Metroliner telephone article 4134

Absolutely! And X.25 was for commercial leased lines only. Nobody *ever* considered the idea that residential subscribers could possibly have a use for anything faster than a 212A modem...

Besides, networks didn't need to be faster that people can type...

In the digital switches, yes. (Though virtually nobody in telco management, or operations for that matter, understood that a digital switch *is* a computer.) But it was a *long* time before telcos (even AT&T) used computers in network management, and when they did very few systems were well implemented. Oddly enough AT&T's early efforts at computerizing network management were fairly good, and it wasn't until perhaps the late 1990's, when newer generations were (poorly) implemented, that they lost their lead in that area.

Exactly. The time line doesn't support his point. ISDN could have been implemented widely in the late 1980's. By that time AT&T had been released from the injunction, had tried and failed to market their own computers, and were buying NCR to combine the worst of both worlds...

In 1995 when AT&T came to Alaska (they purchased Alascom from Pacific Telecom Inc) I used to have great fun telling people that AT&T was no different than Alascom, and was *going* *down* *the* *tube* for exactly the same reasons. It would take longer because they had more resources to waste, hence augering into the ground would take awhile. Everyone thought I was crazy, but my response to the claim that it couldn't happen was "Do you remember Western Union?". It took ten more years, but AT&T and Western Union both exist today in name only...

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