[49838] in Cypherpunks
Re: China
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Frantz)
Sun Feb 11 23:14:44 1996
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 1996 20:13:23 -0800
To: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr. Dimitri Vulis), cypherpunks@toad.com
From: frantz@netcom.com (Bill Frantz)
At 8:29 AM 2/11/96 -0500, Dr. Dimitri Vulis wrote:
>Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com> writes:
>
>> At 01:54 PM 2/10/96 EST, you wrote:
>> >It's not difficult to imagine that governments will seek to regulate the
>> >possession of modems again. Some may recall that in the U.S. it used to be
>> >technically illegal to connect a modem to the phone jack without a permissio
>> >from AT&T.
>>
>> Actually, permission from the local phone companies, who owned the system,
>> I assume? (Though I don't actually remember which parts of The Phone Company
>> were involved in the Carterphone decision.)
>
>Nope. I used modems back when the local phone company _was AT&T. :-)
Back in the really dark ages, we used acoustic couplers (300 b/s max) which
held a telephone handset, so there was no direct connection to the
telephone lines. The phone company asserted that they were also illegal,
but their argument was kind of weak!
