by Ben Bova
“It’s just as important as brushing your teeth,” Dad said firmly.
If I didn’t do it for myself, he was going to do it for me.
“You wouldn’t want to bring billions of bacteria and viruses back home, would you?” he asked.
Our plane took off an hour and a half late. The holiday traffic was heavy.
“Dad, is New York open every year … just like it is now?”
He nodded. “Yes, all during the vacation months. A lot of the public health doctors think it’s very risky to keep a city open for more than two weeks out of the year, but the tourist industry has fought to keep New York going all summer. They shut it down right after Labor Day.”
As the plane circled the brown cloud that humped over the city, I made up my mind that I’d come back again next summer. Alone, maybe. That’d be great!
My last glimpse of the city was the big sign painted across what used to be the Bronx:
NEW YORK IS A SUMMER FESTIVAL OF FUN!
Telefuture
This a good-news, bad-news story.
After four years of editing Omni magazine, it was fun to be a free-lance writer and be asked to do a story for the magazine.
“What will the phones of the future be like?” the new editor asked me.
The answer is “Telefuture.”
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that when the article appeared in the magazine, it had been edited much more extensively than I liked. In particular, the editors had chopped the final lines into hash. I know that every writer screams that whatever the editor cuts “are the best lines in the piece.”
But in this case I think it’s quite true! Here is the original article, as I wrote it. If you have a copy of the February 1985 Omni, compare the two and let me know what you think.
It is growing.
Like a living, sentient creature it has spread its tendrils across the land and snaked them along the bottom of the sea. It has even probed upward into space, growing, learning, expanding, becoming more complex, more sophisticated with every passing year.
Like an extraterrestrial invader of superhuman powers, the Creature acquires human workers to serve it, to help it grow, to become more subtle, more pervasive, and so ubiquitous that we barely notice its presence among us. The Creature’s proclaimed desire is nothing less than to serve humankind. Its instruments have penetrated virtually every home in the United States, and every office of business and government in the world.
The “Creature” is, of course, the telephone system, that incredibly complex electronic infrastructure that links the people of the world in just the same way that the human nervous system links together the billions of individual cells in our bodies.
When the Creature was born, little more than a century ago, telephones were a curiosity, a luxury. Today they have evolved into a necessity that no one can do without. We proudly proclaim that our human civilization of today is international, global in scope. But it is the telephone system that holds our global civilization together, the Creature’s tendrils unite the human world. Without telephones, melons grown in California would never get to supermarkets in New York. Jet airliners would be grounded, or take off empty, without the passengers who book their reservations by phone. Clothes designed in Paris and manufactured in Hong Kong out of materials produced in New Zealand, Mississippi, and Manchester would never get to their retail markets in São Paulo, Pretoria, or Podunk without telephonic signals that cross the oceans and leap out to relay satellites hovering 22,300 miles above the equator.
Most human beings have no idea of how complex the Creature is. We see little more than the instrument that sits on the desk, by the bed, or hangs on the kitchen wall. But that is merely a fingertip, a nerve ending, compared to the Creature’s entire body. Beyond that visible, palpable instrument is the Creature’s vast, almost-alive nervous system, changing, evolving, humming with electrical signals, flickering with pulses of laser light, learning, growing. Its tendrils hide in our walls, snake out to the streets, run from pole to pole, tunnel beneath the pavement, leap across empty air on microwave links. Like nerve pathways, the Creature’s electrical circuits converge to form nodes called exchanges, where the messages they carry are routed with the speed of light to their destinations.
When the Creature first came into existence, it carried the babble of human voices over copper wires. Human work crews strung tens of thousands of miles of wire, across continents, through tunnels, along the abyssal beds of the oceans. Probably the richest deposit of copper in the world lies beneath the streets of Manhattan, tons upon tons of purified copper, like the bulging node of a giant nerve ganglion.
Within recent years, though, the Creature has become aware that another kind of voice is using its circuits with rapidly growing frequency. The digital chatter of computers is taking up more and more of the Creature’s time and capability. At first, it was merely the computers that served the Creature itself: the computers used by the telephone network to help route messages along the system. But increasingly, computers in homes and offices are speaking to one another over the phone links, threatening to overload the Creature’s capacity.
The answer to this is twofold: the Creature is itself becoming a digital entity, a mammoth interlinked computer the size of North America; and it is adding fiber optics lightguide circuits to its systems, nerve pathways made of glass rather than copper.
The Creature’s heart—no, really, its brain —resides in a complex of modernistic buildings in several locations spread over a twenty-five-mile radius of northern New Jersey: the AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories. Since 1925 the men and women of Bell Labs have faithfully served the Creature, working night and day to help it grow and learn. The transistor was invented here; radio astronomy began here; the basic research that led to the development of the maser and the laser was done here; fiber optics lightguides, which transmit pulses of laser light for many miles, is another BTL development.
