It wasn’t a Bird on a Wire or even a Squirrel, just old wires causing problem with data transmission. Recently, a colleague wrote a page about why things sometimes run slow on the Internet. She is an awesome technician and had a myriad of reasons why things can get slow or not work on the Internet. My experience with slowness or not working with digital communication started way before the “Internet” existed as we know it today.
So, let me backtrack here and say that my experience with data transmission started way back in the 1970’s. We were still punching our computer code into punch cards and hand-carrying them to be fed into the big huge mainframe computer in an isolated huge room full of tape and disc drives. In my case, the mainframe was 22 miles from my office.
The computer industry was expanding rapidly at that time, and we gained the capability to read the cards at our site and transmit the code over the telephone lines to the computer. It was Great when it worked. Unlike all the interfaces that have to be used today with the Internet, it was just one simple line. So why did it work sometimes and not other times? The telephone lines. They were old and exposed to the elements. When it rained, there was static on the lines. You could hear it when you made a phone call (landline, no fancy cell phones back then).
New Data Transmission Ability
At that time, I was still pretty young and also going to college at night. I was working for a military installation, and some of my classes were in the Pentagon. My classmates were mostly military officers, and I was a bit intimidated by them. The class I was taking was about the new data transmission ability. I had an assignment to give a presentation in front of the class. I was very nervous, and what I knew seemed very elementary. What I talked about was the telephone lines.
I described one instance of problems we were having sending data to an encryption site to be encrypted, which would then transmit it to a second encryption site to be unencrypted. The data was somehow being scrambled in transmission. I showed an image of a data stream – dots and pauses – digital display of data – and explained that if any of that was changed by the weather swaying the telephone lines and them having static, the data could not be kept intact. Picture a blip in that nice image on the left.
I was embarrassed by the simplicity of my presentation, but afterward the officers all commended me on explaining it so simply, so that they could understand it all.
So, in conclusion here, reading my colleague’s explanation about the many, many interfaces on the Internet today, I was reminded of this situation way, way back in the very beginning and realized how far we have come in my lifetime.
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