by Peter Huber
Fragmentation is most visible in the computer industry itself. In 1974, when Intel introduced its 8080 microprocessor, the computer on a chip matched the power of the IBM 704, a mainframe introduced twenty years earlier. It was in this environment that the Department of Justice had initiated its suits against AT&T and IBM, and the FCC had formulated its policies of “maximum separation” between telephone and computing services. By 1977, however, Zilog had cut the gap between centralized mainframes and microprocessors to fifteen years: the Zilog Z-80 microprocessor roughly matched IBM’s 1962 Model 7094. By 1981, the gap had closed to six years, when Intel introduced its 8088 (the brains of the original IBM personal computer), which offered roughly the same computing power as a 1975 Digital Equipment machine, the PDP 11/70. Intel’s 80386, introduced in 1987, had about the same raw power as Digital’s VAX 8600, introduced in 1984. Intel’s 1989 offering, the 80486, came close to matching IBM’s 3090, introduced in 1985. Thus, in the space of a decade, the performance gap between microprocessors and mainframes was closed from twenty years to less than five. A $5,000 PC in 1990 had the processing power of a $250,000 minicomputer in the mid-1980s, and a million dollar mainframe of the 1970s. In a decade, 99 percent of computing power moved out of the central mainframe computer and on to the individual desktop. There has been a massive relocation of electronic power from the control of technicians, bureaucrats, and traditional system managers, into private hands.
The impact on IBM has been devastating. The only thriving parts of its hardware business today are at the bottom end, where Big Blue’s small beige machines have been open, standardized, and widely copied from the day they were introduced. Between 1985 and 1992, IBM shed 100,000 employees. IBM’s stock, worth $176 a share in 1987, collapsed to $52 by year’s end 1992. In 1992, the New York Times would announce “The End of I.B.M.’s Overshadowing Role.” “IBM’s problems,” the Times noted, “are due to its failure to realize that its core business, mainframe computers, had been supplanted by cheap, networked PC’s and faster networked workstations.” In a desperate scramble for survival, IBM is breaking itself into autonomous units and spinning off some of its more successful divisions. “The idea of open systems—that computers should easily share things and basically behave like friends—is what everyone is aiming for,” IBM’s advertising now declares. Instead of a computer screen, one ad shows two sliding glass doors opening out on a vast expanse of peaceful ocean.
As cheap storage and computing power move onto customer premises, the use of data communications has increased, but dependence on data communications has actually declined. Telephone users today routinely make such trade-offs when they opt to install a faster modem or fax machine, or to install a CD-ROM as a substitute for online electronic services, or to assemble a local area network of personal computers to replace on-line time sharing on a remote mainframe. In each instance, greater electronic power on a user’s own premises becomes a strong substitute, at the margin, for greater usage of the telephone network. The link to the network is never severed; indeed, usage of the network increases steadily as businesses themselves become increasingly decentralized. But relations between consumers and providers of telephone service are nonetheless shifting profoundly with the consumer’s power increasing, while the telephone company’s declines. Each new generation of equipment—computers, local area networks, metropolitan area networks, mobile switching offices, pay-per-view TV systems, and so on—offers a new cluster of possibilities for interconnection. Exchanges multiply and are dispersed; pathways across the network proliferate. Where once there was a monolithic provider of plain-vanilla service, there are now multiple providers offering an array of ever more exotic flavors.
This has triggered a further round of restructuring in the telco central office. The first-generation electronic switches were based on analog technology; the second-generation switches were digital. Digital switches entered the public telephone exchange in the late 1970s; by 1985, half of all telephone calls were digitally switched. The new switches were even more powerful and flexible than the analog electronic switches they replaced. The prior generation had been powerful enough to accommodate the rise of competition in interexchange services; the new generation was powerful enough to accommodate competition among myriad providers of communications and computing services of every description.
Prodded both by forward-looking regulators and providers eager to supply new services through the telephone network, equipment manufacturers and telephone companies have most recently begun to develop a new conception of the role and function of the public telephone exchanges. The regulatory mandate today is for open network architecture (ONA), which will disaggregate the individual components of a telephone connection—the line, the signaling (such things as dial and busy tones), switching, and so on—into basic service elements that can be priced and sold separately and integrated into a rich variety of enhanced services.
ONA is probably the inevitable technological culmination of the disaggregation and decentralization of telephony triggered by the electronics revolution. Theodore Vail’s vision of universal service is not repudiated but instead carried to its logical conclusion. The telephone network will provide universal service not only to consumers but also to producers—to competing telephone companies (as already occurs in the long-distance markets), to radio-telephone competitors who need to interconnect their service with the landline network, and to a limitless number of competing providers of “enhanced” or “information” services, who will monitor burglar alarms, link together bank teller machines, transmit electronic mail, publish electronic newspapers, run shopping malls, or deliver on-line horoscopes.
