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<pre>COMPUTERS ARE BAD is a newsletter semi-regularly issued directly to your doorstep to enlighten you as to the ways that computers are bad and the many reasons why. While I am not one to stay on topic, the gist of the newsletter is computer history, computer security, and "constructive" technology criticism.

I have an MS in information security, more certifications than any human should, and ready access to a keyboard. These are all properties which make me ostensibly qualified to comment on issues of computer technology. When I am not complaining on the internet, I work in professional services for a DevOps software vendor. I have a background in security operations and DevSecOps, but also in things that are actually useful like photocopier repair.

You can read this here, on the information superhighway, but to keep your neighborhood paperboy careening down that superhighway on a bicycle please <a href="https://maleman.computer.rip/">subscribe</a>. This also contributes enormously to my personal self esteem. There is, however, also an <a href="rss.xml">RSS feed</a> for those who really want it. Fax delivery available by request.

Last but not least, please consider <a href="https://ko-fi.com/jbcrawford">supporting me on Ko-Fi</a>. Monthly supporters receive EYES ONLY, a special bonus edition that is lower effort and higher sass, covering topics that don't quite make it to a full article.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------</pre>


	<article>
<h1>&gt;&gt;&gt; <a href="2024-11-09-iron-mountain-atomic-storage.html">2024-11-09 iron mountain atomic storage</a></h1>

<p>I have quipped before about "underground datacenters," and how they never
succeed. During the late decades of the Cold War and even into the '00s, the
military and (to a lesser extent) the telecommunications industry parted ways
with a great number of underground facilities. Missile silos, command bunkers,
and hardened telephone exchanges were all sold to the highest bidder or---often
in the case of missile silos---offered at a fixed price to the surrounding land
owner. Many of them ended up sealed, the new owner only being interested in the
surface property. But others...</p>
<p>There are numerous examples of ex-defense facilities with more ambitious
owners. There ought to be some commercial interest in a hardened, underground
facility, right? After all, the investment to build them was substantial.
Perhaps a data center?</p>
<p>There are several ways this goes wrong. First, there are not actually that many
data center clients who will pay extra to put their equipment underground.
That's not really how modern disaster recovery plans work. Second, and probably
more damning, these ventures often fail to anticipate the enormous cost of
renovating an underground facility. Every type of construction is more
expensive when you do it underground, and hardened facilities have thick,
reinforced concrete walls that are difficult to penetrate. Modernizing a former
hardened telecom site or, even worse, missile site for data center use will
likely cost more than constructing a brand new one. Indeed, the military knows
this: that's why they just sold them, often at rock-bottom prices.</p>
<p>Even if these "secure datacenters" almost never succeed (and rarely even make
it to a first paying client), they've provided a lot of stories over the years.
CyberBunker, one of the less usual European examples (a former NATO  facility),
managed to become entangled in cybercrime and the largest DDoS attack ever
observed at the time, all while claiming to be an independent nation. They were
also manufacturing MDMA, and probably lying about most of the equipment being
in a hardened facility to begin with.</p>
<p>So that's obviously a rather extreme example, sort of a case study in the
stranger corners of former military real estate and internet crime. But just
here in New Mexico I know of at least two efforts to adopt Atlas silos as
secure datacenters or document storage facilities, neither of which got off the
ground (or under the ground, as it were). It seems like a good idea until, you
know, you actually think about it. You might recall that I wrote about a
<a href="https://computer.rip/2024-04-05-the-life-of-one-earth-station.html">secure data center claiming to be located in a hardened facility with CIA
and/or SDI
ties</a>. That
building doesn't even appear to have been hardened at all, and they still went
bankrupt.</p>
<p>What if I told you that they were all barking up the wrong tree? If you really
want to make a business out of secure underground storage, you need something
bigger and with better access. You need a mine.</p>
<p>It will also be very important to make this play in the <em>early</em> Cold War, when
there was a much clearer market for hardened facilities, as evidenced by the
military spending that period building them rather than selling them off. The
1980s and on were just too late.</p>
<p>There are actually several rather successful businesses built on the premise of
secure, hardened storage, and they are distinctively pre-computer. The best
known of them is diversified "information management" firm Iron Mountain. You
know, with the shredding trucks. And an iron mountain, or rather, an iron mine
by that name.</p>
<p>Like most of the large underground facilities that are still commercially
successful today, the story of Iron Mountain involves mushrooms. Efficient
cultivation of mushrooms requires fairly tightly controlled conditions that are
not dissimilar to those you already find underground: cool temperatures, high
humidity, and low light. Culinary mushrooms are widely produced in large caves
and former mines, which often provide more convenient access, having been
designed for bulk transportation of ores.</p>
<p>This might be a little surprising, because we tend to think of underground
mines as being small, cramped spaces. That's true of many mines, often for
precious metals, for example. But there are also mines that extract ores that
are present over large areas and have relatively low value. This requires an
efficient method of removing a very large quantity of rock. Modern mines employ
some very clever techniques, like "block caving," where a very large rock mass
is intentionally collapsed into a prepared chamber that it can be scooped out
of like the bottom of a hopper. One of the most common methods, though, and one
that has been in use for a very long time, is "room and pillar" mining.</p>
<p>The idea is pretty simple: you excavate a huge room, leaving pillars to hold up
the material above. Depending on the economics, geology, etc., you might then
"retreat," digging out the pillars behind you as you work your way out of the
room. This causes the room to collapse, ideally away from the working area, but
not always. Retreat mining is dangerous and doesn't always produce ore of that
much value, so a lot of mines didn't do it. They just left the rooms, and their
pillars: huge underground chambers, tens and hundreds of thousands of square
feet, empty space. Many were dug back into a hill or mountain, providing direct
drive-in access via adits. Most, almost all, successful underground storage
facilities are retired room and pillar mines.</p>
<p>In the first-half of the 20th century, mushroom cultivation was the most common
application of underground space. That's what led "Mushroom King" Herman Knaust
to purchase the disused Mt. Thomas iron mine near Livingston, NY in 1936.
Knaust's company, Knaust's Cavern Mushrooms, was the largest producer of
culinary mushrooms in the world. Ten crops of mushrooms were produced each year
in the Livingston mine, and as Knaust continued to grow his operations, the
mushroom mine became one of the area's principal employers. Knaust dubbed it
Iron Mountain.</p>
<p>By 1950, things had changed. Knaust had at least two motivations for his pivot:
first, the US mushroom industry was rapidly weakening, upset by lower-cost
mushrooms imported from Europe and Asia. Second, WWII had come to a close, and
the Cold War was beginning.</p>
<p>In 1952, Knaust told reporters of his experience working with refugees from
Europe resettled in New York. Most of them had lost everything to bombing, and
they told Knaust how they had attempted to hide their most valuable
possessions, and their paperwork, in safer places. The Germans, Knaust read,
had come up with the best hiding place of all: disused mines. During the course
of the war, the Nazi administration stored valuables ranging from gold bullion
to original works of art in former mines throughout their occupied territories.
Some of them were large-scale logistical operations, with rail access and
organized archival systems.</p>
<p>Now, in the age of nuclear weapons, Knaust thought that this kind of protection
would be in more demand than ever. In 1951, he renovated the old mine and
installed new ventilation equipment. Most importantly, he bought a 28-ton vault
door secondhand from a failed bank. A generator and a security force of armed
former police officers rounded out Knaust's new venture: Iron Mountain Atomic
Storage.</p>
<p>The bank vault door was mostly for show, and Knaust's description of the mine
as "A-bomb proof" and "radiation proof" somewhat stretch the science. But
Knaust was a born marketer; his version of nuclear alarmism drew the attention
of corporate America like the Civil Defense Administration's pamphlets gripped
the public. The entrance to his mine was a sturdy stone block building with
iron bars over the windows and "Atomic Storage Vaults" inscribed at the top. He
was sure to tell reporters of his estate, home to the world's only
mushroom-shaped swimming pool. Over the years of newspaper coverage, the bank
vault door at the front of the mine got heavier and heavier.</p>
<p>In the event of a nuclear attack, Knaust reasoned, banks could lose their
records of deposits. Insurers could lose track of their policies. Companies of
all kinds could lose inventory sheets. The resulting economic chaos would be as
destructive as the bomb that started it. If we were to shelter lives, we also
needed to shelter information. By the time Iron Mountain Atomic Storage was
open for business he had already signed up the first customers, who shipped
copies of their records for storage in individual vaults constructed within
chambers of the mine. The East River Savings Bank, of New York, proudly
described how each of their branches microfilmed new deposits daily for
transport to the Mountain.</p>
<p>Iron Mountain sold its services to individuals as well. For $2.50 a year, a
consumer or small business could pack records into a tin can for storage in the
mine. The cans could be stored or retrieved with local agents stationed in
major cities, who sealed them in the presence of the customer and shipped them
to the mine by courier.</p>
<p>By 1954, Iron Mountain boasted over 400 customers, mostly large corporations
and institutions. It was a surprising hit with newspapers: about 150 rented
space to store their archives. Recordak, a subsidiary of Kodak that provided
microfilming services, set up a branch office at the mine with representatives
who could convert records to microfilm or turn them back into full-sized
versions on demand. The consumer part of the business was reorganized in
partnership with the Railway Express Agency, one of the descendants and
ancestors of our modern American Express and Wells Fargo. Individuals and small
businesses could deposit records with any Railway Express agent and request
records sent back to their nearest train station.</p>
<p>They quickly faced competition. Perhaps the most interesting was Western States
Atomic Storage Vaults, who purchased a disused South Pacific Coast Railroad
tunnel in the Santa Cruz mountains. The railroad right of way, near Zayante,
California, received a similar conversion to caged storage units. At least a
half dozen underground storage companies would be organized between 1950 and
1960.</p>
<p>The atomic storage industry was not always an easy one. Iron Mountain had a
slow start, signing up few customers after their initial set of banks and
newspapers. The Cuban Missile Crisis gave a considerable boost to sales,
though, and revenue almost doubled in 1963 alone. Iron Mountain's inventory
expanded from paper and microfilm records to original works of art, and they
purchased a second mine, a former limestone mine nearby at Kingston, NY, to
expand. They added office and dormitory facilities at both sites, to protect
both their extensive staff of clerks and representatives of their customers in
the event of nuclear war. "What good are the records if everyone in the firm is
blown up," Iron Mountain's executive vice president offered.</p>
<p>Inside of Iron Mountain, behind the vault door, steel doors with combination
locks protected individual vault suites ranging from closets to hundreds of
square feet. Racks held boxes and cans of individual records deposited by
smaller customers. The whole facility was maintained at 70 degrees Fahrenheit
and 50% humidity, a task greatly eased by the surrounding earth.</p>
<p>They were dedicated to the privacy of their customers but also had a hard time
passing up an opportunity for promotion, telling reporters of some of the
publishers and television companies that stored their archives at Iron
Mountain, and hinting at a "major New York City art museum" that leased space
for its collection. Individual customers included doctors, stamp collectors,
and "a whole lot of people who aren't talking as long as the outside world
lasts."</p>
<p>The mid-1960s were the apex of the Cold War in the popular consciousness, and
Iron Mountain's luck would not last through the broader decline in planning for
all-out Soviet attack. Now called Iron Mountain Security Storage, quotes for
newspaper articles shifted their focus towards civil unrest. In a world of
campus riots, president James Price said, universities were moving their
academic records underground.</p>
<p>Iron Mountain's good (for business) and bad (for society)  mood must have been
infectious, because competitors flourished even in 1970. Bekins, the moving and
storage company, purchased 200 acres in the Diablo mountains of California.
