Re: Acoustic couplers (was: WCIT outcome?)

[Janet P Gunn <[e-mail]>]

We definitely had an acoustic coupler, with its own phone line, so my 
father could work from home, in the mid and  late 70s.

He worked for IBM Research. If there had been a more technically advanced 
way of doing it, I am sure they would have used that.
 
There was not much "general intertia/unwillingness to do the necessary 
engineering" at the lab.

Janet


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[e-mail] wrote on 01/03/2013 08:47:44 AM:

> From: John C Klensin <[e-mail]>
> To: [e-mail], [e-mail]
> Cc: [e-mail]
> Date: 01/03/2013 08:48 AM
> Subject: Re: Acoustic couplers (was: WCIT outcome?)
> Sent by: [e-mail]
> 
> 
> 
> --On Wednesday, January 02, 2013 13:34 -0800
> [e-mail] wrote:
> 
> >>     > From: John Day <[e-mail]>
> > 
> >>     > I remember when a modem came with an 'acoustic coupler'
> >>     > because connecting it directly to the phone line was
> >>     > illegal. No, there was nothing illegal about it. The
> >>     > reason for acoustic couplers was that the RJ-11 had
> >>     > been invented yet and it was a pain to unscrew the box
> >>     > on the wall and re-wire every time you wanted to
> >>     > connect.
> >>     > ...
> >>     > It may have been illegal in some countries but
> >>     > certainly not in the US.
> > 
> >> Huh? Remember the Carterphone decision?
> > 
> > Absolutely. Too bad the FCC didn't see fit to extend it to
> > wireless.
> >...
> > At one point there was something that said one phone in each
> > home had to be directly wired without a plug. I don't know if
> > this was a regulation, a phone company rule, or just a
> > suggestion, but it also fell by the wayside after Carterphone.
> 
> IIR regulation, in many states even for a while
> post-Carterphone, and justified, again IIR -- as many things
> have been justified in more recent years-- on the grounds of
> emergency services applications.  After all, if there were an
> emergency, you wouldn't want to go hunting for an unplugged
> phone or, especially, to get something working that required
> external (to the phone system) power.
> 
> And, while my memory of the period is a little vague at this
> point, I'm pretty sure that the four-pin jack (and a few other
> proprietary terminal-device connectors) showed up
> pre-Carterphone, when AT&T/WE was (i) trying to sell alternate
> phones (notably the early "Princess") to prove that what became
> Carterphone wasn't necessary because they could meet the
> relevant market demands and (ii) arguing that, if one wanted to
> connect third-party equipment, they could supply a network
> protection device into which the third-party stuff could plug.
> 
> RJ11 and friends came along when the FCC finally got rid of the
> protective device/coupler nonsense in the mid-70s, long after
> Carterphone (1968) and, in a series of steps that weren't
> complete until the last half of the 90s, regulated/required
> first the jacks then the wiring pinouts.
> 
> > I certainly saw acoustic coupled equipment in use long after
> > Carterphone, but in my experience it was because of general
> > intertia/unwillingness to do the necessary engineering, not
> > because of the lack of connectors.
> 
> My recollection is that acoustic couplers started out as an
> attempt to get around the protective device rules, not the "no
> interconnection" one.  It that is correct, it would provide an
> additional explanation for their being around into at least the
> mid-70s.  I think part of what killed them was the growth of
> different handset shapes along with multiple manufacturers of
> telephones.  Those different shapes meant that one could no
> longer design a recessed-cup device with fixed spread between
> the two cups that would form a tight seal with all relevant
> handset shapes.   I do have an acoustic coupling device from the
> mid-90s that had an adjustable distance between the receiving
> and sending attachments and a strap to attach it to the phone --
> worked pretty well when one wanted to attach a modem in, e.g., a
> hotel with hardwired connections between phone and wall and
> setups that made pulling off the terminal cover and attaching
> alligator clips impractical but it is clearly an exception to
> Ned's suggestion that failure to make the transition was at
> least partially due to unwillingness to do new engineering/
> design work.
> 
> The situation in other countries was, of course, different.
> Especially in places where the telephone carrier was effectively
> its own regulator or managed to convince the regulators that
> content mattered as much or more than physical connections,
> there was a requirement for different jacks (usually at a higher
> monthly rate) for modems and fax machines than was used for
> voice.  I believe that particular approach survived and may have
> been reinforced by efforts to promote deregulation within ITU
> because the relevant carriers argued that the early deregulation
> efforts applied only to POTS service and not to "data" ones.
> That approach and position was contemporaneous with national
> regulations in many countries that one could run all of the
> TCP/IP services one wanted as long as they were run over the
> national X.25 profile and sometimes as long as one claimed they
> were "transitional" until OSI Connection-mode stabilized.
> There might be a useful lesson or two in that bit of history.
> 
>     john
>