1980s to put together the 'Internet' (I worked at SWBT, a sub of ATT), and back then, when we realized that we were breaking up from ATT, we realized that we had over 4000 private lines from ATT, that cost us an arm and a leg. That's why we got into packet switching (the Internet), to minimize the actual number of private lines that we rented from ATT. It was a huge amount of money we were paying out, and using packet switching to channel many different communication links over one physical line or several just made sense. We ended up saving over $200 million a year, a not insignificant amount of money.
And then our marketing guys got interested (at inception, we only had the network guys, the accounting guys/IT guys (me) (paid my bills), and the business office people, on developing service orders (SORD) to put in the new accounts. And remember, this was a data link, not an analog link, we never dealt w/ data before, it was always voice/analog. A whole new world that the phone company never had dealt w/ before. The reason I was involved was that I was the only one in IT that had any experience dealing w/ this new technology coming into the phone company, and thus, I was 'so lucky' to be chosen to work in IT and develop the associated systems we needed in order to bring packet switching to the world, e.g., a gas station company with lots of gas stations, wanting interconnection w/ many, many different links, thus they wanted to cut/reduce their bills.
I am joking, as I really enjoyed not working in the usual trenches on standard, run-of-the-mill voice phone company stuff, but a whole brand new world, dealing w/ data. One of the things I remember that freaked a lot of people out in the phone company was that calls would literally last forever, vs. thos in the voice world. They (my fellow workers in other depts) couldn't get over this, and so, there were basically 4 of us, who started the whole effort, having to re-explain the whole concept of data communications/packet switching. Like I said, a whole brand new world.
Lots of challenges too, for example, one of them was simply removing the 'coils' off of local lines, so they wouldn't filter out the higher frequencies (eliminating noise from voice channels). However, as we all know, the higher frequencies deal mostly w/ data too, so we had to go in, and remove lots and lots of 'coils', which filtered out the higher frequencies that would interfere w/ the data channels we were starting to carry on a packet-switched network. This was one of many, many challenges.
One of our first customers (and probably still is) was American Online. AOL. Of course, we all know the following boom that the Internet went through, as more and more people discovered what they could do on the Internet. Ha ha heh, I remember in one meeting w/ my coworkers, and I said what in the hell are these people going to do online so much? Ha ha heh...how little we knew what was to come. We kind of got an inkling of what was coming when our data traffic (I kept track of it, since I was doing the billing), increased literally every month by 1000%. Imagine that! My data center folks were freaked out, for we were gobbling DASD/storage space by the gobs every month (kept recordings of all traffic, for studies, customer inquires, billing inquires, etc.).
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