After Action Report of the First Crypto War

[jdb10987 at yahoo.com (jim bell)]

 From: Ryan Carboni <ryacko at gmail.com>

   
"The ISDN standard was first defined in 1988. "
Frequently, I see Statists assert that the Internet was built by the United States Federal Government. Â I shut them down with this argument:
Set the "wayback machine" to 1980 or so. Â Typically, modems available to consumers were 300 bps acoustic models. Â Could you build "The Internet" as we know it today with that? Â Absolutely not. Â Nor with 1200 bps modems, nor 2400 bps. Â 9600 bps, which I recall were available in the very late 1980's, would start, although full-motion video would require far more than this. Â 14,400 and 28,800 bps modems were an improvement. Â 
So, "The Internet" as we know it could not possibly have come into existence without the bandwidth provided by then-new high-speed modems. Â ISDN would have been very good (initially, it was claimed to be 64,000 bps in early discussion; more later) but by the time it was rolled out in some locations, it was not sufficiently better than then-available modems. Â Further, the phone companies expected to be paid relatively large fees for ISDN circuits, as opposed to regular voice channels which were "free" beyond the regular monthly cost. Â 
Thus, the vast majority of the credit for developing the Internet as we know it, as least before the high-speed dedicated detworks, was to the various companies that figured out how to shove 28,000 bps down a 3,000 Hz voice channel, digitized and companded with mu-law (or a-law) codecs at 8,000 samples per second.
           Jim Bell
   
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