They intended to open the first underground storage facility specifically built
for that purpose, and plans included a hotel and heliport for convenient
customer access. The July 11th, 1970 edition of The Black Panther's <em>Black
Community News Service</em> contains perhaps them most blunt assessment of the
Bekins plan, one that would prove prescient.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The possibility of World War III is not as much an immediate threat to the
life and well being of America's greedy capitalists as is the strong
probability of the more severe "political consequences" that might be meted
out by the masses, the people, for selfish crimes committed against them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A year later, the plan had expanded to shelter for 1,000 "executives and office
workers" for up to 30 days, an airport that could serve business jets, and a
computer and communications center. Bekins said that it would help corporations
survive a nuclear war, but was even more important in the event of rioting or
terrorism. Bekins specifically called out unrest at UC Berkeley, and damage it
had caused to academic records, as evidence of the need.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Blaine L. Paris, number one stooge manager of Bekins Company.., acknowledged
that the hideaway, hideout survival shelter's main draw is the widespread
fear, on the business executive level, of bombings, the random tossing of
molotov cocktails, possibilities of kidnapping...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some large companies, Bekins said, were planning to set up alternate corporate
headquarters in the facility as soon as it opened. It would be something like
the Mount Weather of the corporate world. Two years passed, and Bekins
reimagined the facility as a regular-use business park rather than a
contingency site, but still underground. Joseph Raymond, Bekins' director of
Archival Services, quipped that employees might be more productive underground
where they'd be "free from the distractions of the surface."</p>
<p>Bekins had bad news coming. The era of atomic storage had come to an end.
Corporate fear of popular revolution proved insufficient to fund the ten
million dollar project. The Bekins facility would never break ground. Iron
Mountain, quietly and under cover of their typical boosterism, had run out of
money.</p>
<p>In 1971, a group of investors formed Schooner Capital and bought them out.
Their strategy: to focus on business records management and compliance, and
largely drop the "underground" and "atomic" part. Beginning in 1978, Iron
Mountain built dozens of new storage facilities that were normal, above-ground
warehouses. At the same time, they shifted the focus of their sales from
security to "information management." New legal requirements and tax
regulations meant that records retention had become a complex and costly part
of many businesses; Iron Mountain offered to outsource the entire matter. Their
clerks collected records from businesses, filed them away, and destroyed them
when retention was no longer required.</p>
<p>Iron Mountain remains the largest company in the business today. Most US cities
have an expansive Iron Mountain warehouse somewhere on their outskirts, and
their mobile shredding trucks are a regular sight in business districts. Still,
a certain portion of the Cold War attitude remains. Unshredded records are said
to be transported in unmarked vehicles, to avoid attracting attention. Iron
Mountain facilities are not exactly hidden, but their locations are not well
publicized, and they continue to use armed guards. Distinctive red "Restricted
Area" signs surround each one.</p>
<p>And they still have plenty underground.</p>
<p>When you look into the history of Iron Mountain, you will see frequent
reference to the Corbis Collection. The story of Corbis would easily make its
own article, but the short version is that Corbis was founded by Bill Gates as
a sort of poorly-thought-out electronic picture frame company. Over the span of
decades, they amassed one of the world's largest private collections of
historic photographs and media, and then collapsed into an influencer marketing
firm. It is often noted that the Corbis collection, of over 15 million
photographs spanning 150 years, is stored at Iron Mountain. This isn't quite
correct, but it's wrong in an interesting enough way to make it worth
unpacking.</p>
<p>In the 1950s, the Northeast Pennsylvania Industrial Development Commission
(NPIDC) formed a task force to investigate opportunities for the reuse of the
state's growing number of abandoned coal mines. Coal is mined almost entirely
by the room and pillar method, and while there are practical challenges in
reusing coal mines in particular, the amount of space involved was
considerable. The NPIDC's first proposal was right in line with the cold war:
they proposed that the Civil Defense Administration use the mines to store
their stockpiles of equipment and supplies.</p>
<p>The Civil Defense Administration wasn't interested, they were worried that
firedamp (flammable coal gases) would make the mines dangerous and high
humidity would cause stored equipment to rust. Still, the idea rattled around
the state of Pennsylvania for years, and sometime around 1953 one such mine
near Boyers, PA was purchased by the newly formed National Storage Company.
National Storage became one of Iron Mountain's key competitors.</p>
<p>Iron Mountain has become as large as it is by following a fine American
economic tradition: monopolization. It outlasted its erstwhile atomic storage
competitors by buying them. Western States Atomic Storage Vaults and their
railroad tunnel, National Storage and their coal mine, and at least two other
similar ventures became part of Iron Mountain in the 1990s.</p>
<p>It is the former National Storage facility in Boyers that holds the Corbis
collection. It has a notable neighbor: the largest tenant at Boyers is the
United States Office of Personnel Management, which famously holds both
clearance investigation files and federal employee retirement records down in
the old mine. In 2014, the Washington Post called the Boyers mine a
<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhole-of-bureaucracy/">"sinkhole of
bureaucracy"</a>,
describing the 600 OPM employees who worked underground manually processing
retirement applications. These employees, toiling away in a literal paperwork
mine, were the practical result of a decades-long failed digitization program.</p>
<p>Underground storage is still a surprisingly large business. Some readers may be
familiar with "SubTropolis," an extensive limestone mine near Kansas City,
which offers 55 million square feet of underground space. SubTropolis has
never particularly marketed itself as a hardened or secure facility. Instead,
it offers very cost-effective storage space with good natural climate control.
Tenants include refrigerated logistics companies and the National Archives.
There are a number of facilities like it, particularly in parts of the eastern
United States where the geography has been amenable to room and pillar mining.</p>
<p>That's the irony of Iron Mountain: their original plan was a little too
interesting. Iron Mountain continues to operate multiple underground
facilities, both their own and those they have acquired. Some of them,
including Boyers, even have datacenters. The clients are mostly media
companies, with original materials they cannot easily duplicate, and legacy
government and financial records that would be too costly to digitize. Sony
Music stores their studio masters with Iron Mountain, a big enough
operation that some of Iron Mountain's underground sites have small recording
studios to allow for restoration without removing the valuable originals from
safekeeping. Miles of film are stored alongside miles of pension accounts. No
one talks about nuclear war. The bigger fear is fire, which is more difficult
to contain and fight in these old mines than in purpose-built archival
warehouses.</p>
<p>There are only so many masters to store, and the physical volume of corporate
records is quickly declining. Atomic vaults hit a limit to their growth. The
total inventory of underground corporate storage facilities in the United
States today is much the same as it was in the 1960s, with more closing than
opening. Offsite records storage is shrinking overall, and Iron Mountain is
effectively in the process of a pivot towards (above-ground) datacenters and
services.</p>
<p>Still, when you read about Mark Zuckerberg's 5,000 square foot bunker in
Hawaii, or Peter Thiel's planned underground project in New Zealand, one can't
help but wonder if the predictions of Bekins, and the Black Panthers, were just
ahead of their time.</p>
<hr>
<p>I hope you enjoy this kind of material on Cold War defense and culture. It's
one of my greatest interests besides, you know, anything underground. For those
of you who <a href="https://ko-fi.com/jbcrawford">support me on Ko-Fi</a>, in the next day
or two my supporter newsletter EYES ONLY will be a short followup to this
piece. It will discuss underground storage facilities of a slightly different
kind: the records vaults constructed by the Church of Scientology and the
Latter-Day Saints, and the extent to which these facilities also reflect Cold
War concerns.</p>
<p>I am also working on something about waste-to-energy facilities that will
probably be an EYES ONLY article, as a companion to an upcoming CAB article on
the history of an experimental Department of Energy biomass power plant in
Albany, Oregon. But first, I will write something about computers. I have to
every once in a while.</p>
	</article>
<pre>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------</pre>

	<article>
<h1>&gt;&gt;&gt; <a href="2024-10-26-buy-payphones-and-retire.html">2024-10-26 buy payphones and retire</a></h1>

<blockquote>
<p>PAYPHONES at High Volume</p>
<p>Existing sites! Earn BIG $$. Money Back Guarantee!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dropshipping AliExpress watches, AI-generated SEO spam websites... marginally
legal and ethical passive income schemes, that serve to generate that income
mostly for their promoters, can feel like a modern phenomenon. The promise of
big money for little work is one of the fundamental human weaknesses, though,
and it has been exploited by "business coaches" and "investment promoters" for
about as long as the concept of invesstment has existed. We used to refer mostly
to the "get rich quick" scheme, but fashions change with the time, and at the
moment "passive income" is the watchword of business YouTubers and Instagram
advertising.</p>
<p>And what income is more passive than vending machine coin revenue? Automated
vending has had a bit of a renaissance, with social media influencers buying
old machines and turning them into a business. The split of their revenue
between vending machine income and social media sponsorship is questionable,
but it's definitely brought some younger eyes to an industry that is as rife
with passive income scams as your average spam folder. Perhaps it's the
enforcement efforts of the SEC, or perhaps today's youth just need a little
more time to advance their art, but I haven't so far seen a vending machine
hustle quite as financialized as the post-divestiture payphone industry.</p>
<p>For much of the history of the telephone system, payphones were owned and
operated by telephone carriers. As with the broader telephone monopoly, there
were technical reasons for this integration. Payphones, more specifically
called coin operated telephones, were "dumb" devices that relied on the
telephone exchange for control. In the case of a manual exchange, you would
pick up a payphone and ask the operator for your party---and they would advise
you of the price and tell you to insert coins. The coin acceptor in the
payphone used a simple electrical signaling scheme to notify the operator of
which and how many coins you had inserted, and it was up to the operator to
check that it was correct and connect the call. If coins needed to be returned
after the call, the operator would signal the phone to do so.</p>
<p>With the introduction of electromechanical and then digital exchanges, coin
control became automated, but payphones continued to use specialized signaling
schemes to communicate with the coin control system. They had to be connected
to special loops, usually called "coin lines," with the equipment to receive
and send these signals. The payphone itself was a direct extension of the
telephone system, under remote control of the exchange, much like later devices
like line concentrators. It was only natural that they would be operated by the
same company that operated the control system they relied on.</p>
<p>Well, a lot of things have changed about the payphone industry. The 1968
Carterfone decision revolutionized the telephone industry by allowing the
customer to connect their own device. Coin operated telephones in the
traditional sense were unaffected, but Carterfone opened the door to a whole
new kind of payphone.</p>
<p>In 1970, burglar alarm manufacturer Robotguard blazed the trail into a new
telephone business. They imported a Japanese payphone that was a little
different from the American models of the time: it implemented coin payment
internally. Robotguard connected the payphone through one of their burglar
alarm autodialers, a device that was already fully compliant with telephone
industry regulations, and then hooked it up to a Southwestern Bell telephone
line in a department store in in St. Louis. By inserting a dime, the phone was
enabled and you could make a local call (the autodialer was used, in part, to
limit dialing to 7 digits to ensure that only local calls were made).</p>
<p>Robotguard had done their homework, consulting the same law firm that
represented Carterfone in the 1968 case. They believed the scheme to be legal,
since the modified Japanese payphone behaved, to the telephone company, just
like any other customer-owned phone. The New York Times quotes Southwestern
Bell, whose attitude is perhaps best described as resignation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Spokesmen for the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, the operating company
in that area, acknowledge that the equipment is in the store, that it is
working as described and that it appears completely legal. There is nothing
they can do about it at this time, they say.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There was, indeed, nothing that they could do about it. Robotguard had
introduced the Customer-Owned Coin-Operated Telephone, or COCOT, to the United
States. Payphones were now a competitive business.</p>
<p>Despite a certain air of inevitability, COCOTs had a slow start. First, there
would indeed be an effort by telephone companies to legally restrict COCOTs.
