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As
quoted from OMNI magazine Feb. 1985 from an article on
Fiber-optics: It's growing! Like a living, sentient creature,
it's tendrils hide in our walls, snake out to the streets, run
from pole to pole, tunnel beneath the pavement, and arc across
space on microwaves. Like an extraterrestrial invader with
superhuman powers, it has become so ubiquitous that we barely
notice it's presence among us. Yet it's instruments have
penetrated virtually every home in the United States and every
office of business and government of the world.
Most
humans have no idea of how complicated the creature is. We see
little more than an instrument that sits on a desk or hangs on a
wall. But that is merely a nerve ending of the creatures entire
body. Beyond that visible, palpable instrument is the creatures
nervous system, humming with electrical signals, flickering with
laser light.
The
'creature` is of course, the
telephone
system, and it's heart-no it's brain-resides in a complex of
modernistic building spread over a 25-mile area in New Jersey:
The AT&T Bell Laboratory...
Most
of us don't realize the complexity of the telephone system but,
today, the technology is at a point of being completely digital
and computer controlled to where the system can virtually
operate humanless. We just maintain the humans for operators,
management, maintenance, and growth and technological
advancement of the system.
Fiber
Optics Technology - the branch of physics concerned with the
propagation of light that enters a thread or rod of transparent
material at one end and is totally reflected back inward from
the wall, thereby being transmitted within the thread from one
end to the other. Pulses of light (binary code) can be used to
transmit voice and data from one location to another. From the
same article in OMNI Solomon J. Buchsbaum, executive
vice-president of AT&T Bell Labs, said, The key question is,
what kind of integration, or synergy, can be produced among
these various forms of communications services? It is evolving,
in Buchsbaum's words, into one giant interconnected computer.
Just think of it, by use of the AT&T system the world has become
a One-World computer data base-system.
In the Late
1960's there was much discussion about The Cashless Society
where paper money would no longer be needed and all goods and
services would be bought through the use of a universal cash
card. On payday, the amount of an individuals paycheck would be
deposited electronically from the company's account to the
employee's account (direct deposit). To purchase groceries,
gasoline, or any other products or services, the Universal cash
card would be used to transfer from the purchaser's account to
the vender's account. At the end of the month, a complete record
of each individual's expenditures would be available; there
would be a tremendous reduction in paperwork, and bad checks
would be eliminated. Today, under the term Electronic funds
transfer (EFT) this concept is being implemented in what may
become one of the largest communication networks in existence.
The question posed with EFT is similar to the problem with
national data banks - who is to have access to this financial
information and what protection do citizens have in ensuring the
right to privacy? Some authorities feel that EFT offers one of
the biggest threats to the freedom that currently exists in
society. For when carried to it's fullest extent, EFT would
provide government agencies with complete records of every facet
of each person's life. Little could be done, from eating to
travelling, without records being recorded in some computer
system. Some feel that a system like this could lead to complete
governmental control over society! (Could George Orwell been
right in his book 1984?)
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