the 1980s. In general, TV-based teletext systems were pretty common in Europe. In North America, they never had much of an impact---but not for lack of trying. In fact, there were multiple competing efforts at teletext in the US and Canada, and it may very well have been the sheer number of independent efforts that sunk the whole idea. But let's start at the beginning.

The BBC went live with Ceefax in 1974, the culmination of years of prototype development and test broadcasts over the BBC network. Ceefax was quickly joined by other teletext standards in Europe, and the concept enjoyed a high level of adoption. This must have caught the attention of many in the television industry on this side of the ocean, but it was Bonneville International that first bit ¹. Its premier holding, KSL-TV of Salt Lake City, has an influence larger than its name suggests: KSL was carried by an extensive repeater network and reached a large portion of the population throughout the Mountain States. Because of the wide reach of KSL and the even wider reach of the religion that relied on Bonneville for communications, Bonneville was also an early innovator in satellite distribution of television and data. These were ingredients that made for a promising teletext network, one that could quickly reach a large audience and expand to broader television networks through satellite distribution.

One of the most significant single advancements in telecommunications technology was the development of microwave radio. Essentially an evolution of radar, the middle of the Second World War saw the first practical microwave telephone system. By the time Japan surrendered, AT&T had largely abandoned their plan to build an extensive nationwide network of coaxial telephone cables. Microwave relay offered greater capacity at a lower cost. When Japan and the US signed their peace treaty in 1951, it was broadcast from coast to coast over what AT&T called the "skyway": the first transcontinental telephone lead made up entirely of radio waves. The fact that live television coverage could be sent over the microwave system demonstrated its core advantage. The bandwidth of microwave links, their capacity, was truly enormous. Within the decade, a single microwave antenna could handle over 1,000 simultaneous calls.

Microwave's great capacity, its chief advantage, comes from the high frequencies and large bandwidths involved. The design of microwave-frequency radio electronics was an engineering challenge that was aggressively attacked during the war because microwave frequency's short wavelengths made them especially suitable for radar. The cavity magnetron, one of the first practical microwave transmitters, was an invention of such import that it was the UK's key contribution to a technical partnership that lead to the UK's access to US nuclear weapons research. Unlike the "peaceful atom," though, the "peaceful microwave" spread fast after the war. By the end of the 1950s, most long-distance telephone calls were carried over microwave. While coaxial long-distance carriers such as L-carrier saw continued use in especially congested areas, the supremacy of microwave for telephone communications would not fall until adoption of fiber optics in the 1980s.