This was never entirely successful, but did result in a set of state
regulations (and to a lesser extent, federal regulations related to
long-distance calls) that made the payphone business harder to get into. More
importantly, though, the technical capabilities of COCOTs were limited. The
Robotguard design could charge only a fixed fee per call, which made it a
practical necessity to limit the payphone to local calls. Telephone company
payphones, which allowed long-distance calls at a higher rate, had an
advantage. Long-distance calls were also typically billed by minute, which made
it important for a payphone to impose a time limit before charging more. These
capabilities were difficult to implement in a reasonably compact, robust device
in the 1970s.</p>
<p>A number of articles will tell you that COCOTs became far more common as a
result of payphone deregulation stemming from the 1984 breakup of AT&amp;T. I would
love to hear evidence to the contrary, but from my research I believe this is a
misconception, or at least not the entire story. In fact, payphones were
deregulated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, but that was done in large
part because COCOTs were already common and telephone companies were unhappy
that conventional payphones were subject to rate regulation while COCOTs were
not [1].</p>
<p>Divestiture did definitely open the floodgates of COCOTs, although I think that
the advances in electronics around that time were also a significant factor in
their proliferation. In any case, several manufacturers introduced COCOTs in
1984 and 1985.</p>
<p>These later-generation COCOTs were significantly more sophisticated than the
mechanical system used by Robotguard. To the user, they were pretty much
indistinguishable from carrier-operated payphones, charging varying rates based
on call duration and local or long distance. This local simulation of the
telephone exchange's charging decisions required that each COCOT have, in
internal memory, a prefix and rate table to determine charges. Early examples
used ROM chips shipped by their manufacturer, but over time the industry
shifted to remote programming via modems. These sophisticated,
electronically-controlled coin operated phones that did not rely on an
exchange-provided coin line came to be known as "smart payphones" and even,
occasionally, as "smartphones."</p>
<p>Smart payphones greatly simplified payphone operations and were even adopted by
the established telephone companies, where they could save money compared to
the more complex exchange-controlled system. But they also made COCOTs
completely practical, as good to the consumer as any other payphone. As COCOTs
became remotely programmable, the payphone business started to feel like a way
to generate---dare I say it---passive income. All you had to do was collect the
coins. Well, that and keep the phone in working order, which would become a
struggle for the thinly staffed and overleveraged Payphone Service Providers
(PSPs) that would come to dominate the industry.</p>
<p>One of the new entrants into the payphone business was a company that
specialized in exactly the kind of remote management these new smart payphones
required: Jaroth Inc., which would do business as Pacific Telemanagement
Solutions or PTS. Today, PTS is the largest PSP in the United States, but that
isn't saying a whole lot. They enjoyed great success in the 1990s, though, and
were so well-positioned as a PSP in the '00s that they often purchased the
existing payphone fleet from former Bell Operating Companies that decided to
abandon the payphone business.</p>
<p>The 1990s were a good time for payphones, and they were also a good time for
investment scams. Loose enforcement of regulations around investment offerings,
the Dot Com Boom, and a generally strong economy created a lot of opportunities
for "telecom entrepreneurs" that were more interested in moving money than
information.</p>
<hr>
<p>The problem of 1990s telecommunications companies funded in unscrupulous ways
is not at all unique to payphones, although it did reach a sort of apex there.
I will take this opportunity to go on a tangent, one of those things that I
have always wanted to write an article about but have never quite had enough
material for: MMDS, the Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Service.</p>
<p>MMDS was, essentially, cable television upconverted to a microwave band and
then put through directional antennas. It was often marketed as "Wireless
Cable," sort of an odd term, but it was intended as a direct competitor to
conventional cable television. I think it's fair to call it an ancestor of what
we now call WISPs, using small roof-mounted parabolic antennas as an
alternative to costly CATV outside plant. Some MMDS installations literally
were early WISPs: MMDS could carry a modified version of DOCSIS.</p>
<p>Wireless cable got a pretty bad rap, though. If you pay attention to WISPs, you
will no doubt have noticed that while the low capital investment required can
enable beneficial competition, it also enables a lot of companies that you
might call "fly by night." Some start out with good intentions and just aren't
up to the task, while some come from "entrepreneurs" with a history of fraud,
but either way they end up collecting money and then disappearing with it.</p>
<p>MMDS had a <em>huge</em> problem with shady operators, and more often of the "history
of fraud" type. Supposed MMDS startups would take out television and newspaper
ads nationwide offering an incredible opportunity to invest in this exciting
new industry. The scam took different forms in the details, but the most common
model was to sell "shares" of a new MMDS company in the four-to-five-digit
range. Investors were told that the company was using the capital to build
out their network and would shortly have hundreds of customers.</p>
<p>In practice, most of these "MMDS startups" were in cities with powerful
incumbent cable companies and, even worse, preexisting MMDS operators using the
limited spectrum available for such a wideband service. They never had any
chance of getting a license, and didn't have anyone with the expertise to
actually build an MMDS system even if they got one. They just pocketed the
money and were next seen on a beach in Mexico or in prison, depending on the
whims of fortune.</p>
<p>These wireless cable schemes became so common, and so notorious, that if you
asked a lot of people what wireless cable was the two answers you'd get are
probably "no idea" and "an old scam."</p>
<hr>
<p>It only takes a brief look at newspaper archives to find that the payphone
industry was a little sketchy. There are constant, nationwide, near-identical
classified ads with text like "buy and retire now" and "$150k yearly potential"
and "CALL NOW!". Sometimes more than one appear back to back, and they're still
nearly identical. None of these ads give a company name or really anything but
a phone number, and the phone numbers repeat so infrequently that I suspect the
advertisers were intentionally rotating them. This was pretty much the
Craigslist "work from home" post of the era.</p>
<p>To understand payphone economics better, let's talk a little about how the
payphone business operated. Telephone companies had long run payphones on the
same payment model, by finding a location for the payphone (or being contacted
by the proprietor of a location) and then offering the location a portion of
revenue. In the case of incumbent telcos, this was often a fixed rate per
call. So someone owned the location and the payphone operator paid them in
the form of a royalty.</p>
<p>COCOTs enabled a somewhat more complex model. A COCOT might be located in a
business, connected to a telephone company line, and remotely programmed by a
service provider, all of which were different companies from the person that
actually collected the money. The revenue had to get split between all of these
parties somehow, but COCOTS weren't regulated and that was all a matter of
negotiation.</p>
<p>Much like the vending machine industry today, one of the most difficult parts
of making money with a payphone was actually finding a good location---one that
wasn't already taken by another operator. As more and more PSPs spread across
the country, this became more and more of a challenge. So you can imagine the
appeal of getting into the payphone hustle without having to do all that
location scouting and negotiation. Thus all the ads for payphone routes for
sale... ostensibly a turnkey business, ready to go.</p>
<p>Ah, but people with turnkey, profitable businesses don't tend to sell them.
Something is up.</p>
<p>Not all of these were outright scams, or at least I assume some of them
weren't. There probably were some PSPs that financed expansion by selling
or leasing rights to some of their devices. But there were also a lot of...
well, let's talk about the second largest PSP of the late '90s.</p>
<p>Somewhere around 1994, Charles Edwards of Atlanta, Georgia had an idea. His
history is obscure, but he seems to have been an experienced salesman, perhaps
in the insurance industry. He put his talent for sales to work raising capital
for ETS Payphones, Inc., which would place and operate payphones on the behalf
of investors.</p>
<p>The deal was something like this: ETS identified locations for payphones and
negotiated an agreement to place them. Then, they sold the payphone itself,
along with rights to the location, to an investor for five to seven thousand
dollars a pop. ETS would then operate and maintain the payphone while paying
a fixed monthly lease to the investor who had purchased it---something like
$83 a month.</p>
<p>It was a great deal for the investors---they didn't need any expertise or
really to do any work, since ETS arranged the location, installed the phones,
and even collected the coins. In fact, most investors purchased phones in
cities far from where they lived, such was the convenience of the ETS model.
There was virtually no risk for investors, either. ETS promised a monthly
payment up front, and the contract said that they would refund the investor
if the payphone didn't work out.</p>
<p>The ETS network was far larger than just Edwards could manage. Most of the
investment deals were sold by independent representatives, the majority of them
insurance agents, who could pick it up as a side business to earn some
commission. Edwards sold nearly 50,000 payphones on this basis, many of them in
deals of over $100,000. Small-time investors convinced of the value by their
insurance agents, many of them retirees, put over $300 million into ETS from
1996 to 2000.</p>
<p>There was, as you might have guessed, a catch. One wonders if the payphones
were even real. I think that at least many of them were; ETS ran job listings
for payphone technicians in multiple cities and occasionally responded to press
inquiries and complaints about malfunctioning payphones bearing their logo.
Besides, the telecom industry recognized ETS as a huge PSP in terms of both
installed base and call volume.</p>
<p>What definitely wasn't real was the revenue. ETS was a ponzi scheme. In 2000,
the SEC went for Charles Edwards, showing that ETS had never been profitable.
Edwards sponsored a NASCAR team and directed millions of dollars in salary and
consulting fees to himself, but in the first half of 2000 ETS lost $33 million.
The monthly lease payments to investors were being made from the capital put in
by newer investors, and even that was drying up.</p>
<p>SEC v. ETS went on for six years, in good part due to an appeal to the Supreme
Court based on ETS' theory that a contract that paid a fixed, rather than
variable, monthly rate could not be considered a security. In 2006, Charles
Edwards was convicted of 83 counts of wire fraud and sentenced to thirteen
years in prison.</p>
<p>Edwards was far from the only coin-op fraudster. ETS was not unusual except in
that it managed to be the largest. When a class-action firm and several state
attorneys general went after ETS, their press releases almost always mentioned
a few other similar payphone schemes facing similar legal challenges. Remember
all of those classified ads? I suspect some of them <em>were</em> ETS, but ETS also
had a more sophisticated sales operation than two-line classifieds. Most of
them were probably from competitors.</p>
<p>The payphone industry crashed alongside ETS; ETS almost certainly would have
collapsed (albeit likely more slowly) even if it had been above board.
Increasing cellphone ownership from the '90s to '00s made payphones largely
obsolete, and more and more established telcos and PSPs decided to drop them.
