* Readers show strong grasp of telecom history
Many thanks to our readers who participated in our “20 years post-divesture” trivia quiz early this month. All participants demonstrated an excellent grasp of recent telecom history, and we suspect a lot of ex-AT&Ters made up the respondent pool.
It seems only fair to honor the folks who scored highest by answering both sets of trivia questions (you’ll recall that the 20-question quiz spanned two newsletters).
So imagine a drum roll. And the winners are:
* David Reuben of the Gartner Group took top honors by nailing 18 correct answers out of 20.
* Joe Holcomb (who we think works for AAA based on his e-mail address) scored a close second at 17.5.
* Peter Shelly (who might work for Household, a consumer lender, per his e-mail address) took third-place honors with a score of 15.
Note: We wish Paula Rhea from Verizon had answered the second batch of questions. She scored 100% on Part I!
For those of you still scrutinizing the tips of your tongues for some answers, here are the Part I responses (with a bit of occasional embellishment for your entertainment):
1) In 1980, the average per-minute price of a residential phone call was about 40 cents (calls were distance-sensitive then). Today, residential calls average about 8 cents per minute.
2) U.S. District Judge Harold H. Greene oversaw AT&T’s breakup, of course.
3) Judge Greene died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 76 in early 2000.
4) Reader Tom Rooney (affiliation unknown) pinpointed the same three large post-divestiture telecom user groups we were thinking of and accurately identified the one that is still active:
* The International Communications Association (ICA) closed its doors in early 2002.
* The New York-based Communications Managers Association (CMA) shut down in August 2003.
* The West Coast-centric Tele-Communications Association (TCA) remains active.
Note that some organizations that readers identified, such as TIA and CTIA, are vendor/manufacturer industry groups, not user groups.
For more on user groups, see Network World Associate Online News Editor Linda Leung’s article from last August, “User Group’s Demise is Sign of Times,” at https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0825cma.html .
5) Astonishingly, nearly all of you identified the 1968 sci-fi film that portrayed The Bell System intact long after 1984: “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Points for most humorous answer, however, go again to Tom Rooney, whose response was “Night of the Living Dead.”
A side note: In “2001,” the ship taken to outer space was a Pan Am aircraft and, of course, Pan Am is also defunct, meeting its demise in 1991. Director, producer, and scriptwriter Stanley Kubrick was certainly brilliant at making films, but a technology visionary he was not.
6) Many of you recalled that Charlie Brown was chairman of AT&T at the time of divestiture. But a whole lot of other answers came in, too – most often, Robert Allen. Allen held that post from 1988 to 1997, when he was replaced by C. Michael Armstrong, who served until 2002.
7) AT&T’s chairman today, of course is David Dorman. Dorman entered the picture following the merger of AT&T Broadband and Comcast in 2002.
8) The brand name of AT&T’s frame relay service in the 1990s – a great name, by the way – was “InterSpan.”
9) The key to identifying the technology expected to form the “new public phone network” was the time frame specified: starting in 1989. The answer is ISDN. We also accepted “SS7 signaling.” Other answers, such as ATM, might have held the same promise, but did so a little later.
10) What was the first VPN and what was it used for? Those who hail from the packet-switching world think that VPNs are recent phenomena. In fact, they first emerged in the mid-80s to support voice services. They allowed enterprises to carve “virtual private” bandwidth out of the PSTN for custom call plans and volume discounts.
The first VPN service was AT&T’s Software-Defined Network (SDN), introduced in 1985. MCI’s VNET (for “Virtual Private NETwork”) and Sprint’s Virtual Private Network (VPN) services quickly followed.
