Re: [PLUG] Ziply ... and history
On 1/3/24 19:17, Keith Lofstrom wrote: On Wed, Jan 03, 2024 at 02:50:19PM -0800, Russell Senior wrote: So, to summarize: West Coast Telephone --(1964)--> GTE Northwest --(2000)--> Verizon --(2010)--> Frontier --(2020)--> Ziply Having lived near Beaverton for 63 of the last 70 years, I've experienced all of those transitions, from gestation onwards. When I was small, my parents shared a party line with another family; I remember hearing the phone ring and ring, and did not understand that the different ring was the other (not answering) family on the same line. [...] Perhaps Russell and others can tell us about the transitions to Century Link from (Pacific Bell?) in Portland and Multnomah County. Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company --(1961)--> Pacific NW Bell --(1988)--> US West --(2000)--> Qwest --(2011)--> CenturyLink (which merged with Level 3 in late 2017, and became Lumen in 2020, but is still using the name CenturyLink for local exchange service, although transitioning to Quantum branding for their fiber service). Amusingly, despite going by CenturyLink for years and years, the PPPoE credentials still use qwest.net in the username and you still occasionally see hostnames with the qwest.net domain. Some of those dates are just branding transitions, and the underlying merger dates might predate or postdate the branding changes ... it's complicated, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_Bell for more details. My local telephone exchange, a few blocks from my house, still has a sign on the exterior with the old PNW Bell branding. -- Russell Senior russ...@pdxlinux.org
Re: [PLUG] Ziply ... and history
On Wed, Jan 03, 2024 at 02:50:19PM -0800, Russell Senior wrote: > So, to summarize: > > West Coast Telephone --(1964)--> GTE Northwest --(2000)--> Verizon > --(2010)--> Frontier --(2020)--> Ziply Having lived near Beaverton for 63 of the last 70 years, I've experienced all of those transitions, from gestation onwards. When I was small, my parents shared a party line with another family; I remember hearing the phone ring and ring, and did not understand that the different ring was the other (not answering) family on the same line. Besides that, the first three companies were pretty good. As I got older, I learned much from telco service techs. Beaverton being home to thousands of adept electronics engineers working at Tektronix and other electronics companies, we demanded a lot from local phone companies, and often got it. It may be no coincidence that the 2010 Verizon/Frontier transition occurred three years after Tektronix was sold to Danaher, which accelerated the Tek plunge into darkness and the shedding of more jobs and local geek talent. For quite a while, there were no "consumer internet providers". The geek cognoscenti connected with SLIP over Telebit modems, and we got our feed to the Real Internet (HUNDREDS of nodes!) through a leased line rented by Randy Bush. That same leased line fed all of South Africa at one point - the entire nation was blacklisted, but Randy fed the apartheid-fighting progressives. Much changed with the arrival of consumer internet. I changed from keithl.rain-net.uucp to keithl.com . The rapid growth of Intel and other Washington County high tech has restored a fast-growing community of high tech geeks with high telecom expectations. Perhaps Russell and others can tell us about the transitions to Century Link from (Pacific Bell?) in Portland and Multnomah County. Perhaps Randy Bush is reading this, and can replace my 20% memory errors with his own. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