One of the reasons for PTS's ascent was its willingness to buy out operators
who wanted out: in 2008, PTS bought most of AT&amp;T's fleet. In 2011, they bought
most of Verizon's fleet. Almost every incumbent telephone company got out of
the payphone business and most of them sold to PTS.</p>
<p>Given all that, you might think that payphone scams were only a thing of the
'90s. And they mostly were, but you can imagine that there was an opportunity
for anyone who could adapt the ETS model to the internet age.</p>
<p>Pantheon Holdings did just that. It's even more difficult to untangle the early
days of Pantheon than it is ETS. Pantheon operated through a variety of shell
companies and brands, but "the Internet Machine Company" was perhaps the most
to the point. Around 2005, Pantheon built "internet kiosks" where customers
could check their email, print documents, and even make phone calls for a
nominal cash or credit card payment. Sometimes called "global business
centers," these kiosks were presented as an exciting business opportunity to
mostly elderly investors who were given the opportunity to buy one for just
$18,000.</p>
<p>Once again, the kiosks were real, but the revenue was not. Pantheon placed the
machines in low-traffic locations and did nothing to market them. By 2009, more
than a dozen people had been convicted of fraud in relation to the Internet
Machines.</p>
<p>Pantheon kiosks still turn up on the junk market.</p>
<p>[1] I spent quite a bit of time researching the history of payphone regulation
to try to understand exactly what did change in 1984, how many COCOTs operated
and on what legal basis from 1970-1984, etc. I did not have much success. What
I can tell is that COCOTs were very rare prior to 1984 (so rare that the FCC
apparently didn't know of any, according to a 1984 memo, despite the 1970
example), and by the late '80s were very common. The FCC seems to have taken
the view, in 1984, that COCOTs had <em>always</em> been legal, and just weren't being
made or used on any significant scale. That's somewhat inconsistent, though,
with the fact that suddenly after 1984 divestiture a bunch of companies started
making COCOTs for the first time. My best guess right now is that from 1970-1984
COCOTs were probably legal but were something of a gray area because of the lack
of any regulations specifically applying to them. Some combination of divestiture
broadly "shaking up" the phone industry, electronics making COCOTs much more
feasible, and who knows what else lead multiple companies to get into the COCOT
business in the mid-'80s. That lead the FCC to issue a series of regulatory
opinions on COCOTs that consistently upheld them as legal, culminating in the
1996 act dropping payphone regulation entirely.</p>
	</article>
<pre>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------</pre>

	<article>
<h1>&gt;&gt;&gt; <a href="2024-10-19-land-art-and-isolation.html">2024-10-19 land art and isolation</a></h1>

<p>Prescript: I originally started writing this with the intent to send it out to
my supporter's newsletter, <a href="https://ko-fi.com/jbcrawford">EYES ONLY</a>, but it
got to be long and took basically all day so I feel like it deserves wider
circulation. You will have to tolerate that it begins in the more
conversational tone I use for the supporters newsletter. I am going to write a
bit about some related local works of art and send that to EYES ONLY instead.</p>
<p>Over on <a href="https://pixelfed.social/i/web/profile/396485435616948986">pixelfed</a> I posted these two photos.</p>
<p><img alt="Turrell installation at The Crystals" src="https://computer.rip/f/landart/1.jpg"></p>
<p><img alt="Turrell installation at The Crystals" src="https://computer.rip/f/landart/2.jpg"></p>
<p>It's Saturday morning, I have coffee and the cat is here and the work thing I
was planning to do has mercifully turned out to not need to be done today, so I
have time to kill. Let's talk a little bit about Art before I take on a real
project for the day.</p>
<p>So let's talk about the photos first, and then we'll sort of widen our view to
the big picture. Neither photo is that good, tbh, I really enjoy architectural
photography but I rarely have more than my phone. It's actually rather
difficult to find any good angles to photograph this particular corner from
anyway, which is one of the common criticisms of it as a work of art. But I
have to actually say what it is! It's a corner of the upper floor of The Shops
at Crystals, an upscale shopping center attached to the Aria on the Las Vegas
strip. It opened in '09, and the building was designed by prominent architect
Daniel Libeskind.  It is, in my opinion, not really that interesting of a
building. It has a combination of dead mall vibes and Las Vegas energy that is
not all that compelling, and it doesn't have the surrealism of The Forum Shops
at Caesars, the Las Vegas destination I recommend if you want to see a real
shopping mall situation. But, it is connected to an APM (the Aria Express),
and I will take the slimmest of excuses to ride an APM.</p>
<p>There aren't a lot of good things I can say about Las Vegas architecture, but
one compliment I can extend is that the casino developers have mostly retained
a tradition of commissioning fine art for their buildings. Nothing can really
unseat Dale Chihuly's "Fiori di Como," the 2,000 square foot, 40,000 pound
glass sculpture that occupies the ceiling of the Bellagio's lobby. But the
Shops at Crystals took a pleasingly modernist direction by commissioning James
Turrell. Turrell is probably the most prominent member of the "Light and Space
movement," which can be simply described as an installation art view of
architecture with a particular emphasis on architectural lighting. Turrell's
portfolio includes an array of works he calls "Skyspaces," often vaguely
gazebo-like structures with apertures in their ceilings intended to frame the
sky as if it were a canvas. Most examples are in private ownership, the only
one I have seen is "Dividing the Light" at Pomona College (Turrel's alma
mater) in Claremont, California. I do recommend a visit.</p>
<p>There's something important to understand about the Skyspaces: the idea is more
or less that the art is the sky, and the space is only there to structure your
perception of it. Turrell has described them as naked-eye observatories. The
naked-eye observatory has a long tradition, perhaps unsurprisingly, since it
was the only kind of observatory until the development of the telescope.
Stonehenge is a rather famous one (I am referring, of course, to the Stonehenge
of Odessa, Texas. What else?). A lot of Turrell's work is like this, creating a
space to structure your view of the world beyond it, and he is particularly
interested in the sky as a subject. Stick a pin in that.</p>
<p>So back to the shopping mall. Turrell did a scattering of different projects
for the Crystals (I am hereforward dropping "The Shops At" for sanity),
including the monorail station. Now, I know you are thinking, what could
possibly appeal to me more than a James Turrell monorail station? Why have I
not up and moved to Las Vegas to devote my life to the preservation and
interpretation of this remarkable artifact?</p>
<p>Well, because it kind of sucks, is why. Almost all of the work Turrell did at
the Crystals feels badly hampered by the design of the larger building and the
practical necessities of an upscale shopping mall. It's hard to produce that
remarkable of a perceptual experience in a wide, crowded hallway. The monorail
station doesn't even always have Turrell's lighting turned on, is my
experience.  What stands out more is the space I photographed, basically an
awkward mezzanine floor that exists mainly to be a hallway to the monorail
station. You can't help but feel that it was handed over to Turrell because
they realized they'd made a mistake and there wasn't really anything else they
could do with the square footage. If you're in Las Vegas I would go to the
Crystals and take a look, because it is <em>something,</em> but it's a very long ways
from a masterpiece. Pretty much every view of it is intermediated by escalators
or food court signage, it's jarringly out of context, and exists in a broadly
uncomfortable part of the building that is too far from the ground floor to
appeal to shops. Instead, it hosts a traveling exhibition on Princess Diana.
And if that's not dead mall energy, I don't know what is.</p>
<p>So why are we talking about this, besides that I get to gush a little about
Turrell? Well, I really wanted to talk a little bit about land art, and I think
these smaller Turrell works are a good inroads. Land art can be succinctly
described as art that makes use of, or consists of, the landscape. One of the
prototypical works of land art is the Spiral Jetty, built by Robert Smithson on
the shores of the Great Salt Lake. It is what it says on the tin, a rock jetty
that reaches out into the lake before turning in on itself in a tightening
spiral. It was installed in 1970 and wore away with time, so for many years it
was completely submerged below the water. But the water is now receding, and it
is revealed once again, as a faint rock spiral in a dry plain. There is some
active debate over whether or not it would be appropriate to make repairs. It
is often an accepted part of land art that it will change over time due to
natural processes. At the same time, the Spiral Jetty's exact fate (to be
submerged and then later beached, as it were) was not foreseen and is largely a
result of human disruption of the ecosystem. So you can make arguments either
way.</p>
<p>In any case, it is an interesting aspect of the work (which merits a discussion
that makes up more than half of the Wikipedia page) that it exists, today,
mostly in the form of photographs. For much of its history it was entirely
invisible, and more recently it has reemerged, but in a severely eroded state. If
you are killing time in Utah on the wrong side of the lake, say because you
have been at the nearby Golden Spike National Historic Park, you should go see
it. Or perhaps not see it, as it no longer resembles Smithson's original
creation. This is, ultimately, the fate of all land art, as it is the fate of
the land. Think about that while you look at it.</p>
<p>One of the most famous works of landscape art is Walter De Maria's "The
Lightning Field," in Catron County, New Mexico. The Lightning Field has
something in common with the Spiral Jetty and several other prominent works of
land art: the Dia Art Foundation. Dia was founded in New York City in the '70s
with Schlumberger money, and had a rather explicit mission of funding art works
that are particularly expensive. This focus on large projects and the timing of
their heyday lead them naturally to land art. I would wager, just off the top
of my head, that roughly half of the prominent works of land art in the United
States are owned by Dia.</p>
<p>Land art really is big, and that can be its undoing. Turrell's Skyspace at
Pomona ran over $2 million, and it's not even <em>really</em> land art, I'm just
making a connection there in service of what I originally set out to talk about
but still haven't gotten to. I'm not sure if the total original cost of The
Lightning Field has been publicized, but it relied on grant funding from
multiple art foundations and the state, and a refurbishment about a decade ago
ran nearly half a million.</p>
<p>But, well, let's be real, it's not that unusual for original works of fine art
to run into the millions, and that's especially true of sculpture which often
requires fairly sophisticated fabrication and installation techniques. Land art
at its best tends to rely on sophisticated construction techniques, as well.
The Lightning Field, for example, required five months of extensive surveying
by land and air. Part of this was to produce what we would now call a digital
elevation map, in order to create the field's flat top despite the varying
terrain.</p>
<p>I am sort of purposely not describing The Lightning Field here. It's not that
it defies explanation, it's actually very easy to describe. In an article that
De Maria wrote himself for "Art Forum" to describe the project, he says that
"the sum of the facts does not constitute the work or determine its esthetics."
This is sort of a pretentious thing for a sculptor to say before rattling off a
bunch of large numbers, but he has a point: The Lightning Field is literally a
bunch of poles stuck in the ground, which is easy to tell you, but gives you
very little idea of what it is actually like.</p>
<p>This is a common and important aspect of land art. When I worked for Meow Wolf,
we talked a lot about "immersive art," which is pretty much the term that has
come to describe "whatever Meow Wolf is." If we allow ourselves some
rose-colored glasses, most land art projects were a form of immersive art, an
earlier form that seems to predate the forthright commercialization of the
projects I got to work on, like Meow Wolf's Omega Mart. To be fair, the
commercialization is part of the work, but it sure is on display. Immersive art
means that "you have to be there," and "you have to be there" is a great
opportunity for the real estate developer.</p>
<p>Ah, but this is indeed a rosy view of the past. There is another very
interesting trait of prominent works of land art. Since I have done such a
paltry job of describing The Lightning Field, go ahead and look up some photos.
