Quote:
Originally Posted by 4RE KLR
Land lines will soon be a thing of the past.
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Thereby finally eliminating the crisis, ca. 1955-60, of the global copper shortage, one of my favorite Doom scenarios.
(In about that time someone projected the rise in telephone usage and the corresponding number of phone trunk lines needed to carry the calls. Very shortly on the curve, around 1970, there was not enough copper on earth to provide enough lines. It was a major panic in the right circles for several years as usage grew and the limits were approached...
...and then techniques for multiplexing call volume were developed. Even the first-generation 12 calls on a single line all but eliminated the crisis forever; now, of course, optical and other high-speed digital trunks carry millions of simultaneous calls. As Supertramp put it, "Crisis? What crisis?" It's amazing how many such insoluble, immediate catastrophes just sort of never happen, for reasons no one quite foresaw. History and social movement is never linear.)