[retrac]

> Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?

Yes, actually. It was illegal to connect any equipment beside Bell's equipment to the US telephone system. Not only would you be disconnected and possibly fined by your phone provider for doing so, but American law also made it illegal to sell such devices as well for use on the phone network. If you wanted to use an answering machine not sold by Bell, you had to get it custom rewired by Bell and pay a monthly rental fee for the privilege:

> AT&T, citing the Communications Act of 1934, which stated in part that the company had the right to make changes and dictate "the classifications, practices, and regulations affecting such charges," claimed the right to "forbid attachment to the telephone of any device 'not furnished by the telephone company.'"

> Initially, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in AT&T's favor. It found that the device was a "foreign attachment" subject to AT&T control and that unrestricted use of the device could, in the commission's opinion, result in a general deterioration of the quality of telephone service.

It was challenged and the seller of the amplifier device ultimately won in federal court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S... (Even then, you couldn't actually electronically connect a device, you could only acoustically couple it. Direct connection of modems wouldn't be legal until the 1980s.)

[jonas21]

> Even then, you couldn't actually electronically connect a device, you could only acoustically couple it. Direct connection of modems wouldn't be legal until the 1980s.

In the late 90s, I remember watching the scenes in WarGames (which came out in 1983) where Matthew Broderick's character is using a modem where you had to place the phone cradle on top of it and thinking why would you ever design a modem that way?

And of course the reason was to work around this stupidity.

https://youtu.be/zb1r_uKOew4?t=49

[wyldfire]

I didn't know this was the case. Interesting!

From [1]

> It was not until a landmark U.S. court ruling regarding the Hush-A-Phone in 1956 that the use of a phone attachment (by a third party vendor) was allowed for the first time; though AT&T's right to regulate any device connected to the telephone system was upheld by the courts, they were instructed to cease interference towards Hush-A-Phone users. A second court decision in 1968 regarding the Carterfone further allowed any device not harmful to the system to be connected directly to the AT&T network. This decision enabled the proliferation of later innovations like answering machines, fax machines, and modems.

From [2]:

> After the ruling, it was still illegal to connect some equipment to the AT&T network. For example, modems could not electronically connect to the phone system. Instead, Americans had to connect their modems mechanically by attaching a phone receiver to an acoustic coupler via suction cups.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S...

[foobiekr]

Acoustic couplers also existed because most homes were pre modular phone jacks and the phones were connected with screw taps.

[salamandersauce]

It's not entirely stupidity. Acoustic modems also made sense for portability. Reporters in the 80s used to use things like TRS-80 Model 100 + an Acoustic modem to send stories back to the office over public telephones rather than have to hunt down a phone jack somewhere.

[josephg]

Australian here. I remember that scene, and I’ve always wondered what that was about too. I was using modems in the mid 90s and I never saw anything like that cradle device! Thankyou. That makes horrible, awful sense to me now.

[djmips]

Yeah, looks like acoustic couplers were mostly a seventies thing

[RNCTX]

+1 and this mentality persisted all the way through the Lucent bankruptcy, prior to which their business model was to sue everyone who had ever talked on a phone, right on up to the previous presidential administration which involved trying to place former telco execs on FCC regulatory boards to rewrite rules which aren't really rules.

But what they don't address is that HBOMax is already the worst streaming app on my TV, and therefore it doesn't matter how much money AT&T throws at politics. Their stuff sucks because they're AT&T, not because of some political misfortune.

[riffic]

the existing AT&T is not the previous AT&T.

edit: sources

* Current AT&T: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T

* Old AT&T: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Corporation

* History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AT%26T

[Retric]

The existing AT&T is just a zombie formed from 5 of the original 8 fragments of the old AT&T. I can’t help but wonder how many former coworkers at AT&T in 1981 where reunited in 2014 without ever having left the fragments.

