1972

1972


Steve Wozniak's 'Blue Box'

People get on my nerves
I am not sure I understand you
You should pay more attention
Suppose you should pay more attention
You're entitled to your opinion
What makes you think I am entitled to my own opinion?
-- from a conversation between PARRY and the ‘Doctor’ via the ARPANET

The ARPANET grows by ten more nodes in the first 10 months of 1972. The year is spent finishing, testing and releasing all the network protocols, and developing network demonstrations for the ICCC.

At BBN, Ray Tomlinson writes a program to enable electronic mail to be sent over the ARPANET. It is Tomlinson who develops the ‘user@host’ convention, choosing the @ sign arbitrarily from the non-alphabetic symbols on the keyboard. Unbeknownst to him, @ is already in use as an escape character, prompt, or command indicator on many other systems. Other networks will choose other conventions, inaugurating a long period known as the e-mail ‘header wars.’ Not until the late 1980s will ‘@’ finally become a worldwide standard.

Following the lead of Intel’s 4004 chip, hand-held calculators ranging from the simple Texas Instruments four-function adding machines to the elaborate Hewlett-Packard scientific calculators immediately consign ordinary slide rules to oblivion.

Xerox PARC develops a program called Smalltalk, and Bell Labs develops a language called ‘C.’

Steve Wozniak begins his career by building one of the best-known ‘blue boxes;’ tone generators that enable long-distance dialing while bypassing the phone company’s billing equipment.

The ICCC demonstrations are a tremendous success. One of the best known demos features a conversation between ELIZA, Joseph Weizenbaum’s artificially-intelligent psychiatrist located at MIT, and PARRY, a paranoid computer developed by Kenneth Colby at Stanford. Other demos feature interactive chess games, geography quizzes, and an elaborate air traffic control simulation. An AT&T delegation visits ICCC but leaves in puzzlement.