th renaming itself, the CCITT stopped publishing quadrennial "books" and instead began to release "Recommendations" whenever they were approved. CCITT/ITU-T standards are formally called "Recommendations," as they are not binding per se; this is especially important to North Americans, whose networks are generally built to separate standards. [28] Note that Europe did not use the 1.544-Mbps DS1 rate; its equivalent was the 2.048 "E1" rate. Thus the European PRI had 30 B channels plus a D channel. [29] NI-1 was more closely based on Northern Telecom's dialect than AT&T's. [30] See http://www.capi.org/. The CAPI project remains active. [31] Adams, S., The Dilbert Future, New York: HarperBusiness, 1997, p. 43. The original T1 specification did not permit the transmission of an octet containing eight O's; the standard North American encoding for voice thus used only 255 out of 256 possi- ble combinations of bits. This was corrected by the mid-1980s, with the B8ZS (bipolar 8-zero substitution) transmission technique, but most 4ESS tandems and many other digi- tal facilities were built to the old AMI/ZCS (alternate mark inversion, zero code suppres- sion) standard. The Great Telecom Meltdown [33] SONET was a North American standard. The ITU-T equivalent, SDH, referred to these two speeds as STM-1 and STM-4. An octet is eight bits, grouped for transmission. A byte is a group of bits that typically rep- resent the smallest addressable part of a computer's memory. A byte is usually eight bits nowadays, but historic computers used other byte sizes. It is thus more precisely correct to follow ITU practice and describe ATM cells in octets, not bytes, though the latter term is more common. This and many other gems were collected by Bruce Kushnick of the New Networks Institute in The Bells' Greatest Broadband Failures, http://www.newnetworks.com/ bellbroadbandfailures. The Internet Boom and the Limits to Growth Nothing says "meltdown" quite like "Internet." For although the boom and crash cycle had many things feeding it, the 