Reminds me of the Bell System in 60's and 70's, you might say a halfway house to public control - they were allowed a regulated profit.

There was a reason for the Lily Tomlin as Ernestine comedy bit, as I remember one of the lines was "we're the phone company, we don't have to care."

They did some great things - 99.99+% reliable phone service, Bell Labs (laser, Unix - I still have a copy of the Bell System Technical Journal issue announcing Unix).

But you couldn't buy even a phone - they were all leased, very few choices. I remember you had to pay extra to lease a push-button phone when they came out (as opposed to rotary dial).

IIRC you either leased modems, or leased a protection device that a purchased modem connected to.

Oh yeah, you weren't allowed to do any wiring your self (e.g. if you wanted to move a phone), phone company had to do it. Yes, the wiring in your house belonged to the phone company.

Obligatory "Get off my lawn!"

Tom

I used Vol. 2 to improve the multiply algorithm in an open source program.

Thought I'd hear better ones than most listed here. For example:

1. A failure that happened every day at a gradually changing time. Cause: heat from sunlight on a system. The failure happened after the sun came through a window at the correct angle. The time was changing as the sun moved with the season.

2. A falure that happened once a year at the same time: 10/10, at 10:10AM. The time was represented in BCD, and using IBM Bisync protocol, the bytes were escaped. That many 10s caused a buffer overflow.