During the heyday of AT&T, it was often said that the telephone system was the largest machine ever built. The "hello machine" certainly was vast, but whether or not you consider it to be a single machine raises challenging questions of definition. The Internet, I think we can all agree, is not a single machine but a system of interconnected ones. The telephone network, though, felt a lot more like one device. "One Policy, One System, Universal Service" was once the slogan of AT&T, a message that the telephone network is more than just a sum of parts. The third of these principles, "Universal Service," is a key point around which telecom policy pivots even today. As the telephone system was at its apex, Universal Service became its undoing.

We know the Internet to be a network of independent devices in part because of the wide variety of ways that we access it. Computer networks, almost to their origin, have emphasized independent implementations of standardized interfaces. Computers, as network nodes, are interchangeable. As a result, much of the complexity must be pushed to the edge, where end-user systems are most able to adapt to the unique needs of, well, the end-user. The telephone system was much different: few types of telephone instrument existed, largely from a single manufacturer. Complexity was drawn into the center where telephone offices could house the huge machinery required by mid-century automation. All of it was, for a very long time, hard-wired: central office switches and customer telephones were designed and installed to suit each other. This core difference, between the flexibility of computer networks and the central caretakership of telephone networks, was a core issue in the series of changes that rocked the telephone business in the early 1980s.

1984 is the K/T line of telecommunications, the year the sea peoples came. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which telephone technology, the communications industry, and the basic concept of what a telephone is changed between the 1970s and the 1980s. This was not a single, well-planned, carefully executed reform the way some accounts of divestiture can make it out to be. In practice, it was chaotic, messy, and often drawn out.

Email, one of the most pervasive and enduring technologies of computer networking, was invented in about a dozen places by dozens of people in the 1960s. It's hard to lay out a clear history of the technology because it's just so obvious—pretty much as soon as more than one person could use a computer, there was some kind of mail facility. These ranged from mainframe-centric systems where all of the users of a single computer could write messages to each other, to PC-centric systems where workstations would mount a network share to store and retrieve messages. Pretty much any scheme you can come up with for moving messages was probably in use somewhere from roughly the 1960s to the 1990s, by which time the ARPANET-derived family of email implementations had taken hold.

This form of email has a clearer heritage, to Ray Tomlinson, who came up with the core idea that addresses could identify both a user and a host, and that some kind of open protocol could be used to send messages to another host when necessary. Over time, and with many revisions, Tomlinson's design became SMTP and was joined by protocols like IMAP that built out the form of email we use today. This is a form of email that is in some ways decentralized (any user is free to choose a host) and in other ways centralized (each host assumed to be continuously online to store-and-forward messages for its users). Tomlinson's design was flexible enough that we have not had to totally get rid of it, but enough has changed about the modern Internet that we have had to take a new approach.

Email has many vexing limitations, artifacts of its age. For example, email handling should not be assumed to be "8-bit clean"—email protocols were originally defined over 7-bit ASCII and ran on many machines that used the eighth bit as a checksum. These machines were prone to changing the last bit of each byte, or otherwise mishandling email with 8-bit content. That wasn't a problem when text was completely limited to that 7-bit plane, but both Unicode and the desire to send binary files made 7-bit email unworkable. MIME was developed as a workaround, an encoding technique that solves a few problems in one go by encoding all non-ASCII content of email in the form of ASCII characters.

In 1914 the Department of the Interior, through the Bureau of Reclamation, investigated the possibilities of developing the Columbia River. Thousands of arid but potentially fertile acres needed only water to become the Imperial Valley of the Northwest. Locked in the mountain ranges were valuable ores awaiting electricity to turn them into needed metals.

Two years later the State engineer of Oregon urged the development of the Bonneville site as a national-defense measure: he saw in the proposed power project a source of fertilizer in time of peace and nitrates in time of war. The dam also would completely drown out the Cascade Rapids and extend slack-water navigation some 40 miles eastward to The Dalles.

The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1925 directed the Secretary of War, through the Corps of Engineers, United States Army, to prepare and submit to the Congress an estimate of the cost of surveys, examinations, and investigations of all navigable streams and their tributaries where power development appeared feasible. (Q1)

It is difficult to succinctly explain why, exactly, the United States Army has spent much of its history involved in the construction of dams. It is partly an accident of history, partly the result of interagency federal politics, and entirely a product of American culture. In his book "Cadillac Desert," Marc Reisner examines the history of the American West's water control projects as a religious project, one animated less by practical needs than by a sense that domination of the West's rivers was destiny.