They're worth a thousand words, and so you'll get... several thousand
words of information. You will quickly notice that there are <em>very few</em> photos
of The Lightning Field, and some of them turn out to be crops or recolors of
the others. The Dia Art Foundation, apparently according to Walter De Maria's
wishes, prohibits photography, or even the presence of cameras.</p>
<p>I have never been to The Lightning Field. This is also a surprise, I'm in
Catron County reasonably often. But it costs either $250 or $150 to visit
depending on the season, and the larger issue I have encountered is that the
visiting nights sell out immediately.</p>
<p>There is no public access to The Lightning Field. You have to make arrangements
with Dia to stay the night at a cabin on the property. Lots of people do this
and end up writing travelogues about how the experience changed them, and God
knows that I probably will too, some day. But after reading enough of these
travelogues you start to go a little mad. You are reading someone else's
accounting of an experience---something that is fundamentally an experience,
not a sight or a sound, not even space or light---that you have not had and
probably never will. It's like when you meet someone and the main and only
thing they have to talk about is their nomadic travels of Europe, but instead
of the routine lifestyle of people with Silicon Valley salaries and few
attachments, it is supposedly a great work of art. Like photographs of the
spiral jetty, personal essays of The Lightning Fields describe something that
hardly exists.</p>
<p>The magazine articles replace the art.</p>
<p>The charmingly-named journal "Art World Follies" featured an essay about The
Lightning Fields by art historian John Beardsley. It is titled "Art and
Authoritarianism." It's an exercise in self-control to not quote nearly the
entire thing here, but it is <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/778373">available on
JSTOR</a> if you have just three pages worth
of time to kill. Let me take just this, from the introduction:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...The directive posture assumed toward the viewer by De Maria and Dia
suggests that both artist and patron lack confidence in either the quality of
the work or the discernment of the viewer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I can respect that Dia has certain practical concerns that encourage them to
limit access to the site, such as preservation of both the artwork and the
delicate desert ecosystem that it incorporates. But Beardsley points out that,
like most landscape art, The Lightning Field is in a remote location. Distance
and unimproved roads provide a natural limiting effect on visitation to these
sites; I've been to the Spiral Jetty several times and seldom seen more than
one other visitor around---fewer than are permitted to stay at The Lightning
Field each night. And that's another Dia-owned site, although not one
originally commissioned by them. They clearly do not apply such restrictive
measures to everything.</p>
<p>It might be tempting to attribute it to finances, especially after seeing
Beardsley complain about the required $30 donation, which has gone up by 500%
at the least. I do think that Dia has some financial struggles, but no doubt
they could raise more revenue by accepting more visitors to the site.</p>
<p>So, while it is tempting to blame Dia for their restrictive attitude, it's
clear that Walter De Maria shares in the fault. Many of the restrictions are in
place at his request; the whole notion that you can only see the artwork
through a 24-hour stay in a remote cabin to which you were transported by Dia
staff was apparently part of his vision.</p>
<p>Artist's vision or not, it is an affront to the public.</p>
<p>There are no doubt some regional politics at play. I cannot help but view Dia
with skepticism. Dia is a high-society NYC institution with galleries in New
York and, incongruously, several of its most prominent holdings in remote parts
of Utah and New Mexico. That land art requires land is self-evident, but it
also tends to require a degree of isolation. The most prominent and ambitious
land art projects, even when conceptualized in the more populous East, tend to
be actualized in the West. Here, land is our most important asset, and in
places like Catron County, it often seems to be our <em>only</em> asset.</p>
<p>So you can see the appeal to land artists. But you can also see the indignation
when those land artists claim the very land as their art, and keep it for
themselves.</p>
<p>To say that The Lightning Field is a betrayal of Western values is probably a
little over the top. Besides, it takes only a casual reference to the Bundys to
show that those values are not universal. But it is fair to say that the kind
of person who travels the west and is interested in land art is the type of
person who is interested in the land itself, and holds it dearly. There is
something unbearable about Walter De Maria, an artist from and in New York
City, making his most famous work out of a slice of our desert and then
narrowly dictating the terms on which we can see it.</p>
<p>The earth did not set forth one hundred thousand acres of lava across El
Malpais and then establish an elaborate booking policy, except that you must
put in the effort to cross such difficult terrain. The beautiful and unique
Quebradas are remote but open to anyone willing to make the trip. De Maria
seems to view his work as part of this tradition: "the land is not the setting
for the work but a part of the work." And yet he apparently thinks of himself
as being far above it.</p>
<p>Much of the beauty of the land is in the discovery. De Maria writes that "the
sky-ground relationship is central to the work." Anyone who loves the desert
can tell you that the sky-ground relationship is different everywhere you look,
that it does not photograph well but must be experienced, that the most
important and striking examples of it are found by chance, or by the dedication
of long hours spent looking. Yet The Lightning Field, ironically, offers no
such experience. It is intensely curated, guarded by Dia's many restrictions,
relentlessly interpreted for its scant audience by the demands its now-dead
creator makes of them. "Isolation is the essence of Land Art," he said.</p>
<p>Smithson built the Spiral Jetty and then walked away. It is technically owned
by Dia but you would be hard-pressed to tell it apart from the public land that
surrounds it. It is, nonetheless, truly isolated. At the lightning field, they
make a show of leaving visitors on their own, but in a way that provides the
exact opposite message: you are being allowed to glimpse something special, but
only on its creator's terms, a creator who has made very certain that his
presence will not be forgotten.</p>
<p>I shouldn't be too hard on the Dia foundation. Not only the Spiral Jetty, but
also Nancy Holt's "Sun Tunnels" are owned by Dia and open to the public in the
way typical of things found in the desert. Like the land itself, they leave it
to the visitor to have an experience of their own.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, this demand for isolation that turns to isolationism has become
too typical of land art.</p>
<p>We started, you might remember, with James Turrell. His work at the Crystals is
open to the public in the most commercial sense possible, perhaps to its
detriment. Even there, he has made a concession to isolationism. By far the
best part of his multi-installation work there, titled "Akhob," was upstairs in
the Luis Vuitton. Access required not only a reservation but passing muster
with the high-end store's doorman. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have
survived COVID: Luis Vuitton stopped advertising Akhob in 2021 and, today, its
fate is unknown besides that there is no access. Like the submerged Spiral
Jetty, we can experience it only by photos, unless perhaps some shift in the
economy causes the waters to recede.</p>
<p>Turrell, as you might suspect, can be viewed as a land artist. The Skyspaces
have a natural connection to the land art movement, and as Turrell became more
ambitious, his projects became larger, taking on the scale of landforms. Since
1979, Turrell has been working on "Roden Crater." It is a cindercone near
Flagstaff that may one day become the greatest of the Skyspaces, excavated and
reconstructed as a naked-eye observatory.</p>
<p>It is a huge vision that has faced a great deal of struggle. Despite many
announced opening dates, it remained "under construction," closed to the public
for 45 years. More recently, a $10 million donation from Kanye West and a
partnership program with Arizona State University have brought in renewed
funding, but a "tentative opening date" of 2024 looks set to pass just like the
last five. In the mean time, it is mainly ASU students (a few of which have
been entitled to visit the site by ASU's partnership agreement) and celebrities
that have been found worthy. Besides Kanye West, with Kim Kardashian as a +1,
Drake recently used Roden Crater as an Instagram backdrop.  Clearly, the
mandatory donation to experience the isolation of Roden Crater is a great deal
more than $250. Perhaps I shouldn't be so cynical, but the main benefactor of
Roden Crater is the Dia Art Foundation, and plans call for a set of cabins by
which visitors will experience it.</p>
<p>Massive land art projects have a tendency towards vaporware, but that's not to
say that they never escape. Michael Heizer's "City" is in a similar vein to
Roden Crater, also initiated in the 1970s, also blowing through its proposed
opening dates, also admitting no visitors due to its incompleteness. But City
made it out: in 2022, it was finally declared open. It is managed by the Triple
Aught Foundation, which has apparently learned a thing or two from Dia.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Triple Aught Foundation, the 501(c)(3) that oversees and operates Michael
Heizer's City, has complete discretion as to the acceptance of any visitor
request. City is located on private property and only invited guests are
permitted on the property. All other visitors will be denied access to the
property. Invited guests must advise Triple Aught Foundation of any medical
conditions. The sculpture City is a registered work, protected by federal
copyright law. Triple Aught Foundation has a strict copyright enforcement
policy regarding unauthorized photographing or filming of the work. No
unauthorized reproductions, public display or distribution of copies of the
work, in whole or in part are permitted.  Anyone violating this policy will
be immediately asked to leave.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Only six visitors are allowed per day, three days a week, for a maximum of
three hours, weather permitting, for a fee of $150, from May to November.
Reservations are available on a strictly first-come-first-served basis.</p>
<p>You, I can say with a fair degree of confidence, will only ever experience City
in the form of the few photographs the Triple Aught Foundation has seen fit to
release. The Lightning Field, Roden Crater, they are all submerged, not by the
waters of the Great Salt Lake but by the inability of their creators to let
land art be like the land itself: unrestricted, unconfined, unassuming.</p>
<p>In the essay collection "LAND/ART New Mexico," curator Lucy Lippard writes that
"I've come to the reluctant conclusion that Land Art is for city people."</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I live between inhabited and mostly uninhabited areas---which makes this
essay a kind of NIMBY rant: not in my backyard, not on my back forty. Given
the fact that I have spent my life writing about art (sometimes Land Art),
and ranting about the importance of public art, this sounds like a kind of
betrayal. But it's hard to imagine what kind of art would work here, at the
edge of a tiny village in north central New Mexico, looking out across a
highway to private ranchlands and distant mountains. When I was a
citydweller, I might have welcomed the sight of some visual extravagance, or
oddity, or subtle highlights to my daily surroundings. But the fact remains
that even semi-rural New Mexico is hard to improve upon.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Perhaps that's the problem, perhaps land art as a movement is fundamentally at
odds with appreciation of the land itself. We might view Turrell, Smithson, De
Maria, Heizer as entitled for thinking that the land needed their help. It is
already art, and it always has been.</p>
<p>But we are humans, and we have always been inclined to interpret the land in
the context of its impact on us, and our impact on it. So often that impact is
happenstance, and more often for the worse than for the better. There must be
<em>some</em> room to manipulate the land entirely by intent, in service of aesthetics
and meaning rather than commercial exploitation. Indeed, the Land Art movement
viewed itself in part as an anti-commercial backlash to the museums and
galleries that held, and confined, so many forms of fine art. And yet, some of
the greatest works of the movement are displayed in conditions more
restrictive, more removed from the nature of the land, than the upper floor of
a Las Vegas Luis Vuitton.</p>
<p>"Isolation is the essence of Land Art." I am inclined to agree. But isolation
is not made, it is found. De Maria went to Catron County to seek it out, but
somehow left thinking that he had created it. This is not New York City, you do
not find space to think and experience behind a rope stanchion and a guest
list. The land is already there, and land artists should trust their audience
to experience it.</p>
<p><img alt="Spiral Jetty, 2021" src="https://computer.rip/f/landart/3.jpg"></p>
	</article>
<pre>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------</pre>

	<article>
<h1>&gt;&gt;&gt; <a href="2024-10-12-commercial-HF-radio.html">2024-10-12 commercial HF radio</a></h1>

<p>According to a traditional system of classification, "high frequency" or HF
refers to the radio spectrum between 3 and 30 MHz. The label now seems
anachronistic, as HF is among the lowest ranges of radio frequencies that see
regular use. This setting of the goalposts in the early days of radio
technology means that modern communications standards like 5G are pushing major
applications into the EHF or "extremely high frequency" band. The frontiers of
basic radio technology now lie in the terahertz range, where the demarcation
between radio waves and light is blurred and the known techniques for both only
partially apply. HF, by contrast, is ancient technology. HF emissions can be
generated by simple, brute-force means. Ironically, this makes HF a bit
difficult: the incredible miniaturization and energy efficiency of modern
electronics makes HF radio hard to receive and transmit in a reasonable
footprint, one of several reasons that HF radio sees little consumer use.</p>
<p>Let's briefly consider the propagation characteristics of the HF band, which
are its most remarkable property. HF frequencies have long enough wavelengths
that they can reflect and refract in the earth's atmosphere. Somewhat like the
skin effect observed with AC electricity or surface tension in liquids, HF
emissions have a tendency to bend their path to follow dielectric boundaries.
