John Linton .....things were so very different.
I read this article earlier this morning:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903596904576516552161014410.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_RIGHTTopCarousel_1
and while it certainly didn't bring 'tears to my eyes' it did instantly transport me back five decades to my early days in the nascent IT industry to when there were only a handful of 'computers' in Australia and I was one of the few people who could actually program one of those few - using machine absolute which required actually using binary code to set instructions directly in to the machine's registers via punching up paper tape via a hand punch from the coding sheets written in pencil (to allow for the frequent mistakes).
Those were amazing days and probably easily the most enjoyable of my business and personal life - everything was 'brand new' and the computer world was totally free of the wankers and con men that were to invade the industry once it became 'commoditised' and required no real skills. If any industry ever has it's "golden period" then the mid 1960s was that period for the computer industry when the IBM 1400 series was about to be replaced by the 360 series and Cobol and RPG made it possible for computers to be programmed so much faster than absolute that it may may been a different world - which was in fact what it was becoming.....the IBM PC was only a few years away which was to change the concept of computing and business forever.
As for communications services, it wasn't until Univac implemented ARTS for the Atlanta airport control towers in the mid 1960s that you could talk to a computer via a terminal (based on a typewriter not a VDU) in any sort of interactive way using a standard telephone line at 1200 baud (roughly equivalent to 1.2 kbps) and it wouldn't be until the late 1960s until you could use a VDU to 'talk' to your 360 computer. From the early 1970s transaction processing systems began to make major strides (in those days almost entirely based on the needs of air lines) and it really wan't until the the late 1970s that video terminals began to become common place in business environments. It would take the release of the first IBM PC in 1981 for computer screens on office desks to become commonplace and not until Bob Metcalfe founded 3COM in the mid 1970s that those individual PCs could talk to each other and larger computers and it wouldn't be until.....
.......Oops - back to 2011 and the realities of a commodity market where IBM sold its PC operation to the Chinese many years ago and Annette dropped a brochure next to me offering 'unlimited mobile' from a company called Amayasim for $39.00 a month/no contract (courtesy of a customer's suggestion).
Even that brief look back at a few of the things that have happened in IT/Communications over the past 50 years demonstrates the foolishness of basing any communications service on anything that is in production today. The average 'life' of any idea/concept/service in this industry is less than nine months and the 'life' of the infrastructure used to deliver any communications service has dropped from 100 years (copper telephony) through 15 years (fibre submarine cable) to something less than five years for the latest iteration of GSM speeds/functions to less than one year for the new 'must have' mobile handset and getting less as each year passes. It makes you realise just how difficult it is for any communications company to sustain any sort of growth or even ROI when so much thinking is needed just to work out what to do next month.
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