[toast0]

At least some of the fragments were doing a lot of pushing out of older employees in the 2000s, so probably not a whole lot left, but I like the concept.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

No, it's the previous AT&T with some parts factored out (most notably, Verizon). It also apparently managed to remerge several parts of itself over the years, which is mind boggling (how that didn't trigger immediate court action is beyond me): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

[RNCTX]

Oh but it is. Culture doesn't tend to change, particularly with ridiculous "rebranding" exercises.

[rektide]

Sounds like you can imagine the law permitting something horrific & ghastly.

I too can imagine that. But the restraints the law allowed to be imposed on our freedom sound absurd, sound outlandish to me now. We were in a situation that de-legitimizes the law & the legal system, and eventually we fixed that.

> Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?

Also, it was illegal to sell connecting equipment, sure, but AT&T didn't go nearly as far as what we see today. They didn't do anything this bad. The question posed wasn't about the legality or ability to interoperate, to make devices.

The question was about the reprecussion. Hush-A-Phone & other companies did not have their corporate phone numbers dropped, did not lose their ability to make phone calls when the started making a device AT&T didn't like. AT&T took them to court & tried to get them to stop making devices, but they didn't retaliate by kicking their corporate entity off the network. AT&T also didn't search for people using the phone system to talk about using other means of communication & kick them off the phone network (something we've seen repeatedly, recently with Mastodon, although those policies may/may not have been improved recently). Facebook is acting far more like a bully than AT&T did, in my view.

[bduerst]

> It was illegal to connect any equipment beside Bell's equipment to the US telephone system.

Right, but IIRC Bell was considered a common carrier.

That means Bell could enforce this because they already had to give equal play on their network. Facebook is not and does not.

[djmips]

Facebook wants to think it is

[trangus_1985]

I said 40 years for a reason ;) But yes, those laws were horrible, and stifled innovation.

[at-fates-hands]

>> It was illegal to connect any equipment beside Bell's equipment to the US telephone system. Not only would you be disconnected and possibly fined by your phone provider for doing so, but American law also made it illegal to sell such devices as well for use on the phone network.

Which is the exact thing which gave rise to phone phreaking and getting around the limitations on Bell Systems.

"Exploding The Phone" by Phil Lapsley is a great book that examines these early hackers:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-invisible-playground...

[tshaddox]

Right, the point wasn't whether you can literally imagine that happening. The point is that it's obviously bad.

[prepend]

> It was illegal

It wasn’t an arbitrary choice by a private company. That’s a big difference.

A stupid rule by a highly regulated monopoly is very different from a stupid rule by an unregulated monopoly (maybe member of oligopoly).

[dredmorbius]

A fascinating bit of innovative, entrepreneureal, hacking, technological, telephonic, monopolistic, and criminal history.

Independent inventor convicted and gaoled by AT&T for "misdemeanor attachment", the crime of attaching non-AT&T equipment to AT&T's phone network.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_L._Shaw

More on this in the first bit of "The Inventor and the Thief" on Snap Judgement:

https://snapjudgment.org/episode/the-inventor-and-the-thief-...

Directly-connected modems were an obvious threat to AT&T as this would enable high-bandwidth packet-based distribution over AT&T's network, including ultimately what we know as VOIP. AT&T fought packet-switched networks from the start:

Paul Baran: The one hurdle packet switching faced was AT&T. They fought it tooth and nail at the beginning. They tried all sorts of things to stop it. They pretty much had a monopoly in all communications. And somebody from outside saying that there’s a better way to do it of course doesn’t make sense.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807

[cycomanic]

But they didn't ban the seller from using the phone system, they banned people from attaching a different machine to the system. That's like the Facebook trying to detect the extension and trying to block it. That's similar to some websites blocking ad blockers, while it would not go down well with Facebook users I think it's very different to what Facebook does here.

[Nasrudith]

I wonder how much of the ban was from concern of poorly regulated voltage related device damage. Now at least FCC regulations alone protect against the worst because anything that cheap also tends to output significant noise on reserved spectrum(s).