All of these effects are mercurial and difficult to predict; the reliability of
sky or ground wave HF propagation can depend on the time of day, the weather,
the number of sunspots. All of this makes HF radio a bit of a pain in the ass,
but it can be worth it to achieve a feat that higher radio bands cannot:
propagation beyond the line of sight.</p>
<p>As a rule of thumb, radio emissions in the VHF band and above behave much like
light. Many materials are more transparent to RF than they are to light, but
still, most modern radio communications will not propagate beyond the horizon,
over a hill, or even past a sturdy building. An HF transmission, by contrast,
can be received around the globe in good conditions.</p>
<p>HF radio thus appeals mostly to users that desire long-range communications
with minimal infrastructure, and that have the sophistication (of operating
practice or technology) to handle the vagaries of HF. The usual suspects are
militaries, who fall more on the side of technical sophistication by using
computer-driven link establishment systems, and amateurs, who enjoy the
complexity of the operating practice. Other major HF radio applications include
international broadcasting (often of either national or religious propaganda),
intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and communication with ships and
aircraft at sea. Nearly all of these applications are giving way to satellite
communications, but the relative simplicity and low cost of maintaining HF
equipment, and its independence from vulnerable satellites, give it enduring
appeal to government users.</p>
<p>Let's consider a few interesting examples of these government applications,
although they are not the focus of this article. Military radio is a curious
combination of secretive and well-documented. The US military possesses
multiple major radio systems, but is theoretically consolidating onto the
Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS). JTRS is an infamous military acquisition
debacle and has run vastly overbudget and behind schedule while failing to
deliver on many of its promises, but is now in daily use and consists of
a diverse lineup of software-defined radios that can operate a variety of
modes across many bands. In other words, it is a conceptually fairly simple
system that hides enormous, combinatorial complexity in its software. This
is modern military tradition.</p>
<p>Non-military systems are more recognizable to those without a background in
1990s military technology programs. One of the largest civilian government HF
radio systems is COTHEN, the Customs Over-The-Horizon Enforcement Network.
COTHEN was constructed, as the name suggests, by Customs and Border Patrol.  It
is now widely used by other federal law enforcement agencies with remote field
operations, as well as by the military when cooperating with law enforcement
agencies. The principle day-to-day business on COTHEN is drug interdiction by
CBP and the Coast Guard. COTHEN employs second-generation Automatic Link
Establishment (ALE), a popular system developed by the military to allow HF
radios to "discover" working frequencies between two locations. Besides various
mobile radios, COTHEN has fixed radio sites throughout the country, including
one <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@35.14125,-105.9082222,981m/">in the high plains east of
Albuquerque</a>.</p>
<p>There are many smaller HF radio systems operated by executive agencies, mostly
for continuity of operations. Many are integrated into SHARES, a joint system
sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security. For a more specific example,
the Department of Energy has installed HF radio equipment at many of its
facilities including national laboratories, infrastructure sites, and the
historic AEC campus at Germantown. The DoE operates its own ALE network, but
most (and very probably all) of its sites are also seconded to SHARES. DoE also
makes use of HF radio for communications with Office of Secure Transportation
vehicles.</p>
<p>We understand that there are government applications of HF radio, that's
probably no surprise to anyone. But what about commercial applications? The
complexity of HF operations, the size of the antennas, and ready availability
of other communications options (like the internet) limit the appeal of HF
to business users. Still, there must be some? Obtaining a license to use HF
radio is a reasonably simple procedure, the FCC has allocated a number of
HF ranges to the IG (industrial/business pool) service. As is usual in the IG
service, frequency allocations are not exclusive and there may be other users.
Interestingly, FCC regulations place a significant break point at 25MHz: 25MHz
to 30MHz is technically HF, but FCC rules don't really differentiate between
these frequencies and the more common business pool uses in VHF. Below 25MHz,
though, special rules apply.</p>
<p>47 CFR 90.266(b):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Only in the following circumstances will authority be extended to stations to operate on the frequencies below 25 MHz:</p>
<p>(1) To provide communications circuits to support operations which are highly important to the national interest and where other means of telecommunication are unavailable;</p>
<p>(2) To provide standby and/or backup communications circuits to regular domestic communications circuits which have been disrupted by disasters and/or emergencies. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>As is often the case in federal regulation, there are some additional terms
that require a little closer reading. 47 CFR 90.35, which governs the
Industrial/Business Pool radio service, has a table of possible frequency
allocations. For the range below 25MHz, the table specifies the following
restriction, in part:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>(c)(i) Only entities engaged in the following activities are eligible to use this spectrum, and then only in accordance with s 90.266:</p>
<p>(A) Prospecting for petroleum, natural gas or petroleum products;</p>
<p>(B) Distribution of electric power or the distribution by pipeline of fuels or water;</p>
<p>(C) Exploration, its support services, and the repair of pipelines; or</p>
<p>(D) The repair of telecommunications circuits. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Available bandwidth at these low frequencies is already rather constrained by
the allocations, but the situation is worse than it appears. HF propagation
behavior mean that radio operators seldom have their choice of anywhere in the
HF spectrum; usually there are only limited "windows" in which propagation is
good. It would not take very many users to create congestion in this valuable
long-range spectrum, so licenses are limited to users without other options.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, special restrictions below 25MHz mean that frequencies just
above 25MHz are quite popular. For example, from 25MHz-25.5MHz you can find a
veritable who's-who of the petroleum industry, who use HF radio for
communications with off-shore oil platforms. You also find some other peculiar
licenses in this range. For example, Ritron is a manufacturer of radio
equipment and holds a license for the use of 25-50MHz for the purpose of
demonstrating and testing that equipment. This 25-50MHz range is more or less
"low band VHF," which was formerly in reasonably common business use, but is
now becoming rare. Online discussion leads me to believe that it may not be
possible (or is at least very difficult) to obtain IG licenses for the low
band today, but some people that had them continue to renew them.</p>
<p>When I say "people" here, I mean it. One of the more common types of licensee
for this range is... people, filling out their application with a title of
"self" or "person." Although it is public record I am hesitant to give names or
addresses of these people, but it explains a lot about them that you can almost
always (invariably, from my spot-checking) find an amateur radio license for
the same person. I have known some amateur radio operators that obtained their
General Radiotelephone Operator license, a broad license for maintaining
certain types of commercial radio equipment, more or less for the hell of it. I
suppose obtaining a low-band IG license is similar, and adds some more bands
to your potential operations.</p>
<p>Let's limit our consideration further, then, to the rarefied frequencies below
25MHz. Besides special justification, applicants for these frequencies are
limited to certain emission types (generally narrow 2.8kHz emissions), must
use equipment capable of tuning across the entire range, must submit their
written communications plan, and are prohibited from testing or exercises
that exceed seven hours per week. There are relatively few such licenses, the
ULS returns just 61.</p>
<p>I totaled up the licenses by user type. For companies that provide radio
services, I categorized them with the industry they normally serve, except when
that industry was emergency communications itself. This sometimes required a
bit of a subjective call, as we'll see when looking at some specific licenses.
But here are license counts by type:</p>
<ul>
<li>Telecom providers: 23</li>
<li>Electrical utilities: 15</li>
<li>Emergency communications/disaster relief contractors: 11</li>
<li>Petroleum: 7</li>
<li>Railroads: 2</li>
<li>Ranches: 1</li>
<li>Weird: 1</li>
</ul>
<p>Let's discuss these a bit by category. Telecom providers are a fairly obvious
user group, as are electrical utilities. Both types of organizations operate
infrastructure over large areas and will be expected to begin recovery quickly
after a natural disaster or another event that disrupts conventional
communications infrastructure. These licensees include AT&amp;T, with the single
largest license count (9), Pacific Bell dba AT&amp;T California at the second
largest (4), down to smaller entities like the Grand River Dam Authority.
A notable selection is National Grid USA Service Company, which despite its
generic and almost sketchy name holds a fixed location license for the Nine
Mile Point Atomic Power Station among other power plants.</p>
<p>Verizon New York Inc. holds a license for a number of fixed locations including
an inconspicuous brick building (reminiscent in its design of early telephone
infrastructure but likely today a remote exchange) in Philmont, NY and a
mountaintop site near Schenectady. The license seems to cover multiple
telephone exchanges, only some of which have apparent HF antennas... some of
the locations listed may be historic, nearly all commercial HF licenses are
old, with renewal histories stretching back to the beginning of online records
in 2001. Besides, virtually all of these licenses include either a nationwide
mobile or nationwide temporary fixed location, making the listed locations
less important than they might otherwise be.</p>
<p>Most licenses are also nonspecific as to frequency. It is the nature of HF
radio that any given frequency will not reliably provide good propagation. The
frequency lists on commercial HF licenses routinely stretch on for multiple
pages of 20 ranges each, giving operators ample choice. Besides, the CFR
requires these licensees to be frequency-agile across the band, in part because
the FCC may require them to stop using a given frequency at any time.</p>
<p>The next largest category of licensees are companies that provide
communications services to relatively nonspecific customers. Some, such as
L3Harris, are principally in the defense industry but likely also provide
services to infrastructure providers and regional governments. A few are tiny,
like Hazard Zone Technology LLC, which does business from a residential
address. Judging by forum discussions of the FCC's approach to HF licensing, it
is possible that some of these smaller licensees are largely fictitious
entities created to entice the FCC to issue a sub-25MHz license despite the
restriction to emergency communications. While not conclusive, the fact that
the same individual holds both a general radiotelephone license and an amateur
extra license with a vanity call sign is certainly suggestive of a certain
personality. There are several such examples, not an inconsiderable portion of
the 61 total.</p>
<p>Others are familiar names in an unfamiliar context. Cisco Systems holds a
license that lists their San Jose and Research Triangle Park campuses, besides
a nationwide mobile location. This license is likely intended to cover the use
of HF equipment as a backup point-to-point link for customers of fully managed
industrial communications services, but it's hard to say exactly. They have
apparently demonstrated a mobile communications trailer for emergency response
coordination at conferences.</p>
<p>Just those three categories get us into a long tail. A railroad, CSX, holds two
licenses. A ranch holds one; it's unclear how the ranch would qualify under the
requirements but they may have held the license long enough to be
grandfathered.  The justification listed on the license is simply farm
operations, not a 90.266 justification statement as found on most of these. The
sub-25MHz restrictions have applied since 1983, making it difficult but
certainly not impossible to hold a grandfathered license. One license is held
by a missionary transportation group, they may have also held the license since
before 1983 and list a location in Guam. They likely use HF to communicate with
facilities on outlying islands.</p>
<p>There is exactly one license that I have described as "Weird." It was issued to
the Bran Ferren Corporation in 2000. Bran Ferren is a bit of a character, a
former executive at Walt Disney Imagineering who apparently has a side business
of building off-road vehicles. This helps explain the justification statement,
"MANUFACTURER AND DEVELOPER OF ALL TERRAIN COMMUNICATIONS VEHICLE." I would
like to know exactly which vehicle this relates to, but the Bran Ferren
Corporation keeps a low profile as compared to Ferren's main business venture,
Applied Minds. Bran Ferren Corporation holds an active USDOT motor carrier
number, but has had zero vehicles inspected in the last two years. That may not
mean anything, they are listed as a private (not for hire) carrier and inspections
may not be required. It's all a bit of a head-scratcher.</p>
<p>These 61 licenses for sub-25MHz commercial radio represent only a tiny fraction
of the activity in the HF band. Besides amateur radio, a long list of
government users are authorized to use HF radio by the NTIA, rather than FCC.
