The Michigan Telephone blog

Hard to believe we’re coming up on the turn of another decade. Although the technological revolution was well under way by the time I was born, it’s interesting to think about how different things are today from how they were way back then.  Here’s how I recall the decades (note I wasn’t born yet in 1950, but close enough that I can extrapolate):

1950: Black and White television was just starting to appear in the homes of those who were not extremely affluent (although a TV was still a major investment).  Sets were large and picture tubes were small (and round, though sometimes the top and bottom parts were masked).  Nationwide television broadcasting was still a year away – coaxial cable connections only extended between New York and the eastern half of the country until 1951, when it was extended to the west coast. Many network stations in smaller markets actually got their signal by putting up a tall antenna and picking it up from the nearest network owned and operated station, or another nearby affiliate (a practice that continued in some places until communications satellites came into being).  Local telephone calls in many areas had to placed through an operator, although some cities had rotary dial service.  Long distance calls were very expensive and usually had to be placed through multiple operators and toll switchboards, although operator dialing of distant numbers was starting to come into use. Many people only called relatives at Christmas or on a birthday, and were careful to keep the call length under three minutes (the initial charge was for the first three minutes).  Telegrams were just starting to decline in popularity, as long distance had become a bit less expensive after the war ended. As for computers, a basic pocket calculator today probably has more computing power than the largest computers of the 1950′s.

1960: Color TV’s were available, but they were big and heavy and definitely a luxury item.  TV picture tubes had started to take on a more rectangular shape, but still had rounded corners. The big story of the previous decade had been the development of transistors, and the transistor radio was just starting to be the hot item for teenagers to have.  “Direct Distance Dialing” (customer dialing of long distance calls within the U.S. and Canada) was being implemented, although in 1960 there were still many manual exchanges in rural areas, so not all points were dialable, and long distance calls were still expensive enough that you thought twice before making a long distance call, even though the phone companies did everything they could to encourage long distance usage. The first experimental satellite television signals were still two years away. Telegrams were for funerals and official business – people had found that it was cheaper to make a three-minute call than send an old-fashioned telegram. And even with transistor technology, computers still filled large rooms and weren’t as powerful (and almost certainly didn’t have as much memory or storage) as even a low-end notebook computer of today.

1970: All but the poorest people (and the cheapskates) had color TV (or would within a couple of years), and some TV’s had real remote controls (in many homes, the remote control was a parent hollering for one of the kids to come change the channel!).  TV’s has shrunk to a reasonable size, too – the large TV-as-a-piece-of-furniture was on its way out, and a smaller model (perhaps on a rollable stand) was in.  With the new mostly-transistorized sets, the TV repairman was no longer almost a part of the family, since transistors didn’t fail the way vacuum tubes did.  Commercial satellite television was now a reality, being used to relay news and programs from overseas, and to deliver network programming direct to TV stations, no matter how remote the location.  The receiving equipment was still very expensive, though. The hot new technology was the Integrated Circuit. Electronic switching had come into widespread use in telephone exchanges, and the days of the operator (for completing local calls) was gone. For most folks, regular telegrams were something only seen in old movies. There were mobile telephones (and marine telephones on boats) but they were very expensive and required bulky equipment, and in most areas only a handful of channels were available (and they were plain old analog radio channels, so anyone with a radio that tuned those bands could listen in!). Touch-Tone telephones were starting to become popular, replacing the old rotary dial phones. Computers had actually started to appear in many medium-sized and smaller businesses – the most compact models were about the size of a home furnace and used LARGE hard drive platters (16″ was a common size) with far less storage capacity than you’d get on a memory stick today. And electronic calculators were starting to be widely used in businesses, and even some homes.

1980: Your TV had integrated circuits and a remote control, and was priced so that even poor people could afford one. Only small specialty sets were black and white. Cable TV was becoming available in many parts of the country, though the selection of channels was fairly pitiful by today’s standards (it had actually been around for many years, but it was just starting to become a somewhat ubiquitous utility in populated areas).  News and programming from around the globe was commonplace, delivered via commercial satellite, and some people were installing large C-band dishes on their property to receive programming direct from the satellites. The Sony Walkman was the hot new thing, and it would forever change the way people listened to music.  And wonder of wonders, the personal computer had arrived – if you lived in a major city, you could actually go to a “computer store” (or a Radio Shack) and buy your very own home computer.  You’d store your data on cassette tapes, or perhaps a floppy disk if you could shell out few hundred dollars for a floppy disk drive (hard drives were in the four to five figure price range – a home computer might have one with 5 MB capacity). Oh, and your family and friends would look at you like you’d grown a third eyeball when you told them you had a computer at home! And there was this thing called the Internet that was being used to move data between large computers (mostly those owned by universities and the government) worldwide, but most home computer users had never heard of it – what was newly available in 1980 was commercial services such as Compuserve and Prodigy, if you had a 300 baud modem and were willing to pay by the minute for a service that displayed text at a rate much slower than most people’s reading speed.

