Ecommerce talks

Ecommerce talks

"Probably most of the people who use VOIP never heard of Pulver, just as the other week I met a company who believed it was reinventing the World Wide Web and had never heard of Tim Berners-Lee.

I first ran across Pulver in 1995, when he was working on the first version of Free World Dial-Up. It was the first service designed to let people talk over the Internet to people they already knew instead of strangers who happened to have signed up on the same server.

At the time, no one had broadband, and my phone bills including Internet, local calls (which were billed by the minute in the UK then), and long distance were running upwards of $3,500 a year, and calls from the UK to the US could cost as much as $1 a minute.

(For comparison, I now spend about $1800 a year, soon to reduce by another $400, and calls to the US cost about 5 *cents* a minute.)

The experimental service involved a MASH unit-like system of patching calls from one modem to another to transfer them from the Internet connection to the ordinary telephone network that Pulver thought up because of his background in ham radio. "

73 fer nw,
Bob N5IET

(old calls KE5CTY - WB5ZQU - WY5L)
10X# 37210, FP#-1141, SMIRK#-5177
http://www.qsl.net/ke5cty/
Code may be taking a back seat for now,
but the pioneering spirit that put the code
there in the first place is out front of it all.