Indeed, the NTIA master file includes at least hundreds of entries under 25MHz,
more detail will have to wait on my finally finishing the parser for the more
recent format they have used for FOIA disclosures (universal rule: if you spend
many hours writing tools to parse a PDF export of a relational database back
into a relational database, they will change the format of the PDF).</p>
<p>High-frequency traders have created renewed interest in HF radio, because of
its low latency for global communications and the increasing ease of
implementing automatic link negotiation with SDRs. <a href="https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/05/07/shortwave-trading-part-i-the-west-chicago-tower-mystery/">Sniper in
Mahwah</a>
has some well-known writing on this topic. To date, the FCC has authorized this
activity only on an experimental basis. In 2023, a group called the Shortwave
Modernization Coalition (SMC) and consisting of a group of HFT firms submitted
a petition for rulemaking to allow regular use of the 2-25MHz range. The
petition opened docket RM-11953, which remains open. Most recently, the FCC
conducted a series of meetings between the SMC and federal spectrum users to
discuss the impacts of such a new radio service.</p>
<p>Various documents filed by SMC do contain interesting details. SMC members are
operating at least fourteen experimental HF sites, with one operating since
2016 and most since 2020. The median transmit power (EIRP) is 21.5kW, and the
experimental licenses authorized 5.06-30MHz while SMC members conducted most
activity between 6.675 and 21MHz. The ARRL and various amateur radio operators
have filed comments opposing the change, a competing HFT radio operator has
discussed a counter-proposal that would impose performance obligations on
commercial HF radio operators ("use it or lose it" rules). The FCC has not yet
produced a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, the next step in the process. They
are not obligated to, and it is possible the proposal will not reach that
stage. For its part, the federal government itself has weighed in (in the form
of comment from the NTIA), and has requested that the FCC either extensively
study how such commercial HF use would mitigate interference with federal
users, or exclude the use of any frequencies allocated to federal use. This
includes certain bands like the Radio Astronomy service allocation at 13MHz
that exist as a matter of federal policy due to foreign agreements. For my
own part, I am skeptical that the FCC will act on the SMC petition unless the
scope of the SMC's proposed use is reduced.</p>
<p>Finally, it is worth noting that these commercial HF licenses do not represent
the full extent of private industry use of HF radio for continuity of
operations. Some critical infrastructure operators have been sponsored by
federal agencies as operators of SHARES stations. However, SHARES documents
suggest that there are relatively few of these stations (around 100),
suggesting that they almost completely overlap with commercial HF licenses.
State and municipal governments also operate HF radio stations, which are
generally licensed under public safety radio services. A curious exception is
the City of Lafayette, Louisiana, which holds an IG commercial license for HF
frequencies. I suspect that license is actually for the use of the
publicly-owned Lafayette Utilities System (it lists electrical distribution as
justification), and was issued in the name of the City of Lafayette for
bureaucratic reasons.</p>
	</article>
<pre>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------</pre>

	<article>
<h1>&gt;&gt;&gt; <a href="2024-09-26-the-GE-switched-services-network.html">2024-09-26 the GE switched services network</a></h1>

<p>We currently find ourselves in something of a series, working our way from
<a href="https://computer.rip/2024-09-08-private-lines.html">private lines</a> to large
private line systems like the four-wire private-line <a href="https://computer.rip/2024-09-14-the-national-warning-system.html">national warning
system</a>.
Let's continue to build on the concept of the private line into large
corporate systems.</p>
<p>In principle, a large organization in want of a private telephone system could
build one out of a set of private lines and switches, such as under a Centrex CU
(Customer Unit) arrangement. And this did happen: one common type of private
line was the tie line, a private line used to link two switches together (which
could be PABXs or Centrex) so that users could call from one to the other
without using a conventional dial telephone line. This could save money, if
usage of the tie line was heavy enough and especially if the two switches were
far enough part that a standard call would be long-distance.</p>
<p>Consider a corporation with two large offices, each with a PABX. If they are in
different local calling areas, calls between them placed by dial line would be
long distance. If employees at the two offices call each other often, the long
distance bills would add up to more than the fixed monthly cost of a tie line
from one office to the other. There are a few different ways to solve this
problem, such as getting WATS (wide area telephone service) at one or both
offices, but it illustrates the general idea that getting a fixed private line
can sometimes be a cost-saving measure compared to placing a lot of calls over
standard dial service.</p>
<p>But what about a bigger organization, with many offices? You can imagine that
getting a huge number of tie lines between different offices, planning where
those tie lines should be located and how many were needed on each link, could
become a feat of traffic engineering on par with the telephone company's own
work. It might be easier to just pay the telephone company to work it out, and
indeed, that's what large organizations often did.</p>
<p>So let's say the telephone company meets this request by designing a scheme of
tie lines and Centrex exchanges. It's not so far off the mark to say that this
describes AUTOVON. AUTOVON was a complete system of tandem exchanges and at
least semi-private telephone lines provisioned by AT&amp;T [1] for use by the
military.  The problem with this arrangement is that it is very expensive: the
customer is paying the telephone companies to purchase, install, and maintain a
huge amount of hardware, just for the customer's private use.</p>
<p>Now, comparing AUTOVON on a price basis is both difficult and unfair. Difficult
because AUTOVON was paid for in a somewhat complex way, by the military paying
a central, cumulative rate for the entire system and then performing cost
recovery from individual user agencies and installations using a non-trivial
cost assignment calculation. It is also often said that the Bell System
themselves did not recover the full cost of AUTOVON from the military and that
it was, to some extent, subsidized by other telephone services.</p>
<p>And I say unfair, because AUTOVON was more than just a private telephone
network. It was a <em>hardened</em> private telephone network, with four-wire service
and a precedence capability that required the development of novel equipment.
It wasn't really expected to save money compared to the public telephone
system, because it was acquired in order to provide capabilities that the
public telephone system did not.</p>
<p>Still, we can safely say that AUTOVON was expensive. A 1979 study by the
Defense Communications Agency, responsible for AUTOVON cost recovery at that
time, comes out to an impressive total of $255,492,000 in AUTOVON operating
costs for FY 1978. By way of example, the report puts the monthly service cost
of a two-way capability from CONUS to Europe with priority precedence at
$1,182. Obviously this example case is one of the most expensive, but I still
shudder to imagine a monthly phone bill of over eleven hundred dollars in 1979
money. The military was willing to swing the stiff cost of AUTOVON because,
first, it was the military and they were willing to swing the stiff cost of
many things, and second because AUTOVON's military capabilities would be very
expensive to build by any means. It was the Cold War, after all, and it could
be said that outspending the Soviet Union was a military objective.</p>
<p>The situation was rather different when it came to non-military communications.
The civilian federal government ran up some enormous telephone bills between
its many offices, and initially considered purchasing an AUTOVON-like system to
serve as a private network between federal offices. The concept simply wasn't
cost effective, it likely would have increased the cost of federal telephone
calls overall. The Federal Telecommunications System or FTS would eventually
come to be, but not in the form of a private switched system. It is, after all,
intuitive that cost savings would not come from installing a great deal of
dedicated hardware. Rather, the Bell System would have to find a way to serve
these large institutional customers with <em>less</em> investment. And that was the
Common Control Switching Arrangement, or CCSA.</p>
<p>It is very tempting to draw an analogy between the CCSA and virtualization in
contemporary computing, but it is probably more accurate to draw an analogy
between the CCSA and LPARs in IBM hardware, or even more aptly, to
virtualization's early precedent in the limited subdivision capability of
Babbage's difference engine. Let's stop indulging the temptation and explain it
more directly: a CCSA is created by configuring existing telephone switches to
treat a subset of their lines as part of a separate network.</p>
<p>The technical details by which this was achieved varied significantly by the
switch. CCSAs were introduced in the early 1960s and could be configured on the #5
crossbar exchange, where "configuration" consisted of strapping or jumpering
certain components of the switch to operate independently of the others. CCSAs
continued just about to the modern era, where configuration became a matter of
selecting the appropriate lines in the business office system that generates
configurations for computer-controlled exchanges.</p>
<p>I think that it's most interesting to examine the CCSA by way of example---by
looking at a specific, real CCSA. BSP 310-200-007 I2 (1966) conveniently
provides a directory of the code numbers that were used to identify CCSAs
within the telephone system. Number 02 is FTS, the Federal Telecommunications
System. I didn't bring it up without reason, the concept of the CCSA was
developed in large part in order to bring the cost of FTS under control.
We can ponder what happened to number 01, but I'm guessing that AT&amp;T used
that code for testing and thus reserved it, or maybe even to identify the
public telephone system.</p>
<p>One could think of the normal, public telephone system as just another CCSA,
although as I understand it this was not the nature of the actual
implementation. Another appealing analogy for the CCSA is the VLAN, we could
think of these CCSA network numbers as VLAN tags. In this analogy, the public
telephone system is the PVLAN, sometimes called 0 or sometimes called 1 at the
whim of vendors. If you are familiar with VLANs, that somewhat illuminates why
I say that the public telephone network is not just another CCSA: it is the
"untagged" network into which equipment not capable of CCSAs and lines not
attached to a CCSA are presumed to exist. Anyway, that's all besides the point,
what other CCSAs existed?</p>
<p>04, General Electric. 05, New York Central (railroad), 06 Lockheed, 07 State
of California, 08 AUTOVON (used to facilitate expansions of AUTOVON over
non-AUTOVON telephone infrastructure, as a more cost effective way to provide
AUTOVON lines at smaller installations), 09 American Airlines, 10 Boeing,
11 Westinghouse, 12 Western Electric, 13 IBM, 14 North American Aviation.
That's the complete list as of 1966, and while short, it is a who's-who of
the industrial giants of the post-war United States. Plus the State of
California. Most state governments used large Centrex-and-WATS arrangements,
but some combination of the large size of California and GTE's different
approach to the network steered them in the CCSA direction.</p>
<p>Of these CCSAs, I will focus on General Electric. There are two reasons: first,
GE had an early and large CCSA---the largest CCSA outside of the federal
government, at the time. Second, I was an intern at a failing GE business in a
large, half-abandoned corporate campus [2] during the summer that the last
vestige of the GE Switched Services Network, as AT&amp;T called it, was retired.
