Data communications over telegraph circuits 1898

Remember that through the 1960s and into the 1970s there was an awful lot of computer time sharing being done with the Teletype Model 33 as the terminal. Of course time sharing is not typical of the real business world, but you could get a lot of business done with similar equipment. I remember there was some demand in the 60s for the ability to connect a computer to the TWX switched network, simply because TWX was cheaper than DataPhone. DataPhone allowed voice or data, so calls were charged at the voice rate. The issue became moot as the cost of voice calls went down.

I suspect neither company realized at the time just how far TWX was past its peak. At the time cheap FAX machines and Carterfone were still out in the future.

It took a while for the AT&T companies to get their data marketing act together. Things were changing very rapidly with voice-versus-data and there were a lot of people whose main expertise was in voice. We at Teletype found that some of the Bell operating companies were much more data savvy than others.

That's a good question. We know they had some effective sales effort, because they kept the Air Force as a customer for a long time, and they had the GSA and also some large companies like G.E. and Sylvania with their private wire message systems.

I wonder if they broke even or took a bath with Plan 55 - it had a rather short service life and I don't know whether the Air Force paid enough up front to pay for all that equipment that suddenly depreciated. And then with AUTODIN they were in the computer switching business. Computers were notoriously overpriced and became obsolete quickly; so I wonder if they were protected against that.

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jhhaynes at earthlink dot net