An opening note: would you believe that I have been at this for five years, now? If I planned ahead better, I would have done this on the five-year anniversary, but I missed it. Computers Are Bad is now five years and four months old.

When I originally launched CAB, it was my second attempt at keeping up a blog. The first, which I had called 12 Bit Word, went nowhere and I stopped keeping it up. One of the reasons, I figured, is that I had put too much effort into it. CAB was a very low-effort affair, which was perhaps best exemplified by the website itself. It was monospace and 80 characters wide, a decision that I found funny (in a shitposty way) and generated constant complaints. To be fair, if you didn't like the font, it was "user error:" I only ever specified "monospace" and I can't be blamed that certain platforms default to Courier. But there were problems beyond the appearance; the tool that generated the website was extremely rough and made new features frustrating to implement.

Over the years, I have not invested much (or really any) effort in promoting CAB or even making it presentable. I figured my readership, interested in vintage computing, would probably put up with it anyway. That is at least partially true, and I am not going to put any more effort into promotion, but some things have changed. Over time I have broadened my topics quite a bit, and I now regularly write about things that I would have dropped as "off topic" three or four years ago. Similarly, my readership has broadened, and probably to a set of people that find 80 characters of monospace text less charming.

I think I've also changed my mind in some ways about what is "special" about CAB. One of the things that I really value about it, that I don't think comes across to readers well, is the extent to which it is what I call artisanal internet. It's like something you'd get at the farmer's market. What I mean by this is that CAB is a website generated by a static site generator that I wrote, and a newsletter sent by a mailing list system that I wrote, and you access them by connecting directly to a VM that I administer, on a VM cluster that I administer, on hardware that I own, in a rack that I lease in a data center in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico. This is a very old-fashioned way of doing things, now, and one of the ironies is that it is a very expensive way of doing things. It would be radically cheaper and easier to use wordpress.com, and it would probably go down less often and definitely go down for reasons that are my fault less often. But I figure people listen to me in part because I don't use wordpress.com, because I have weird and often impractical opinions about how to best contribute to internet culture.

I have an ongoing fascination with "interactive TV": a series of efforts, starting in the 1990s and continuing today, to drag the humble living room television into the world of the computer. One of the big appeals of interactive TV was adoption, the average household had a TV long before the average household had a computer. So, it seems like interactive TV services should have proliferated before personal computers, at least following the logic that many in the industry did at the time.

This wasn't untrue! In the UK, for example, Ceefax was a widespread success by the 1980s. In general, TV-based teletext systems were pretty common in Europe. In North America, they never had much of an impact---but not for lack of trying. In fact, there were multiple competing efforts at teletext in the US and Canada, and it may very well have been the sheer number of independent efforts that sunk the whole idea. But let's start at the beginning.

The BBC went live with Ceefax in 1974, the culmination of years of prototype development and test broadcasts over the BBC network. Ceefax was quickly joined by other teletext standards in Europe, and the concept enjoyed a high level of adoption. This must have caught the attention of many in the television industry on this side of the ocean, but it was Bonneville International that first bit ¹. Its premier holding, KSL-TV of Salt Lake City, has an influence larger than its name suggests: KSL was carried by an extensive repeater network and reached a large portion of the population throughout the Mountain States. Because of the wide reach of KSL and the even wider reach of the religion that relied on Bonneville for communications, Bonneville was also an early innovator in satellite distribution of television and data. These were ingredients that made for a promising teletext network, one that could quickly reach a large audience and expand to broader television networks through satellite distribution.

One of the most significant single advancements in telecommunications technology was the development of microwave radio. Essentially an evolution of radar, the middle of the Second World War saw the first practical microwave telephone system. By the time Japan surrendered, AT&T had largely abandoned their plan to build an extensive nationwide network of coaxial telephone cables. Microwave relay offered greater capacity at a lower cost. When Japan and the US signed their peace treaty in 1951, it was broadcast from coast to coast over what AT&T called the "skyway": the first transcontinental telephone lead made up entirely of radio waves. The fact that live television coverage could be sent over the microwave system demonstrated its core advantage. The bandwidth of microwave links, their capacity, was truly enormous. Within the decade, a single microwave antenna could handle over 1,000 simultaneous calls.