1990: What a difference a decade makes.  By 1990 most of the original home computer manufacturers were long gone – the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981, and Microsoft’s MS-DOS had radically altered the personal computer landscape. Apple and a few others were still in business, but most of the early PC makers either got out of the business or started selling PC “clones.” The hot new thing in 1990 was Windows 3.0, which many would argue was the first version of Windows that remotely resembled Windows as we know it today.  A typical computer hard drive would have capacity measured in megabytes, in most cases under 100 MB. And while computer users were starting to become vaguely aware that there was something called the Internet out there, many users were still using 2400 to 9600 bps modems and connecting to local BBS systems, many of which were interconnected through an ad-hoc network called Fidonet, run in some areas by tin-pot dictators who were more interested in enforcing rules than applying common sense (causing some sysops to incur hundreds of dollars in unnecessary phone charges, because they weren’t allowed to pick up feeds from the least expensive source).  I still have the deepest of contempt for one particular Fidonet “coordinator” who I’d swear was working for the phone company (since he was a direct cause of many sysops incurring excessive or unnecessary toll charges), except for the fact that he even caused problems FOR a phone company’s sponsored Fidonet BBS in one city. Many Fidonet users and sysops were looking for an alternative to Fidonet by 1990, and I think that in large part jump-started the interest in that “other” network, the Internet. In other news, Direct-To-Home satellite service was just getting started in Europe; it would be another year before Primestar would be available in the United States.  Cell phones were starting to be used by businesses, but the per-minute rates were prohibitive for most users.  At the same time, rates for calls to many overseas locations had started to fall to somewhat affordable levels. The big news in telephones had been the Bell System breakup of 1984, and by 1990 many customers had started buying their own telephones instead of paying the phone company approximately $5 a month for a rented phone (even more if you wanted a color other than black, or a long cord). Also, by 1990, competitive long distance companies such as MCI and Sprint were capturing a large percentage of long distance traffic that had formerly gone through AT&T.

2000: The home computer user was no longer considered a bit strange, thanks to the appearance of the commercial Internet (and the World Wide Web) starting in the early- to mid-90′s.  Suddenly the Internet was usable by the common person, and it was far less expensive that Compuserve or AOL, which were but a shadow of their former selves.  Fidonet only held onto a few hardcore sysops (though it has tenaciously refused to die completely). Windows 2000 was the new OS from Microsoft (some people are still using it!).  Writable CD’s were replacing the floppy drive, and hard drive storage was measured in the hundreds of megabytes; and those large drives were needed to store all those MP3 files that people were downloading courtesy of Napster and similar filesharing programs that had become the bane of the recording industry (since most users were still on dial-up Internet, using 56K modems, it wasn’t really feasible to download large video files yet).  Speaking of the MP3, personal MP3 players were only another year away – goodbye to our old friend, the Walkman.  Dish Network and DirecTV were competing for customers, finally giving TV viewers an alternative to cable television, which was increasingly becoming overpriced – the channel selection was increasing, but people were starting to find the offerings underwhelming, thus the lament of “500 channels and nothing’s on.” The long, slow changeover to HDTV had begun, though few stations broadcasted HDTV signals, and HDTV sets were very expensive (and about as easy to move around as a grand piano!). Cell phones were becoming a somewhat common item, at least among the well-heeled, and they were getting much smaller as well – gone were the “bag phones” that had been used in cars. And traditional telephone calling was getting much cheaper, due to the increased competition between both long distance companies and the new competitive local phone companies.  Unfortunately, the trend toward big mergers had begun; the “baby Bells” started putting themselves back together.

Going into 2010: The 2000′s brought us flat screen monitors and TV’s in sizes that we’d only imagined (just in time to help us baby boomers with failing eyesight).  HDTV sets are finally becoming somewhat affordable, though they have a way to go (I think HDTV is about where color sets were in 1970).  Cable and satellite TV services have gotten more expensive but not necessarily better, but today we have an alternative – sites like Hulu and YouTube.  However, another thing that happened during the 2000′s was that most of us started getting our Internet service from the cable company, in order to get away from slow dialup speeds, but in the process we have nearly eliminated the very competitive dialup ISP market and replaced it with a monopoly or duopoly provider situation when it comes to broadband.  And both the cable companies, and the phone companies that are starting to see the potential in offering their own cable TV equivalent, would like very much to kill the streaming video sites, by going to metered billing so that customers are afraid to use the bandwidth they’re paying for (bear in mind that NO provider wants to offer TRUE metered billing – they still want to charge you a monthly rate like they’ve been doing all along, but then start piling on charges if they think you’ve consumed too many bytes of data in a month). Computers have gotten much faster, and hard drives capacities are starting to be measured in terabytes. The floppy disk has gone the way of the dodo, and the CD probably would have if so many of us didn’t have drawers full of “free-after-rebate” blank CD’s that we bought to back up our hard drives, only to discover that it was more efficient to just buy another hard drive for backup purposes. The music and movie industries moved to impose Draconian punishments on those who share copyrighted files, arguably alienating many of their best customers in the process. Microsoft really dropped the ball with Windows Vista, giving Apple a leg up in the consumer computer market, and it remains to be seen if Windows 7 will reverse the trend. In telephony, the big story was VoIP, which drove down the cost of both domestic and international calling, to the point that traditional phone companies started doing something they probably never thought they’d have to do – offer affordable, flat-rate nationwide calling plans.  And even with that, people are abandoning the traditional landline in droves. As the telegram was in 1950, is perhaps what the traditional landline phone call is today.

