Smell-o-vision
I’m working with a vendor setting up my new phone system. Today, they were laying out 2000 feet worth of 4-conductor silver-satin cable and terminating the ends. The smell of the cabling, combined with server room dust, white grease and the odd smell that Northern Telecom hardware has took me back to 1995 when I worked on big phone systems full-time. This was back when phones were king - the internet was just taking off; voice and fax were the primary way of contacting someone. My job was very high-visibility - cost-savings could be huge, since long distance service cost an arm and a leg, and toll fraud was a serious ongoing concern. Every monday morning, you could come in to find someone had hacked your system and routed thousands of dollars worth of calls through it![1].
Phone systems were rock-solid; I seem to recall 30 day uptimes being good for an NT 4 server, 90-120 days for Netware servers. Phone systems stayed up 24/7 for years, and the bigger systems had dual CPU, dual memory, and dual storage - you could upgrade the OS on one side, then switch to the second side and upgrade the second side without “dropping the switch”.[2]
Paging was king back then, too - voicemail systems could page you when you received a message, making it very easy to stay connected wherever you were. I got my first alpha pager about that time, and the paging companies started rolling out the Flex protocol, making pagers longer-lasting and making messages more useful.
Now, we have email, smartphones with internet access, Blackberry units, wireless PDAs, all hundreds of dollars more than pagers in startup costs, and similarly inflated monthly costs.
I liked the old days when I could carry a pager and a pocketful of change and stay in contact. With the “advent”[3] of cell phones, pay phones are being ripped out, and the phones that remain are 50 cents (!) per call.
I’m carrying a 2-way pager for work now, and I’m liking it. I can forward important mail to it, receive automated alerts, and people can page me. I don’t have to worry about recharging batteries or having to take a call without being prepared. I don’t have to be interrupted unless I want to be, and I can send short emails to people. Through the wonder of email gateways, most of the “meta-information” people get through portals can be gotten through email - weather, driving directions, stock quotes, and so on.
Paging has suffered because of the “propulgation”[4] of cell phones as well. Motorola got out of the paging business and is licensing their state-of-the-art-circa-1990 pager designs to smaller Pacific rim companies. Many of the paging carriers have merged, Weblink Wireless came out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was purchased, and some of the smaller carriers are dropping out of the business. Palm dropped their Palm.net platform, which used the paging networks. It’s a shame, because the paging networks are mature, dependable networks. Pagers are inexpensive and unobtrusive, monthly nationwide plans are a fraction of the price of cellular phone plans, and for most office applications, there’s always a phone to use *somewhere* - why carry a phone with you between 8 and 5 when you have an office phone at your desk?
Surprisingly, there have been some advances both on the network and pager side. The 2.7 Reflex protocol allows for better coverage, and Percomm released the e80, an old-school Blackberry sized unit with desktop transfer capability and some PIM functionality. Sadly, Percomm appears to have gone out of business. Someone else will most likely take over manufacturing, however.
I see lots of products that look like intriguing vaporware. I bet they’ll all make it to market, just not in the US. Shame.
The other smell that took me back today was walking past a photolab. A large exhaust fan was blowing the smell of film chemistry out of the lab. That’s a nostalgia trip for another blog entry, though…
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[1] …Which happened, a month and a half after I left the company. Not on my watch, luckily!
[2] “Dropping the switch” was a universal term for crashing the phone system. Way back when, phone systems were electromechanical switching systems, not specialized computer systems.
[3] I’ll remove the sarcastic finger quotes when any cell phone vendor can manage to get service at my house. I’m in one of the largest cities in the bay area, for pete’s sake, and none of the providers can manage to provide decent service - except AT&T Wireless’ TDMA network, and it’s going away as part of the Cingular merger!
[4] Die hard “West Wing” fans will get this one.
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Originally posted on poindexter, WHO?. Please post any comments there.