The Future End of Classic Computing

From: James B. DiGriz <jbdigriz_at_dragonsweb.org>
Date: Tue Apr 2 14:39:19 2002

Douglas H. Quebbeman wrote:
>
>
> FYI...
>
> John Draper was arrested and convicted in Pennsylvania in '77 or '78
> for "possession of a device capable of defrauding the telephone company
> of its rightful tarrifs". I met him on his journey back to the left coast after
> he got out.
>
> The device in question? The Apple (autodialing) Modem, which he was
> developing for Woz.
>
> Why? Well, Woz doesn't like to do too much in hardware; he always
> like to minimize the logic design and use software to do the job
> (a great philosphy for controllers, a louosy one for general purpose
> computers). So rather than design the hardware to have fixed-frequency
> tones, the software could determine the tones to be used. Of course,
> that meant you could select the ESS interswitch "MF" tones instead of
> DTMF.
>
> Today, virtually every modem with a Rockwell chipset has this feature.
>
> Has Rockwell been locked up? Unlikely...
>
> -dq
>
>
> -Douglas Hurst Quebbeman (DougQ at ixsnayamspayIgLou.com) [Call me "Doug"]
> Surgically excise the pig-latin from my e-mail address in order to reply
> "The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away." -Tom Waits
>
>

Woz made it to the East Coast and the Deep South once and gave a talk at
an Apple UG meeting in our town. I managed to be there, and his
collaboration with Draper on that modem, and precisely regarding those
features, was one of his talking points.

It certainly gave one something to think about. Of course, Operation
Sundevil was ratcheting into high-gear at the time, which I was pretty
much blithely unaware of, despite hanging out on some of the same boards
with some of the same people that, well, you know. So it's a good thing
I'm an honest fellow.

There was this guy who claimed to be with Unisys called my board, for
instance, who seemed desperate for me to set up a BBS with a shiny new
Unisys 486 the company would provide for me to "beta-test" and demo.
What was up with this? At the time, the big Unisys customers in the area
were the local army base and a lot of banks, and we had already run into
snags running the board from a buddy's house on post. I didn't want to
look a gift horse in the mouth, and I gleaned a lot about Burroughs
OS'es from him, but frankly, it smelled. I never did figure out what was
going on with that, exactly, except that other people knew about it.

jbdigriz
Received on Tue Apr 02 2002 - 14:39:19 BST