Among my scattershot duties was working on the decommissioning of the campus's
Nortel PABX in favor of Cisco UCM. GE SSN would go with it, replaced by IP
trunking between UCM sites.</p>
<p>In 1963, the GE SSN spanned fifteen central offices ranging from New York to
Los Angeles, all #5 crossbars. It was intended to provide voice as well as data
at 1200bps.  Unlike some (mostly federal) CCSAs, it was designed to provide
standard two-wire dial service only, without station-to-station four-wire
connections or call precedence. In other words, it was a standard telephone
network, but intended to make calls between GE offices more reliable and less
costly than calls over the long-distance telephone network.</p>
<p>One of the complications of the GE SSN, and of CCSAs in general, is the
diversity of telephone equipment in use across the different corporate offices.
The GE of 1963 had Centrex service, step-by-step PABXs, crossbar PABXs, key
systems, and manually operated PBXs. All of these were integrated into a
7-digit dialing scheme for GE SSN, with the NNX prefix (different from NXX used
in the public telephone network by prohibiting a 0 or 1 in the second digit
position) identifying a location on the network such as a PBX, and the
four-digit subscriber number generally being the telephone's local extension,
padded with arbitrary digits as needed to be four digits long. Of course, the
details were less tidy, with smaller locations sharing prefixes and some
locations acting almost like toll stations with single telephones on the
GE SSN and selecting it by key.</p>
<p>In general, though, at PABX-served locations, extension users had a choice as
to how to place their call. The configuration wasn't the same at every office,
but the recommended practice was to use a 9 prefix (or "exit code") to dial on
the public telephone network, and an 8 prefix to dial on the GE SSN. Most PABXs
have some version of this capability: specific trunks can be selected for
outgoing calls based on the dialing prefix.</p>
<p>At locations with manual exchanges and locations without compatible PABXs, GE
SSN calls had to be placed with the assistance of the local PBX operator. Still
other locations used a small PABX connected via tie line to a larger PABX at a
larger office, in this case the dialing prefix "18" was recommended to first
dial a trunk from the satellite PABX to the main PABX, and second from the main
PABX to the telephone exchange providing GE SSN service.</p>
<p>Indeed, let's reflect a bit on the wiring scheme involved. </p>
<p>CCSAs were served by Offices, like the fifteen I mentioned for GE. FTS and
AUTOVON had more offices (AUTOVON's CCSA office list tellingly includes the
proper AUTOVON exchanges), but most CCSAs had fewer, sometimes only a handful.
Between these offices, trunk capacity could be shared with normal  telephone
traffic, giving CCSAs a significant cost advantage. Individual phones (or PABXs
or etc) on CCSAs needed to be connected to an actual CCSA office, though, in
order to have access to the CCSA at all. This made practical CCSAs sort of a
hybrid situation.</p>
<p>A given GE office might have lines running directly to the serving office, for
example in New York City where there were two offices on the GE SSN. Offices
that weren't near a 5XB included in the scheme, though, would need to somehow
be connected up to one. The BSPs are not replete with details, but presumably
this was done using the fairly conventional foreign exchange service.</p>
<p>I think I have mentioned this before but I will provide a very short summary.
In the VoIP industry, it is extremely common to identify the "ends" of a
telephone subscriber loop using the terms FXO and FXS, for Foreign Exchange
Office and Foreign Exchange Station. Confusingly, the terms refer to where a
given connection "goes" rather than where it "is," with the result that a
Foreign Exchange Office connection is what you would plug into a phone, and a
Foreign Exchange Station connection is what you would plug into a device like
an ATA---something that provides talk battery, ringing, etc., the traditional
role of the telephone office.</p>
<p>So the "Office" and "Station" part of those terms makes sense, besides the fact
that they are arguably the opposite way around from what you would first think.
But what about the Foreign Exchange? Well, these terms predate VoIP by decades,
and were originally used to identify the ends of a foreign exchange service.</p>
<p>Foreign exchange was a specific type of private line that allowed a phone to be
connected to a different central office from the one that physically served it.
There are different reasons that this was useful, but a common one had to do
with long-distance rates and suburban areas: it was historically common in
large metro areas that suburbs could call into the city at local rates, but
suburbs could not call into other suburbs at local rate... that would be a long
distance call. You can see that this provides a bit of an economic advantage to
city phones. So if you are, say, a plumber with your shop located in a suburb,
you might pine after a big-city telephone line that would allow more of your
prospective customers to call you for free. Foreign exchange could solve that
problem.</p>
<p>When you ordered foreign exchange service, the telco connected your phone line,
at the distribution frame of your local central office, directly to a private
line. The private line went to a central office in the Big City, where it was
connected at the distribution frame to a local line served by the switch. In
practice there were complications and details to how this was set up, but this
description gives you the idea: your telephone was now connected to the switch
in a different central office from the one your local loop was actually
connected to.</p>
<p>Foreign exchange service was expensive, because it took up private line
capacity, so various combinations of WATS, InWATS, zenith numbers, toll-free
numbers, etc. have pretty much replaced it. Some of the terminology got stuck
in our modern telephone parlance, though. FXO and FXS were designations used by
the telco to keep track of which ends of the private line needed to connect to
what equipment. Why was I talking about this, though? Oh, right, because large
CCSAs in practice also relied on what was basically foreign exchange service in
order to connect outlying locations to CCSA offices.</p>
<p>It's a good thing, here, that most of these GE offices had PABXs. This limited
the number of outside lines that needed to actually go to a CCSA office. What I
am calling foreign exchange lines could also be viewed as tie lines, not really
serving phones but providing trunks from PABXs to CCSA offices.</p>
<p>The nature of the CCSA is pretty much in its name: it is a switched private
line service, but it makes use of common control equipment to minimize costs.
I have tried to make terminology a little simpler here, but I have kept saying
"GE SSN." Switched Services Network, or SSN, seems to have been a term used by
the Bell System to refer to any private switched network. A CCSA was one of the
ways of implementing an SSN, and seems to have been the most common throughout
telephone history. There were not many truly private switched systems. AUTOVON
could be considered an example, although it had requirements above and beyond
typical telephone service. That leaves the FAA as a purer example, as the FAA
used a significant number of private line services for both switched and
unswitched communications between air traffic control sites and equipment.</p>
<p>Incidentally, a precursor to AUTOVON was called SCAN, the Switched Circuit
Automatic Network. SCAN was a US Army four-wire system, because four-wire
service was required for the cryptographic equipment of the era to function.
AUTOVON seems to have inherited its four-wire nature directly from SCAN.
Skimming through a telephone tariff almost always turns up some interesting
details, one of them being that a few state telephone tariffs describe
Switched Service Networks as being private line service based on either CCSA or
SCAN. Given that these same 2024 telephone tariffs define SCAN as a federal
government service for secure communications, this definition (and the presence
of an entry for SCAN at all) seems to be purely a holdover from some
fifty-year-old tariff documents. It does go to show that non-common control
switched services networks were uncommon enough that telcos viewed AUTOVON as
the odd exception to the CCSA rule.</p>
<p>I am trying not to get too tied up in the history of AUTOVON, because it is
easily its whole own article. I do think it is fair to say that the CCSA
emerged largely as a response to the high price of AUTOVON, as building FTS
based on the pattern of AUTOVON was deemed completely unrealistic on a cost
basis. FTS launched in 1963, not far behind AUTOVON at all, but consisted of
CCSA service for long-distance calling with PABXs in government offices
furnished under lease agreements. Once the heavy lifting had been done for
FTS, it was natural to extend CCSA as an offering to large private companies.</p>
<p>FTS also holds some of the seeds of the Bell System's undoing. High costs and
lackluster service plagued FTS in its early years. During the 1970s the General
Service Administration, which was responsible for FTS, decided to introduce a
competitive bidding process for long-distance capacity. That lead to companies
like Western Union and MCI joining the network, and the introduction of
least-cost routing to select the carrier. These ideas would also spread from
government to private industry, helping to set up the industry-wide tensions
that culminated in the 1982 breakup of AT&amp;T.</p>
<p>A common term in the telephone industry is "Universal Service." In the modern
world, universal service is understood to be the goal of providing telephone
service to all customers. The Universal Service Fund, for example, levies a fee
on telephone lines to subsidize the provision of telephone service to those who
would otherwise be unable to afford it. This is a recent invention. 1960s
documentation on CCSAs makes repeated reference to Universal Service, a very
different form of the concept championed by AT&amp;T more or less until its
breakup: that everyone would be served by one, unified telephone system, the
Bell System. During the early days of the telephone, before AT&amp;T's monopoly was
cemented, Universal Service was a rallying cry against competing telephone
companies, whose independent networks interfered with the ability of any
telephone to call any other. In the mid-century, it became a term somewhat like
public switched telephone network (PSTN). CCSAs were capable of Universal
Service, where desired, on a somewhat limited basis, in that CCSA exchanges
could be configured to allow calling outside of the CCSA, into the public
system.</p>
<p>It is amusing, then, that AT&amp;T was so willing to abandon the ideal of universal
service when their customers offered to pay for it. But that's business, and in
the mid-century, AT&amp;T was one of the biggest businesses in the world. CCSAs
show us some of the ups and downs of the age of the telephone monopoly: CCSAs
were an innovative concept that was rapidly developed and delivered, first to
the government and then to private customers, over a span of just a few years.
They were also frightfully expensive, and offered a new level of lock-in that
kept customers from using competitive carriers.</p>
<p>It's hard to find any contemporary information about GE's private telephone
system. It has almost entirely vanished from history, except in the form
documented by the early BSPs. I don't even quite remember what it was called
when I was at GE, I think it might have had "star" in the name. There was a
printed directory to help you figure out the correct office code and means of
transforming an extension in order to dial over the system. I don't think the
copy I saw was recent, I'm not sure if a recent copy even existed. The system
was barely used at all. It was replaced by a common modern arrangement, least
cost routing with IP trunks.</p>
<p>When calling another GE office, the Cisco Call Manager installation would
connect the call over the data network to the other office's Call Manager.
Very practical, very easy to use, kind of boring.</p>
<p>[1] Even prior to divestiture, the practical construction and operation of
these telephone systems was split between AT&amp;T Long Lines and the telephone
operating companies. Many, but not all, of these were subsidiaries of AT&amp;T.  In
the case of AUTOVON, for example, we must consider that non-AT&amp;T subsidiary GTE
built and operated part of the system. I'm trying not to get bogged down in
this complexity, but I'm also trying not to keep writing "AT&amp;T" when referring
to work done by multiple companies, some of them independent. Please do me the
kindness of understanding that when I use terms like "the telephone company" or
even "the Bell system" I am trying to encompass all of the parties, AT&amp;T, Bell
Operating Companies, independents, etc. that were involved in this work.  The
term I use may not be exactly correct.</p>
<p>[2] It was GE Intelligent Platforms, and the beautiful but poorly maintained
corporate estate in Charlottesville, itself the remains of a failed joint
venture,  might have been a more suitable exterior for <em>Severance</em> than Bell
Labs Holmdel.</p>
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