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1974 September. As giant pandas Chia-- Chia and Ching-Ching arrive at London Zoo, so Issue 1 of Communications International - "The monthly journal for the World's Communications Industry'- departs the UK capital, courtesy of the Royal Mail.
"In every direction there is growth," wrote Kim Bachmann in the maiden editorial, published by Northwood Publications and based in the home of many another gem, Hatton Gardens. "Newly developing nations are hungry for communications. The Old World with well-developed systems still cannot cope with increasing demands. Accompanying the commercial pressure for more and yet more channels is a parallel explosion in communications technology." Sounds familiar? "It is in this environment, exciting, challenging and demanding, that Communications International makes its first appearance."
Add to that the boast that "CI is without precedent in publishing. It is the first of its kind." And so 84 pages of product advertising and technical data hit the streets. Familiar names among those peddling their wares and services were Cable & Wireless, Philips, Racal, Muirhead, ITT, Schlumberger, and Ferranti. Among the topics covered by the writing staff were 'Radio Propagation Disturbances', `Use of Computers in Telephone Network Planning' and `Testing High-Speed Data Transmission Systems'. Complex mathematical formulae explaining antenna 'transfer efficiency' and graphs to portray `atmospheric refi-action' were legion.
Issue 2 included updates on optical communications, and the progress of research into sending photons along glass fibres (`Beginning to Hear the Light', and quite significant coverage of datacomms, especially in Europe. A report by Frost & Sullivan noted that European investment in datacomms development was "lagging from three to five years behind that of the US". Service was noted for its poor transmission quality and high error rates. The consultancy also predicted that 15% of total telecomms revenues would come from data services by the mid-1980s.
The following month saw Richard Milton posing the question, "Packet Switching: Is It Commercially Viable?" The answer? "On the face of it," he wrote, keeping the readers guessing from the outset, "economies of channel utilisation to be gained from packet switching over conventional circuit switching techniques are substantial." That seems to be a 'Yes', then. However, "while from the user's point of view there are undoubted economies to be gained from packet switching, it is not...