The first city-to-city television broadcast, carrying President Herbert Hoover’s image from Washington to New York, was accomplished by Bell Labs. High-fidelity and stereo records were developed at Bell Labs. The movies learned to talk with Bell Labs’ Vitaphone system. The latest breakthrough made here is solitons: single pulses of light that may be able to glide through hundreds of miles of fiber optics cables without losing their strength. Seven Bell Labs scientists have received the Nobel prize.
Never far from the high-speed Jersey Expressway, Bell Labs centers in Holmdel, Murray Hill, Whippany, and Short Hills look rather more like the campuses of very posh universities than industrial research laboratories. The buildings are sleek and new; even the older ones have had their exteriors refaced in reddish brick and sweeping glass facades. The interiors tend to have dual personalities: the lobbies look as if they are sets in the latest Fellini film, while the actual laboratories are like labs everywhere —busy, crowded with people and equipment, metal desks topped with humming computer terminals.
Bell Labs is the one part of American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation that has been allowed to retain the name of Bell, even after AT&T divested itself of its operating telephone companies. It is here that the Creature’s future growth and evolution are being planned and developed. Some 25,000 men and women work here, supported by a budget of more than $2 billion per year.
Solomon J. Buchsbaum, executive vice-president of AT&T Bell Labs, sees the Creature’s future in terms of its usefulness to people. Today, he points out, the average American home contains a telephone, a television receiver, and a computer.
“The key question,” he says, “is what kind of integration, or synergy, between these various forms of communications services can we produce? None of them will be obliterated … but the telephone of tomorrow will be very different from the telephone of today.”
Buchsbaum sees computers and telephones merging into a new instrument, the telephone terminal. In essence, today’s telephone is evolving into a true computer
-communications device capable of linking not only human voices but much denser computer data and video signals as well. To handle the enormous growth in demand for the Creature’s time and capacity, the Creature itself is being changed. It is evolving, in Buchsbaum’s words, into “one giant interconnected computer.”
For more than two decades, computers have been taking over more and more of the Creature’s work load. Having human operators handle phone traffic was fine in the early days. But by the 1950s it became obvious that either the phone network would move toward automation or every human being in the United States would be needed to serve the Creature’s growing work load. Computers began to take over the tasks of the telephone operator, so much so that in 1983, when some 750,000 operators and repair personnel went on strike against AT&T for several weeks, the Creature was hardly affected at all.
Today, when you speak into a telephone, your voice is transformed into an electrical current that is carried to a telephone exchange, where the message is routed to your intended listener. The telephone converts the fluctuations in air pressure caused by your voice into fluctuations of the electric current, then converts the current back into audible sound at the receiving end of the transmission. This is called an analog system.
At more and more exchanges, though, the electrical signal is converted into digital bits so that it can be processed by the computers that handle the work there. Voice signals are carried at a rate of 64,000 bits (64 kilobits) per second over the Creature’s existing copper wires, while lightguide links can carry 90 million bits (90 megabits) per second, and have achieved 2 billion bits (2 gigabits) per second in laboratory tests.
The path of the Creature’s evolution is toward digitizing the entire system, from the phone instrument in your hand to the receiver on the other end of your conversation.
A digital system is powerful and flexible. It can handle voice, computer data, or video signals with equal ease. Its performance quality is superior because the digital signal is less likely to be distorted in transmission than a continuously varying electrical current. And digital systems can yield all these benefits at lower cost than the older analog systems, because the cost of the microchips that are the heart of all digital systems is constantly moving downward.
Bell Labs developed its own 256K memory chip, which is the heart of the digitization of the Creature. More than 80 percent of AT&T’s urban exchanges are now digital. The growth in long-distance links, the switching systems that transmit calls from one urban center to another, is slower: 10 percent now, growing to some 40 percent over the next ten years.
Digital systems can also use pulses of light in place of electrical signals. “Optical signal processing is the wave of the future,” says Ira Jacobs, director of Bell Labs’ Wideband Transmission Facilities Laboratory.
Hair-thin glass fibers can transmit laser light pulses, and light waves can carry tremendously more information than can electrical currents.
Today’s copper telephone cable, three inches wide, consists of 1,500 pairs of wires. It can carry 20,000 two-way voice signals. It needs repeaters to boost the signal every mile, and it costs thirty dollars per meter. Optical cables are half-inch-wide bundles of 144 fibers. They can carry 80,000 two-way signals today and will handle three times that amount in a few years, and need repeaters only every six to twenty miles. In a test in 1983, Bell Labs transmitted an optical signal through a one-hundred-mile length of lightguide fiber without a repeater to boost the signal: the world record for optical transmission. Optical fibers cost roughly twice as much as copper, meter for meter, but they carry four times the work load and will soon carry twelve times the load.
The light that optical fibers transmit is generated by ultrasmall semiconductor lasers, transistorlike devices that emit pulses of light. Their power output is only a few watts, but this is sufficient to carry thousands of conversations along lightguide cables.