So much for fragmentation. The second transcendent reality in the world of electronic thought is convergence. Telephony, television, and computing now share the same future. It is a future of switched, digital, broadband networks that combine the broadband carrying capacity of cable television, the digital power and flexibility of computers, and the switched addressability of telephones. In digital systems, a bit is a bit, whether it represents a hiccup in a voice conversation, or the price at which AT&T stock is selling at this particular instant, or a strand of hair in a rerun of “I Love Lucy.” The lines between media formerly segregated by mode of transmission (radio vs. landline) and function (telephone, cable, broadcast, computer) are disappearing. We are moving toward a myriad of mixed media (radio/landline), integrated (digital), broadband networks, all interconnecting seamlessly to one another. As Ithiel de Sola Pool recognized in his landmark Technologies of Freedom, “the neat separations between different media no longer hold.”
Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this convergence is cellular telephony, made possible by the synthesis of radio, telephone, and computers. The key problem with the early radio telephones, which persisted until the 1980s, was that there just didn’t seem to be enough spectrum available to allow simultaneous use of very many of them. A few dozen stations pretty much fill up the dial of a radio— and radio telephone requires radio stations in pairs to sustain two-way conversation.
In the 1940s, researchers at Bell Labs proposed an ingenious solution. Radio telephones should be low-power, short-range devices. The same frequencies could then be used again and again (just as they are with cordless home telephones); a radio conversation at East Forty-second Street would not interfere with another one on the same frequency on West Fifty-first. A city would be divided into many separate “cells,” each one served by its own low-power transmitter. The capacity of a cellular system could then be increased almost indefinitely by shrinking cells and increasing their number. But cellular telephony required, in exchange, highly sophisticated transmitters and receivers, and massive coordination among cells to “hand off” calls and coordinate frequencies as the car telephone on Forty-second Street moved toward Fifty-first. No one had the technology to perform this—until the advent of microelectronics.
After the FCC finally approved commercial cellular telephone sy
stems in 1982, the market grew explosively. The new exchanges—mobile telephone switching offices—secured the right to interconnect with the established landline exchanges. By 1990, entrepreneurs and regulators were considering a second generation of over-the-air telephone systems—personal communications networks (PCNs)—based on microcells, with base stations linked to either private or public exchanges. Each new cluster of exchanges that appeared on the scene opened up new possibilities for service from competing networks. Cellular companies have quickly recognized the advantages of clustered service and established dedicated links between their own exchanges and those of the long-distance carriers. PCN operators have turned to cable companies to provide transport among the transceivers that will be used to support their service.
A less visible but equally revolutionary merger of radio and telephone technologies has occurred below ground, during almost exactly the same years as cellular systems were being deployed above. This too evolved directly from technological developments set in motion at Bell Labs several decades earlier.
The development of coaxial cable and microwave transmission marked a major advance in the continuing quest for ever more capacious, reliable, secure transmission systems. For telephonic purposes, microwaves represented an important advance over ordinary radio because they operated at much higher frequencies, capable of carrying much more information over focused paths. Push the frequencies higher still, and you get ultra-high-frequency radio waves, better known as light. A light beam can be shaped and modulated to carry information in much the same way as Marconi’s radio waves, but in vastly larger amounts. It is best transmitted in a wave guide, similar (in principle) to those developed by Bell Labs in the 1930s. Extremely pure, hair-thin strands of glass serve admirably.
Fiber-optic systems represent today’s pinnacle of telecommunications technology the finest merger (so far) of radio, telephone lines, and electronics. Integrated circuits provide the highly sophisticated transmitters and receivers at each end of the line. The telephone line itself is now a strand of glass. The radio wave is now a beam of light, generated by a laser. A single strand of glass can transmit thousands of simultaneous telephone conversations, or hundreds of color television signals.
Fiber is now rapidly replacing copper, coaxial cable, and microwave everywhere in the telephone network, except (so far) in the short last stretch to the user’s home. But competing local carriers have begun deploying independent fiber-optic systems in larger cities across the country, aiming to replay the MCI history again, with a new technology (fiber instead of microwaves) in response to enormously rapid increases in demand.
• • •
In the 1950s, competitors searched for forgotten comers in the shadow of B&B, where they might peddle such things as cardboard punch cards or plastic Hush-A-Phone cups. But that old world, Orwell’s world, the world of computer and communications monopolies, will not be seen again in our lifetimes. The loose ends and the forgotten comers have taken over. The battle of the cardboard card and the plastic cup have been won; computers, telephones, and televisions are now riddled with slots, ports, jacks, joysticks, mice, and SCSI interfaces, and surrounded by compact disks, videocameras, VCRs, scanners, screens, optical character readers, facsimile interfaces, sound synthesizers, projectors, and radio antennas. The plugs and jacks and sockets have taken over the telescreen world; the Ministry is dead. Every unfilled plug, every unconnected jack, is a loose end, a new entry into the network or an exit from it, a new soap box in Hyde Park, a new podium, a new microphone for poetry or prose, a new screen or telescreen for displaying private sentiment or fomenting sedition, for preaching the gospel, or peddling fresh bread.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My telecommunications work has been generously funded by the Markle Foundation and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. I am deeply indebted to Bill Hammett for his most patient support and encouragement.
