Data communications over telegraph circuits 1919

Nope. AT&T knew how to use computing for their app, as they should. They had no folklore in place for the computer biz in general. Computer biz, ala Dennis, was a very teensy, tiny place in their org chart. It was never going to become a huge central part of their org chart. This is all part of how a company grows and all the trade-offs it made as it grew.

And that's all they knew. They did not know how to provide computing for customers that had no computing interests in comm other than connection vehicle.

Sigh! In the olden days, it was the small errors that were pesky. "Large" errors were hard and could be fixed. The small intermittent errors caused the equivalent of long, lingering rest.

I always suspected that this was the reason for our 2-year rumor about AT&T buying DEC. I figured that their upper management reviewed their business every two years, and decided to "do something" about getting into computing. Somebody would get the job. About six months later, he would determine that it would be extremely expensive with no guaranteed rate of return and the project would be stored into his back drawer. Two years later, after the usual promotions and turnover, the cycle would repeat. Note that this was my pure speculation based on little info and the timely patterns of the rumors.

BAH

BAH

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