One System, Universal Service? | Hacker News Reader

One System, Universal Service?

technicshistory.wordpress.com

The sequel, https://technicshistory.wordpress.com/2018/09/19/the-unravel..., is pretty interesting too.

I wonder to what extent the U.S. dominance of information technology is a result of the fact that even when we had a monopoly telecommunications provider, it was a private — rather than a state — monopoly, and how much is the result of us breaking the monopoly fairly early compared to other states.

Author of the article here. I've had a hard time motivating myself to keep going with this series, and thus it's stalled out for a couple months. I'd be interested to hear whether others find the direction interesting, it may help me to decide whether to have another go at The Unraveling, Part 2.

I discovered this series earlier in the year via HN. I don't remember which entry I started with, but I read it, then a couple more, then went back to the beginning and read everything in order. I read them all over a period of days. I found the series utterly compelling and kept checking back every week for a while in hope of updates. I'm happy to see that there are new entries now and I'll be reading them this weekend.

I can't comment on the current direction since I'm not caught up yet, but I wanted to thank you for writing what you have. I knew maybe a third of what you had written about before reading your series, and your writing and thematic organization are great. Your writing is clear, full of colorful details without becoming too digressive, and unifies the entries with an effective thematic arc that I haven't seen before. It's better than any published-in-book-form popular history of technology that I have read in the past decade.

I for one enjoyed the article. Very well done, with quality similar to good history books.

Quick note: typo near the end "However the FCC shielded AT&T from the implications of this for man years, with" should be "many years", I believe.

Your articles are amazing, both very informative and entertaining! Thank you so much for researching and writing this! I have been checking your blog for updates regularly; please, do continue this series!

I really enjoyed your work and it'd be a crime if you didn't continue!

Thanks. I've decided to skip over the segment that's been blocking me and write the next thing I was planning instead. Hopefully I will get back to it later.

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