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   Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Nov-2024 06:01:20 JST Charles U. Farley

   Apparently when The Source was purchased by Reader's Digest in 1980 it had only 5,000 subscribers. But that was still more subscribers than CompuServe had in 1980, 3,600.

   Subscribers peaked at 80,000, but CompuServe peaked at 500,000.

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     Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Nov-2024 06:01:15 JST Charles U. Farley

     in reply to

     From the same article, referenced from the Wikipedia page:

     "Worse yet, after explaining the echo cancellation to a hostile audience and how it could be done, the same young engineer then had the audacity to suggest that 160 kb/s was too slow, and they really ought to consider a much higher speed, enough for video at perhaps 1.5 Mb/s, much closer to Shannon capacity for a four-mile twisted-pair telephone connection, at least in the toward-customer direction. The laughter was thunderous, and the kid was embarrassed beyond belief (particularly when even his own boss told him to “shut up and sit down”). But that was modern DSL's birth. I know well — that kid was me."

     Seems even more precient to have realized video could be sent at 1.5Mbps in 1980. H.120, which operated at that rate, was published in 1984. But I guess DCT-based compression for videotelephones was being researched from around 1975, so I assume 1.5 Mbps must have been demonstrated by that time. Ironically, H.120 doesn't even use DCT but DPCM, which was pretty much obsolete by 1984. That's standards committees for you.

     H.120 used that bitrate to be able to send video over a T-1. MPEG-1 used it to be able to encode video on a CD. But even though they're about the same, the bitrate of a CD has nothing to do with the bitrate of a T-1, though it DOES have something vaguely to do with video, since 44.1kHz is the highest sample rate compatible with both NTSC and PAL without requiring more than 3 samples per line, so it's the rate digital audio was recorded at at the time.

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     Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Nov-2024 06:01:16 JST Charles U. Farley

     in reply to

     Holy shit. Apparently by 2011 ⅓ of the world's 1.3 billion copper phone lines were running DSL.

     https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5762795

     feld repeated this.
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     Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Nov-2024 06:01:17 JST Charles U. Farley

     in reply to

     "John Cioffi had recently demonstrated echo cancellation would work at these speeds, and further suggested that they should consider moving directly to 1.5 Mbit/s performance using this concept. The suggestion was literally laughed off the table (His boss told him to "sit down and shut up")…"

     That was in 1980. One of the reasons ISDN never really took off in the US is because modems got better, cutting into its speed benefit. And then ADSL came along. Imagine if ISDN had had DSL speeds from the start!

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDN

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     Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Nov-2024 06:01:18 JST Charles U. Farley

     in reply to

     In 1997, only about 36% of American households had a computer, and only half of those were connected to the Internet. Which I suppose is why Microsoft bought WebTV that year and then started working on their "Universal Settop Box", a device that was all about "fusion": all your multimedia and Internet use would happen through the same device and display. I played around with one at Microsoft's Mountain View campus.

     I don't remember if Microsoft ever released a product based on the Universal Settop Box. Maybe as MSNTV boxes? But I think the XBox at least partially evolved from it.

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     Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Nov-2024 06:01:19 JST Charles U. Farley

     in reply to

     It's really interesting how much of the history of online services actually pre-dates people having computers in their homes. They used purpose-built terminals and TVs.

     It makes sense that there was so much use made of televisions, since these were large displays people already had in their homes. So you'd have a terminal, perhaps built into the television, that could display graphics that were better than the computers of the time for a lot less money. The computer would be on the other end of the phone line, radio signal, cable, whatever.