The Bureau of Reclamation, part of the Department of the Interior, was formed for that purpose. At the time, though, the Army had already been used to survey and improve rivers for nearly 100 years. They were not content to give it up. The result was a rivalry, one with several feints and blows before the two settled into their modern areas of control. For the Bureau of Reclamation, the Hoover Dam was their signature project. For the Corps of Engineers, the battle that would go down in history was the Columbia River Project.

Through decades of consolidation, reorganization, and divestiture, AT&T left a famously complicated corporate history. One of the greatest enterprises in American history, arguably the greatest enterprise, AT&T has often rivaled the federal government in the size of its budget and workforce. One of the reasons, as we well know today, was monopolization and its close relative vertical integration. AT&T was the telephone system, or at least aspired to be, and for decades the meaning of "Universal Service" was that the service was designed, built, and operated by AT&T—universally.

While AT&T's tangled origins are fertile ground for the historian, they also obscure many of the early stories of telephone history. Much of the work of the early independent telephone industry has been lost in the voluminous achievements of AT&T. Even very basic facts become obscure. For example, who invented the telephone? Well, we all know the answer: Alexander Graham Bell. We have mostly forgotten that, at the time, this was a hotly contested question. One of the most prominent alternate claimants to the title was a man named Elisha Gray, today immortalized as the "Gray" in electrical distributor "Graybar," but better known in his time as an inventor of telegraph and telephone equipment. Gray contracted prototyping of some of his inventions to an upstart manufacturer and de facto Western Union spinoff, founded by Enos M. Barton (the "bar" in Graybar) and George Shawk. Impressed by Barton's operation, and at odds with Shawk on its future direction, Gray put together the money to buy out Shawk and became half-owner of the company that would reincorporate, in 1872, as Western Electric (WE).

It is ironic, of course, that a man who might fairly be called one of the top enemies of Bell helped to found the company that would become one of the most important parts of the Bell System. It's not a coincidence: Gray's involvement in WE included plans to manufacture his own telephone design, for which he had filed a provisional patent. Like many of the late 20th century's telephone inventors, Gray's greatest challenge in commercializing his invention was not technical but legal. His provisional patent on a telephone transmitter, substantially similar to the one invented by Bell and possibly older, led Western Union to take take part ownership in WE to advance their own plan to compete with AT&T as a telephone company. That set off a protracted legal battle, whose end result included the termination of Gray's patent claim and Western Union's abandonment of telephony.

It has been an unfortunate turn in the software industry, one of many as of late, that gambling is once again one of its primary engines. With the rise of almost nationwide online sports betting, not to mention prediction markets, making odds on real-world events and extracting the money of suckers is no longer limited to island nations. It is a great American pursuit, or at least, that's what modern television sports coverage leads you to believe.

There has always been an uncomfortable relationship between software and the manipulation of marks. Techniques developed by casinos became a fundamental part of consumer software, while the software industry wholeheartedly embraced "gaming" as a market (the older meaning of the term here, meaning gambling). We can readily point to a couple of reasons: first, gambling is profitable, and technology is first and foremost a means of accumulation. Second, gambling is mathematical, or at least arithmetical, in nature. Most forms of gambling involve some sort of complex calculation with real-world stakes.

Gambling predates history, or it might be better to say that gambling has been around for as long as recorded history has been able to observe it. Most early gambling seems to have been based on card or dice games, but humans have been betting on animal fights for more than a thousand years. As sensibilities and resources changed, animal fighting has mostly given way to animal competition. The most famous of these wagering opportunities is horse racing, a form of gambling with such a long and pervasive history that it has often achieved a unique regulatory status as one of the only legal sports betting venues in the US. Well, at least, before Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association.

The earliest recorded horse races were held in England in 1539, and bets were placed. By 1666, horse racing had reached such prominence that King Charles II—himself a jockey—commissioned and then won the "Newmarket Town Plate." That event's eccentric history gave way to the King's Plate, a broader 17th-century racing series whose royal remit made up the first formal rules for the sport. Queen Anne founded the racetrack at Ascot in 1711; while it took decades for permanent facilities to be built at the track, only stands for the royal family came before a betting office. As British empire expanded around the world, horse racing spread with it. Likewise, horse racing spread throughout Europe. By the 19th century, horse racing could be found almost anywhere.