The Creature is also acquiring more and more microwave links, where signals are beamed by ultrashort radio waves from one antenna to another. Neither copper nor optical fiber cables are needed, but microwave transmission is horizon-limited: the radio beams do not bend around the curve of the horizon, so antennas are needed every few miles, at least.
As the Creature’s central nervous system begins to flicker with laser pulses carrying digitized voice, computer, and video data, the part of the Creature that we see—the telephone itself—is evolving swiftly.
On Buchsbaum’s desk at Bell Labs, next to a symbolic quill pen, sits “the phone of the future”: EPIC, which stands for Everyone’s Planning and Information Communication system.
EPIC looks like a small computer terminal, which it is, in part. It has a display screen, a keyboard for typing out commands and messages, and a handset for talking and listening, together with a speakerphone feature if you don’t want to use the handset. It also includes a touch-screen feature: instead of typing commands on the keyboard, you can tell the terminal what you want it to do merely by touching the cues displayed on its screen.
It is a very smart telephone, an evolutionary step beyond the clever phones available today. Where they have a few chips built into them to remember a short list of often-called numbers, EPIC’s built-in computer gives it much more power. No need for phone books with EPIC; the terminal can store your entire personal phone list, and even query the Creature’s various information services for phone numbers anywhere in the country. Local telephone companies will not need to print phone directories: the telephone itself will find the numbers you want.
EPIC’s screen can show you the number of the phone that is calling you, so that you can decide if you want to take the call, ignore it, or have EPIC’s answering service record the caller’s message. If you are not at home, EPIC can refer your caller to the phone where you are. It can also be mated to sensors that will detect smoke, or fire, or burglars, and immediately contact the police or fire department. In service for more than two years at Bell Labs, EPIC also handles mail electronically. Phone your letters to other EPIC terminals across town or across the country. They will arrive with the speed of light, instead of the speed of the Postal Service.
You can pay your bills by phone, and EPIC will keep track of your checks. You can shop by phone. Ultimately you will be able to talk to EPIC and have the phone reply to you: the system will include voice recognition and response.
Telephone terminals are becoming clever enough to recognize human voices. Although it is very difficult to program a computer to understand every voice it hears (“We all talk differently,” Buchsbaum observes wryly, with the faintest hint of a Middle-European accent), a computer can be programmed to understand a few individual voices—the voices of the family that owns the telephone terminal, for example. Family members will be able to talk to their own phone, have it understand them and answer them vocally.
AT&T’s marketing plans for EPIC are still unclear. The hardware has been tested for more than two years at Bell Labs, but questions of manufacturing, pricing, and distribution have not yet been settled. Like all new capabilities, however, this flexible, smart telephone terminal is going to change our lives. The nine-to-five working day may well be the first casualty of the Creature’s new telephone-cum-computer.
Buchsbaum has found that Bell Labs employees who have terminals in their homes “plug them into our computers here at the laboratories and work all kinds of crazy hours … . Our computer centers are busy chugging away at three o’clock Sunday morning … . Communication is going to change travel patterns, working mores and modes, in a way that is very difficult to predict.”
Arthur C. Clarke, inventor of the communications satellite and author of science fiction classics such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, foresees the advent of a global communications network that transcends national boundaries and, more important, national politics.
“During the coming decade,” he believes, “more and more businessmen, well-heeled tourists, and virtually all newspersons will be carrying attach
é-casesized units that will permit direct two-way communications with their homes or offices, via the most convenient satellite. These will provide voice, telex, and video facilities … . As these units become cheaper, they will make travelers totally independent of national communications systems.” (Clarke’s italics.)
The Creature, according to Clarke, can help to unify the world. “It means the end of closed societies.” Nations that refuse to allow visitors to bring “such subversive machines across their borders” will face economic suicide, “because very soon they would get no tourists, and no businessmen offering foreign currency. They’d get only spies, who would have no trouble at all concealing the powerful new tools of their ancient trade.”
The attaché-case phone terminal is but an intermediate step toward the old science fiction dream of the wrist communicator: a telephone as small as a wristwatch, with enough computer power in it to do everything an EPIC-like phone terminal can do.
Rich Adleman, head of Bell Labs’ Transmission Network Architecture Department, says, “There’s no reason why we can’t make [a communicator] that small. But is there a reason to make it so small?” He points out that until phones become clever enough to respond to voice commands, the size of the human finger limits how small the device can be. And “you give up a little bit in sound quality” when you go to wristwatch-sized speakers.
But just as the Creature’s network of electronic linkages is going digital, the telephone at the nerve ends of the Creature’s system will become smaller, cheaper, and smarter. Within a decade the technology will bring out a wristwatch-sized communicator that will be a combination of telephone, computer, data service, and even a clock that can tell you the local time for any spot on Earth, as well as a calendar that can remind you of important dates such as birthdays, anniversaries, or when the next income-tax payment is due (no new technology is without its drawbacks).