Microwave's great capacity, its chief advantage, comes from the high frequencies and large bandwidths involved. The design of microwave-frequency radio electronics was an engineering challenge that was aggressively attacked during the war because microwave frequency's short wavelengths made them especially suitable for radar. The cavity magnetron, one of the first practical microwave transmitters, was an invention of such import that it was the UK's key contribution to a technical partnership that lead to the UK's access to US nuclear weapons research. Unlike the "peaceful atom," though, the "peaceful microwave" spread fast after the war. By the end of the 1950s, most long-distance telephone calls were carried over microwave. While coaxial long-distance carriers such as L-carrier saw continued use in especially congested areas, the supremacy of microwave for telephone communications would not fall until adoption of fiber optics in the 1980s.

Alcatraz first operated as a prison in 1859, when the military fort first held convicted soldiers. The prison technology of the time was simple, consisting of little more than a basement room with a trap-door entrance. Only small numbers of prisoners were held in this period, but it established Alcatraz as a center of incarceration. Later, the Civil War triggered construction of a "political prison," a term with fewer negative connotations at the time, for confederate sympathizers.

This prison was more purpose-built (although actually a modification of an existing shop), but it was small and not designed for an especially high security level. It presaged, though, a much larger construction project to come.

Alcatraz had several properties that made it an attractive prison. First, it had seen heavy military construction as a Civil War defensive facility, but just decades later improvements in artillery made its fortifications obsolete. That left Alcatraz surplus property, a complete military installation available for new use. Second, Alcatraz was formidable. The small island was made up of steep rock walls, and it was miles from shore in a bay known for its strong currents. Escape, even for prisoners who had seized control of the island, would be exceptionally difficult.

These advantages were also limitations. Alcatraz was isolated and difficult to support, requiring a substantial roster of military personnel to ferry supplies back and forth. There were no connections to the mainland, requiring on-site power and water plants. Corrosive sea spray, sent over the island by the Bay's strong winds, lay perpetual siege on the island. Buildings needed constant maintenance, rust covered everything. Alcatraz was not just a famous prison, it was a particularly complicated one.

In 1909, Alcatraz lost its previous defensive role and pivoted entirely to military prison. The Citadel, a hardened barracks building dating to the original fortifications, was partially demolished. On top of it, a new cellblock was built. This was a purpose-built prison, designed to house several hundred inmates under high security conditions.

A long time ago I wrote about secret government telephone numbers, and before that, secret military telephone buttons. I suppose this is becoming a series. To be clear, the "secret" here is a joke, but more charitably I could say that it refers to obscurity rather than any real effort to keep them secret. Actually, today's examples really make this point: they're specifically intended to be well known, but are still pretty obscure in practice.

If you've been around for a while, you know how much I love telephone numbers. Here in North America, we have a system called the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) that has rigidly standardized telephone dialing practices since the middle of the 20th century. The US, Canada, and a number of Central American countries benefit from a very orderly system of area codes (more formally numbering plan areas or NPAs) followed by a subscriber number written in the format NXX-XXXX (this is a largely NANP-centric notation for describing phone number patterns, N represents the digits 2-9 and X any digit). All of these NANP numbers reside under the country code 1, allowing at least theoretically seamless international dialing within the NANP community. It's really a pretty elegant system.

NANP is the way it is for many reasons, but it mostly reflects technical requirements of the telephone exchanges of the 1940s. This is more thoroughly explained in the link above, but one of the goals of NANP is to ensure that step-by-step (SxS) exchanges can process phone numbers digit by digit as they are dialed. In other words, it needs to be possible to navigate the decision tree of telephone routing using only the digits dialed so far.

Readers with a computer science education might have some tidy way to describe this in terms of Chompsky or something, but I do not have a computer science education; I have an Information Technology education. That means I prefer flow charts to automata, and we can visualize a basic SxS exchange as a big tree. When you pick up your phone, you start at the root of the tree, and each digit dialed chooses the edge to follow. Eventually you get to a leaf that is hopefully someone's telephone, but at no point in the process does any node benefit from the context of digits you dial before, after, or how many total digits you dial. This creates all kinds of practical constraints, and is the reason, for example, that we tend to write ten-digit phone numbers with a "1" before them.