Communications Computers Data communications over telegraph circuits 1946

Well I meant to limit it to the circa 1960 time frame, when there were computers being built specifically for data switching. Sure, today everything is microprocessor based.

I neglected to mention the Bell #1ESS-ADF, which was the #1ESS voice switch arranged for data communication applications. The Bell Labs history says they quit all development on it when they sold TWX to W.U., implying that the main use of it was TWX. Yet in the earlier articles about it it was clear that what they had in mind was using a single #1ESS computer to replace multiple punched-tape-based private line store-and-forward systems such as the 81-systems they had been leasing for corporate message handling. Of course by the time they sold TWX the private line store-and- forward systems had largely been obsoleted by online computer systems where the messages went person-to-machine and machine-to-person rather than person-to-person.

A sort of mystery here is that Teletype didn't try to do anything with computers for switching because of the 1956 AT&T consent decree which forbade the company to do any data processing. Yet the #1ESS-ADF seems to test the decree as much as anything Teletype might have done would have.

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jhhaynes at earthlink dot net