 Chapter Eight Questions Chapter 9 Final Summary Index CHAPTER First Things First First Things First Chapter 1 Telecommunications, like all highly visible and interesting fields, is full of apocryphal stories, technical myths, and fascinating legends. Everyone in the field seems to know someone who knows the outside-plant repair- person who found the poisonous snake in the equipment box in the man- hole, ¹ or the person who was on the cable-laying ship when it pulled up the cable that had been bitten through by some species of deep water shark, or a collection of seriously evil hackers, or the backhoe driver who cut the cable that put Los Angeles off the air for 12 hours. There is also a collection of technojargon that pervades the telecom- munications industry and often gets in the way of the relatively straight- forward task of learning how all this stuff actually works. To ensure that such things don't get in the way of absorbing what's in this book, I'd like to begin with a discussion of some of them. I am a writer, after all; words are important to me. This is a book about telecommunications, which is the science of com- municating over distance ("tele-", from the Greek tele, meaning "far off"). It is, however, fundamentally dependent upon data communications, the science of moving traffic between computing devices so that this traffic can be manipulated in some way to make it useful. Data, in and of itself, is not particularly useful, consisting as it does of a stream of ones and zeroes that is meaningful only to the computing device that will receive and manipulate those ones and zeroes. The data does not really become useful until it is converted by some application into information, because a human can generally understand information. The human then acts upon the information using a series of intuitive processes that further convert the information into knowledge; at this point it becomes truly useful. Here's an example: A computer generates a steady stream of ones and zeroes in response to a series of 