And thanks for the LC … in my opinion, the fellow almost always offers an useful lyric or train of thought.

Betty Jo … (way back) in the day, when you had your cubicle next to Augment, did you by any chance get to know a guy named Jim Bair ?

I was thinking of those old times just the other day.
In the late 70′s I went to work for a packet switching data network company. We had an early message switch on an old Honeywell computer. Every Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, techies and operations folk came to work with their pillows and blankets so we could catch catnaps under our desks between the inevitable
multiple system crashes from the heavy florafax flower orders on the message switch.

By the early 80′s we got these great “silent 700′s”. They were little light weight portable (30 cps) terminals (still with heat sensitive printer paper) that were easy to take on the road. The kids sat on the living room floor playing “Caves” on the terminal, it took reems of paper to get anywhere in the game.

Our developers had constructed the network interfaces so we could do local packet acknowledgements and fool the terminals and the hosts into thinking there was no real propagation delay in the network. This was no small feat as the network expanded to Europe and Asia. 56 KB trunk lines were ‘new technology’ to ATT, and
the best long line connectivity we could get was 9.6 kbps, error correction protocols were serious business on those noisy lines. Still, the network traffic grew rapidly, we hosted the “Source”, the “Well”, car dealerships and freight companies began using electronic inventory control through the net. Timesharing applications on our PDP10 hosts were accessible from anywhere on the network. We offered early relational database applications with which we (or our customers) could quickly construct business apps, and used PUBS on the PDP10s for document creation.

I think around 1980 a little group (Augment) was purchased from SRI (Stanford Reasearch Institute). They had their cubbys next to mine. I remember them showing me the workgroup messaging, shared calendars, meeting software and prototype mice. Doug Engelbart was part of that group. Over at PARC (Xerox’s research center) others were creating pieces of the technologies that eventually found
their actualization in Apple pcs.

It was quite cool when HP came out with a reasonably priced desktop terminal with a CRT in addition to instead of paper.

The Network part of the company (which had, in the 70′s, been considered simply a vehicle to get customers to the time share business) became the tail that wagged the dog. Network interfaces propagated, to support 3270′s, X.25, X.75 gateways, various IBM and Digital hosts, Internet IMPs,we sold private and virtual networks.

We charged $20,000 for the 2 MEG Disk Drives needed on private nets. Can you imagine! $20K for 2 Megabytes of storage!

The arrival of Visicalc and the IBM PC made stark the writing on the wall for many timesharing services, as applications moved from the hosts to the desktop.

Isn’t it funny how nowadays, apps are moving right back into the networks and the hosts – all, I suppose, in order to meet the right price point for the wireless “personal digital assistant- telephone-camera-terminal- tv-calendar-walkman-gameboy-anythingelseyou mightdesire” thing they call a “cell fone”.

My goodness. Who’d a thunk.