Tim May 1992 Post on Future of Cyberspace/Cryptology/Digital Money/Transnationalism

[jim bell]

 On Sunday, December 23, 2018, 2:03:06 PM PST, juan <juan.g71 at gmail.com> wrote:
 
 
 On Sun, 23 Dec 2018 09:47:23 +0000 (UTC)
jim bell <jdb10987 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
>> But I wouldn't blame Tim May. 

>    To be fair, here  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcC0RNsallc  is Tim May stating 

>    "The US and other societies around the world are facing a turning point, a fork in the road where one path leads to a surveillance society effectively where people have television cameras recording their actions and conversations on a computer, all their transactions at stores, everything is completely tracked. 

>    The other path, the other fork in the road moves in a direction where governments can't even collect taxes anymore because they don't know what interactions people are making. People are buying things and information from other countries and they won't even know in what countries the transactions are taking place."


>    That's a 1997 japanese documentary about crypto. By the way, looks like the japanese 'forgot' to include you Jim. Then again, the video comes from the japanese government...



>> 26 years is "forever" in technology.   26 years ago, very few people had even heard of the "Internet".  

>    Actually in the last 26 years there hasn't been any significant 'technological' change *at all*. The only thing that happened is that microelectronics got relatively cheaper.

You forgot that in 1992, typical dialup modems worked at 9600 bps.  Now, most people have access to 25 megabits/sec Internet.  
I occasionally see people in discussion areas claim that "the U.S. Government" was responsible for making "The Internet".I shut that talk down, by pointing out "Do you think that The Internet would have 'worked' if a person, at home, had to connect up to his ISP at with a 300 bps modem?  1200 bps?  2400 bps?"I counter by pointing out that the people REALLY responsible for a usable Internet were those who developed the 9600 bps, 14,400 bps, and 28,800 bps modems.  Rockwell, USR (US Robotics), Hayes, Telebit, and a few others.  Had that not existed, it would have been hard to make the Internet available to most people.  
From:     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem 
"V.32 modems operating at 9600 bit/s were expensive and were only starting to enter the market in the early 1990s when V.32bis was standardized. Rockwell International's chip division developed a new driver chip set incorporating the standard and aggressively priced it. Supra, Inc. arranged a short-term exclusivity arrangement with Rockwell, and developed the SupraFAXModem 14400based on it. Introduced in January 1992 at $399 (or less), it was half the price of the slower V.32 modems already on the market. This led to a price war, and by the end of the year V.32 was dead, never having been really established, and V.32bis modems were widely available for $250.V.32bis was so successful that the older high-speed standards had little to recommend them. USR fought back with a 16,800 bit/s version of HST, while AT&T introduced a one-off 19,200 bit/s method they referred to as V.32ter, but neither non-standard modem sold well."

And:    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem 

V.34/28.8 kbit/s and 33.6 kbit/s

×

×


"Any interest in these proprietary improvements was destroyed during the lengthy introduction of the 28,800 bit/s V.34 standard. While waiting, several companies decided to release hardware and introduced modems they referred to as V.FAST. In order to guarantee compatibility with V.34 modems once the standard was ratified (1994), the manufacturers were forced to use more flexible parts, generally a DSP and microcontroller, as opposed to purpose-designed ASIC modem chips.
"The ITU standard V.34 represents the culmination of the joint efforts. It employs the most powerful coding techniques including channel encoding and shape encoding. From the mere four bits per symbol (9.6 kbit/s), the new standards used the functional equivalent of 6 to 10 bits per symbol, plus increasing baud rates from 2,400 to 3,429, to create 14.4, 28.8, and 33.6 kbit/s modems. This rate is near the theoretical Shannon limit. When calculated, the Shannon capacity of a narrowband line is {\displaystyle {\text{bandwidth}}\times \log _{2}(1+P_{u}/P_{n})}, with {\displaystyle P_{u}/P_{n}} the (linear) signal-to-noise ratio. Narrowband phone lines have a bandwidth of 3,000 Hz so using {\displaystyle P_{u}/P_{n}=1000} (SNR = 30 dB), the capacity is approximately 30 kbit/s.[7]
[end of quote]

It took a lot of work to learn how to shove 28.8Kbits/sec down a 3000 Hz channel.  By and large, those people who did that were the ones who made the Internet of the late 90's possible.  

                      Jim Bell





  
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 15383 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20181223/2f7e4cb3/attachment.txt>