"Selling sex as a perk isn't allowed yet, and our wives would murder us, but one of us will act as a sperm donor in giving your child a celebrity We would play the repeater .
You can barely make out the stuff going on, on the inside. With a few dozen repeaters across the Great Plains and the Rockies, we could have a crude telegraph system across the entire country if all the cell towers were down.
Usually, there's a kind of steel mesh outside for structure, and then usually, a copper tube-- I use that word technically-- that transmits the electricity that powers these repeaters that sit on the ocean floor, that are these kind of big tuna shaped things every 50 miles or so that amplify the signal.
This was a mobile network that was operating here in the San Francisco Bay Area. We had some radio store and forward repeaters up in the mountaintops and we had mobile devices down on the Bayshore freeway or driving around Palo Alto and Mountain View and so on. The network itself took care of dealing with the mobility of the devices below the Internet Protocol layer. It's not too different from what happens with
And they amplified phone calls. In some rural areas, these repeater stations didn't have a real reliable power source, especially in the south. They used dry cell batteries that would sometimes stop working, or they used diesel generators.
The vacuum tubes, in fact-- this is the one Kelly worked on for years and years called the 101 D-- was also called the repeater tube. And these tubes were spaced every 50 to 75 to 100 miles across the country at repeater stations. Phone calls that were going from New York, for instance, to Menlo Park, would travel through many of these repeater stations as the signal would be amplified and sent on
They are weak. They attenuate. The vacuum tubes, in fact-- this is the one Kelly worked on for years and years called the 101 D-- was also called the repeater tube. And these tubes were spaced every 50 to 75 to 100 miles across the country at repeater stations.
And these tubes were spaced every 50 to 75 to 100 miles across the country at repeater stations. Phone calls that were going from New York, for instance, to Menlo Park, would travel through many of these repeater stations as the signal would be amplified and sent on farther along the line.
And they just serendipitously almost found each other. What Pearson knew about Chapin was that Chapin was actually looking for a way to solve a problem that he was working on at Bell Labs that had to do with those old repeater stations I was talking about.