HISTORY OF FIBER OPTICS
This segment of the History of Fiber Optics is taken from George Gilder’s book, “Telecosm.” By late 1970 or the early 1980s anti-monopoly legislation changed the communications scene from a pyramid of Ma Bell to a tower of Babel. No longer will one imperial company ensure that every hand set, plug, codex, and central office switch can seamlessly link together telephone conversations from sea to shining sea. Now the challenge is to interconnect all the myriad of more than 5,000 different companies, and components.
The trade show that drives this new polyglot of hardware and software is InterOp a semi-annual gathering of the world’s networking nerds that is devoted to interpolation. Now merged into Networld plus InterOp and bought by Softbank of Japan, it began in the late 1980s, when impresario Dan Lynch threw down the gauntlet to the networking industry. In the age of the internet mere claims that your equipment can interoperate will not be enough; you must come to InterOp and prove it. Nearly anybody who is anybody in networking showed up at InterOp and made his/her pitch. The pivotal part of InterOp happens before the really big shows in Atlanta, San Francisco, or Las Vegas amid a menagerie of hundreds of nerds and boffins with beards, scopes, sniffer’s, denim shirts, Indians, Chinese, cable guys, paunchy folks with wild hair, spruce dudes with crew cuts, turbans, baseball caps, united only by an exotic common idiom of pings, rups, interrupts, trace routes and seven layer brains. All interspersed with a green glow or telltale CRT’s and Cisco envy and desire.
And, if that chaos isn’t enough, new technology, especially fiber optic technology is threatening to cause the collapse of the seven sacred layers of current communications. If you want to see raw emotion talk to InterOp companies about eliminating any of those seven layers and the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of profit they insure. The fiber-sphere aims to eliminate virtually everything but the physical layer from the center of the network. In the end, the fiber-sphere will render InterOp itself less and less significant.
Indeed, beginning in 1999 InterOp began showing signs of decline, as many of the leading optical companies stayed away. They chose to focus instead on ascendant optical conferences, such as OFC (optical fiber conference), which concentrate on what they call the optical layer. To be sure, the intelligence at the center, among the seven layers, is fearsome, but ultimately the Brahmins (InterOp) are no match for the revolution of the untouchables (fiber optics). As insider David Isenberg put it “Telecompanies invented the stored program control switch in the seventies,” and then fell asleep at this very switch.
The transistor and the laser, both invented at Bell Labs, will eventually bring down the seven layer system. The miracle of the fiber-sphere is that it improves old copper wire bandwidth and error rates by a factor of billions—in Paul Green’s memorable estimate by ten orders of magnitude. This ten-billion-fold multiple is a quantity with clout—and the crucial factor to grasp in fathoming the future of the modern world economy. Old hat companies like ITT, Ma Bell, GE, RCA and many others who’s upper management is mostly retired military officers with Washington connections, has time and again turned a deaf ear and blind eye to these crucial technological truths. A prime example is GE’s failure to pay any attention to a video produced by a mathematics teacher in Waltham, Massachusetts for their 1980 business meeting.
The highpoint of the videotaped presentation focused on PCs and computer networks by declaring: “In short, I see home computers as the next major new home appliance…I see companies like GE selling computers like they now sell refrigerators…by the millions…I see computers on the verge of changing our entire concept of home and family…Here the man looked, paused, looking straight into the camera, he clearly had one sentence to go. The man uttered with fervor: “And, I don’t mean just here on earth.” GE decided against computers and networks and instead became a portfolio of beloved companies like NBC and etc. “Play It Again Sam.”
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