the monopoly would thus prove to be an epic battle. And as the 1960s wound down, competition opened up on two sepa- rate fronts, both of which would contribute to a major restructuring of the industry. Carterfone Made the Network More Valuable Tom Carter's little company did not set out to undermine the pillars of "The System." Indeed the Carterfone product itself was hardly, it seems, worth fight- ing over. Like the Hushaphone, the Carterfone did not make any electrical con- tact with the telephone network. It was an acoustic coupler, designed to allow a telephone handset to interface with a two-way radio system. Its target market was offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico-hardly the kind of mass mar- ket that threatens giants like AT&T. Nor was Carter's the only "phone patch" on the market. Thousands of amateur radio operators had phone patches that connected their radio gear to their home phone lines. They were widely used on behalf of the U.S. military, to allow servicemen overseas to phone home, as well as to allow the ham operators themselves to make free long distance calls to places where another ham had a patch. Some of these patches were homemade; others were commercial The Great Telecom Meltdown products. Heathkit, in those days a major supplier of hobbyist electronic gear, had a phone patch kit, freely advertised in its catalog. Insofar as legality was con- cerned, most hams assumed that the telephone company maintained a "don't ask, don't tell" policy, but some may have also assumed that their FCC radio licenses demonstrated at least some qualification to touch a low-voltage audio circuit such as a telephone line. The Carterfone, on the other hand, shied away from even that level of connection. Yet AT&T considered it an improper "for- eign attachment." The FCC's 1968 ruling [1] echoed Hushaphone. And it went further, opening up electrical attachments as well. In the next few years, customer- provided terminal equipment could be attached to a telephone line, provided that the subscriber leased a