Janey Huber Reacher provided extensive help with the fiction parts of this book, particularly the scenes of London. My friends and colleagues Michael Kellogg and John Thome read and provided invaluable comments on early drafts. The three of us are also coauthors of Federal Telecommunications Law (1992) and The Geodesic Network (1993), in which we jointly developed, albeit at a more down-to-earth level, many of the ideas presented in Orwell’s Revenge. I am also indebted to Fred Siegel, Lewis Bateman, and Martin Kessler, who all read and commented on various drafts of the book. Fred Siegel in particular offered encouragement when I needed it most.
In the summer of 1992 I was invited by John O’Connor to present my views in a lakeside talk at the Bohemian Grove. The feedback and expressions of interest I received from John and the very generous audience there gave me the stamina to complete what I might otherwise have abandoned.
Some months later, George Gilder kindly read my manuscript and put me in touch with Erwin Glikes, editor of The Free Press. Erwin agreed to take a chance on my unorthodox creation. He then patiently steered my book through a raft of lawyers and agents, on both our side of the Atlantic and Orwell’s. Erwin Glikes died suddenly in May 1994, as my book was going to press. I am forever in his debt.
I am indebted as well to Erwin’s assistant at The Free Press, Marion Maneker, who helped see the book through to completion. My copy editor, Beverly Miller, suggested many useful changes, and meticulously cleaned up the notes. The book’s elegant design was the work of Carla Boke. Loretta Denner of The Free Press patiently coordinated the production. My mother, Dorothy Huber, and my research assistants, Karin Albani, Olga Grushin, Laura Haefner, Penny Karas, Lynn Kelley, Rosemary McMahill, B. J. Min, T. J. Radtke and Gary Stahlberg, Jr. helped proofread the manuscript; my secretary Danelle Lohman worked many long hours to put it in final electronic shape.
Finally, I am grateful to Orwell’s literary executors at A. M. Heath & Company (London) for their agreement to let me use Orwell’s work as I have. The estate is receiving a share of the royalties earned on this book, which of course it fully deserves.
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ABBREVIATIONS IN THE NOTES
I have cited wherever possible paperback editions that are readily available.
Down and Out: Down and Out in Paris and London. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1933.
Burmese Days: Burmese Days. 1934. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962.
A Clergyman’s Daughter: A Clergyman’s Daughter. 1935. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960.
Aspidistra: Keep the Aspidistra Flying. 1936. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956.
Wigan Pier: The Road to Wigan Pier. 1937. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958.
Homage to Catalonia: Homage to Catalonia. 1938. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1952.
Coming Up for Air: Coming Up for Air. 1939. Penguin Books, 1990.
Lion: The Lion and the Unicorn. 1941. Penguin Books, 1941.
Animal Farm: Animal Farm. 1946. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1946.
1984: Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.
The Orwell Reader: The Orwell Reader. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956.
Essays, I: George Orwell: A Collection of Essays. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1946.
Essays, II: The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage by George Orwell. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956.
Essays, III: The Penguin Essays of George Orwell. Penguin Books, 1984.
Essays, IV: George Orwell, Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays. Penguin Books, 1953.
Broadcast: Orwell, The War Broadcasts. W J. West, ed. Duckworth/British Broadcasting Corporation, 1985.
CEJL, Vols. 1-4: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Martin Seeker & Warburg, 1968.
Shelden: Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorized Biography. HarperCollins, 1991.
NOTES
Preface
last two digits interchanged: Shelden, p. 433.1 refer to the book as 1984 rather than Orwell’s original Nineteen Eighty-Four. The whole point of Orwell’s Revenge, after all, is to rewrite Orwell in ways large and small.
New York Times reported: Shelden, p. 430.
the New Yorker and the Evening Standard: Shelden, p. 430.
one context or another: “Charles Dickens” (1939), Essays, I, p. 91.
not so much a book, it is a world: “Charles Dickens,” p. 91.
quote him unconsciously: “Charles Dickens,” p. 92.
name to the English language: “Rudyard Kipling” (1942), Essays, I, p. 126.
whole attitude to life: “Books v. Cigarettes” (1946), Essays, III, p. 349.
the Washington Monument: “Charles Dickens,” p. 91 (“Nelson Column” in the original).
beneath is rotten: “Charles Dickens,” p. 96.
out of bed every morning: 1984, p. 296.
occasional bomb crater: Coming Up for Air, p. 30.
out of bedroom windows: Coming Up for Air, p. 31.