2020:  Okay, my crystal ball (or third eye or whatever you want to call it) has never worked right – I keep hoping for that moment of enlightenment, but so far, no such luck.  So I’ll probably miss on some of these, but here’s what I suspect may happen by 2020.  With regard to TV’s: Bigger, thinner, cheaper, and the hot new thing may be 3D television.  With regard to telephones, the dangers of cell phone radiation will become more apparent as more heavy cell users start getting brain tumors, so the cell phone will be redesigned so there is no high power transmitter close to any body part (unless it’s shielded in some way).  This means that portable phones may only radiate to one side (away from the head/body), posing interesting challenges for cell site designers. Also, I suspect wideband voice will take hold – it is ridiculous to limit voice channels to sub-AM radio quality, a relic of available long distance circuit bandwidth from nearly a century ago. Traditional copper-pair based residential landline service will be all but dead, except for older people and some businesses. By 2020, phone companies will simply stop installing new copper (except perhaps for the last few- to few-hundred feet) and go to fiber almost exclusively. There will be a mad scramble by all traditional phone companies to try and sell off as much of their aging copper plant as possible.  After that, I think competition may arise in the broadband market – as existing phone/broadband companies find that they have saturated their existing service areas, they will look to grow by (finally) moving into the territories of other companies and overbuilding (this assumes that the cost of running fiber will get cheaper).  One wild card is that the government could still require divestiture of outside plant, spinning off the wires, cables and fiber to an entity that would not be allowed to be in the phone or broadband business, but would only be allowed to wholesale connectivity between homes and service providers. And I’m not sure what the hot new technology for the kids will be, but I’m betting it will involve some form of thought control (remember the line from Back to the Future II: “You mean you have to use your hands? That’s like a baby’s toy!” No, I don’t think we’ll have antigravity hoverboards, not because the technology won’t exist, but because it won’t have filtered down to commercial use yet). As for computers: Faster, MUCH smaller desktop models (think Mac Mini, but thinner), quieter, more use of solid state storage to replace hard drives, and built in HDMI ports will become commonplace.  I also expect you’ll see HDTV sets with a fully functional computer either built in, or offered as an accessory.  There will be a replacement for the computer mouse – it may involve thought control, or it may take the form of a camera smart enough to recognize gestures and hand movements in the air (privacy advocates and conspiracy theorists probably won’t like the camera idea much), but the mouse will be too inconvenient when you are sitting in your easy chair using a wireless keyboard and your HDTV screen!

Then, as I’ve mentioned before, there is the “X factor” — the technology that hardly anyone sees coming even a decade before.  We’ve had a lot of those in the past few decades: television in the home, transistors, the space program, integrated circuits, lasers, fiber optics, cell phones, the commercial Internet, the World Wide Web, commercial broadband to the home, VoIP. Some of these may have been anticipated in science fiction, but still they were often things that few had seriously dreamed of even ten years before. Let’s suppose for a moment that someone figures out the secret of anti-gravity and makes it widely available — can you imagine the changes that would bring to society?  Or, what about cold fusion (which some scientists think is still workable)? Okay, now suppose that you had some way to put a platform in the sky, in the upper atmosphere above the level of clouds and storms, and you have figured out how to oppose gravity (and have the nearly limitless energy supply to do it). Suddenly you have the perfect platform to spot-beam wireless Internet to entire counties or more, plus with clear line of site such platforms could network to each other. Unfortunately, far too often the governments of the industrialized countries choose to protect existing corporations rather than advance new technologies. We don’t even utilize the technologies we have available (case in point: Why do we not have computer controlled, “drive by wire” automobiles and trucks? You’d likely have to embed control wires in or near road surfaces, but once fully implemented, such a system could save both fuel and lives, particularly in the case of avoiding accidents caused by sleepy/distracted/aggressive/inexperienced/elderly/fleeing criminal drivers).

Well, I hope you have enjoyed this romp through the technological past and possible future. Did I miss anything important? Do you know of some up and coming technology that has the potential to change life as we know it? Feel free to leave a comment!