Hacker Crackdown | Page 8

10, 1876.
On that great day, Alexander Graham Bell became the first person to transmit intelligible
human speech electrically. As it happened, young Professor Bell, industriously tinkering
in his Boston lab, had spattered his trousers with acid. His assistant, Mr. Watson, heard
his cry for help--over Bell's experimental audio-telegraph. This was an event without
precedent.
Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely work very well. They're
experimental, and therefore half-baked and rather frazzled. The prototype may be
attractive and novel, and it does look as if it ought to be good for something-or-other. But
nobody, including the inventor, is quite sure what. Inventors, and speculators, and pundits
may have very firm ideas about its potential use, but those ideas are often very wrong.

The natural habitat of the Goofy Prototype is in trade shows and in the popular press.
Infant technologies need publicity and investment money like a tottering calf need milk.
This was very true of Bell's machine. To raise research and development money, Bell
toured with his device as a stage attraction.
Contemporary press reports of the stage debut of the telephone showed pleased
astonishment mixed with considerable dread. Bell's stage telephone was a large wooden
box with a crude speaker-nozzle, the whole contraption about the size and shape of an
overgrown Brownie camera. Its buzzing steel soundplate, pumped up by powerful
electromagnets, was loud enough to fill an auditorium. Bell's assistant Mr. Watson, who
could manage on the keyboards fairly well, kicked in by playing the organ from distant
rooms, and, later, distant cities. This feat was considered marvellous, but very eerie
indeed.
Bell's original notion for the telephone, an idea promoted for a couple of years, was that it
would become a mass medium. We might recognize Bell's idea today as something close
to modern "cable radio." Telephones at a central source would transmit music, Sunday
sermons, and important public speeches to a paying network of wired-up subscribers.
At the time, most people thought this notion made good sense. In fact, Bell's idea was
workable. In Hungary, this philosophy of the telephone was successfully put into
everyday practice. In Budapest, for decades, from 1893 until after World War I, there was
a government-run information service called "Telefon Hirmondo+." Hirmondo+ was a
centralized source of news and entertainment and culture, including stock reports, plays,
concerts, and novels read aloud. At certain hours of the day, the phone would ring, you
would plug in a loudspeaker for the use of the family, and Telefon Hirmondo+ would be
on the air--or rather, on the phone.
Hirmondo+ is dead tech today, but Hirmondo+ might be considered a spiritual ancestor
of the modern telephone-accessed computer data services, such as CompuServe, GEnie
or Prodigy. The principle behind Hirmondo+ is also not too far from computer
"bulletin-board systems" or BBS's, which arrived in the late 1970s, spread rapidly across
America, and will figure largely in this book.
We are used to using telephones for individual person-to- person speech, because we are
used to the Bell system. But this was just one possibility among many. Communication
networks are very flexible and protean, especially when their hardware becomes
sufficiently advanced. They can be put to all kinds of uses. And they have been--and they
will be.
Bell's telephone was bound for glory, but this was a combination of political decisions,
canny infighting in court, inspired industrial leadership, receptive local conditions and
outright good luck. Much the same is true of communications systems today.
As Bell and his backers struggled to install their newfangled system in the real world of
nineteenth-century New England, they had to fight against skepticism and industrial
rivalry. There was already a strong electrical communications network present in

America: the telegraph. The head of the Western Union telegraph system dismissed Bell's
prototype as "an electrical toy" and refused to buy the rights to Bell's patent. The
telephone, it seemed, might be all right as a parlor entertainment--but not for serious
business.
Telegrams, unlike mere telephones, left a permanent physical record of their messages.
Telegrams, unlike telephones, could be answered whenever the recipient had time and
convenience. And the telegram had a much longer distance-range than Bell's early
telephone. These factors made telegraphy seem a much more sound and businesslike
technology--at least to some.
The telegraph system was huge, and well-entrenched. In 1876, the United States had
214,000 miles of telegraph wire, and 8500 telegraph offices. There were specialized
telegraphs for businesses and stock traders, government, police and fire departments. And
Bell's "toy" was best known as a stage-magic musical device.
The third stage of technology is known as the "Cash Cow" stage. In the "cash cow" stage,
a technology finds its place in the world, and matures, and becomes settled and
productive. After a year or so, Alexander Graham Bell and his capitalist backers