were more or less sitting around idle because of course business is happening during the day. So General Electric Network Internet Exchange, or Genie, was launched.
Priced at $6 per hour at night and $36 per hour during the day, Genie had all the best online games at the time and lots of sci-fi writers ended up using the service, including J. Michael Straczynski, who announced some TV show called Babylon 5 on there. And Babylon 5, one of my favorite TV shows, just celebrated its 30th anniversary of the series debuting.
Anyway, back to Apple Link and the shuttle email. On STS-43 the communications experiment was designated DTO-799, PGSD-slash-PADM Air Ground Communications Demonstration. So PGSC is the Payload General Support Computer, the aforementioned Grid Compass, and PADM was the Portable Audio Data Modem. And the modem was of course key in communication back then, right? This would be talking back to Earth. The space shuttle already had amazing communications capabilities compared to all previous space programs. It had been launching the Tracking Data and Relay Satellites, or TDRS. In fact, the primary payload on STS-43 was TDRS-5. These satellites sat out in geostationary orbit and they enabled communications with the shuttle when the shuttle didn't have a line of sight to the ground stations.
The shuttle actually supported digital communications protocols at bit rates that absolutely eclipsed the lowly dial-up connections that us earthbound plebs generally had to deal with. Like the telemetry and the voice communication, all that stuff would take up about 216 kilobits per second. But the shuttle could also send data like a real-time video as much as 50 megabits per second, so it was able to scream out data.
So yeah, there wasn't also an existing teletype communications system on board, so from the shuttle they could send up text to the teleprinter to provide written instructions and messages to the astronauts on their trip. And sometimes these printouts could be huge. They would spill out of the printer in zero-g, making for some comical sights as astronauts tried to make sense of the massive instructions flowing out of this device. So a big part of the air-to-ground communications experiment was to provide a two-way equivalent of this, and maybe one day eliminate the paper copy if it wasn't needed.
So now the question is, how do you connect a Mac to this space-age digital communication system so it can take advantage of all that bandwidth? Well, it turns out that modifying the digital communication system to support a data link to a device on the flight deck was not possible with resources they had on hand, right? So they just hooked up an old school modem, the portable audio data modem, to an audio channel. And let's be clear, the space channel communications were all digital, including the analog audio, which was converted to a digital format for transmission and then decoded and converted back to audio.
So the modem on the flight deck, it would convert the digital data on the computer to analog audio and vice versa. So the binary data on the computer was converted to an analog audio signal by the modem, fed into the shuttle's audio processor, which could convert it to a digital signal, and then beam that to the TDRS satellites, which would then send it back to the Earth at White Sands, and then that would be sent across the country on data links to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. And there, the data would be decoded, including the shuttle audio. And some lucky person at JSC could have picked up the wrong phone and, you know, sure, no doubt have listened into the modems screeching at them, right?
But anyway, according to the documents that I found, the protocol they used was V27TER, half-duplex. That's a fax protocol that uses 1200 symbols per second at 2 bits per symbol, making a total data rate of 2400 bits per second. And the half-duplex part is significant. It means that this is a one-directional transmission. And when a pair of modems share...
the shuttle into a phone line and point it at the AppleLink phone number. Well, it turns out that wouldn't work, because the servers running AppleLink's modems required full-duplex two-way communications. So instead, they connected that audio out to a Gateway Macintosh that was set up in JSC. On one side, it had a modem that was connected to the regular AppleLink services through, you know, regular phone line. And on the other side, which actually had to be connected to the printer port, because, you know, normally the modem takes the modem port, it would talk to the shuttle communications. And there was a special piece of software in there that would understand half-duplex signals, you know, tweak them around, repackage them. And on the other side, it would talk to the AppleLink services and make this whole thing possible.
So that's how it was supposed to work. But they did have a number of technical problems. The first time they tried to do this, there was some data switching system on the ground that was asleep. So they had to, like, power cycle their system decoding on the ground. The next time they tried, it failed because that hardware was still sort of in the process of waking up. Finally, the third time they hit send, it sent. And it worked and history was made. Now, an interesting side of this, on this, was that they used the standard AppleLink memo service, which was basically email. But the email addresses weren't protected in any way. So it was, they had to keep the shuttle email address secret. In fact, they registered STS-43 at AppleLink as an address so that curious people would be sending to that address rather than the actual shuttle address.
So anyway, after this flight, the Mac did fly again, but NASA elected to move the communication systems over to their tried and tested grid compass laptops. And I don't have any information on exactly how this operated beyond knowing that it used the same kind of modem. There might have been the same Mac at JSC for all I know, or they might have run their own bulletin board at NASA, right? NASA, BBS. There's very little information on this. There's a few references to the modem still being used and there's some photos of crew using it on later missions.
But I do know that by 1998, the email system was able to receive messages from the general internet because Bill Clinton sent an email to the crew of STS-95, which included Senator John Glenn. And he used a laptop that belonged to somebody that was in the right place at the right time. It wasn't a government laptop, it was like some doctor who was there and they used his AOL account to send a message to the space shuttle. And this is the first time, by the way, a sitting US president has sent an email. Bill was also the only president to attend a shuttle launch. Obama was actually supposed to see STS-134, which would include Mark Kelly, who of course is now a senator. That launch was scrubbed and Obama wasn't there when they retried again.
Incidentally, by the way, AOL also has its roots back in AppleLink because when Apple wanted to find an alternative to paying GE for their very expensive services, they approached quantum computer services, which had built a very similar online system for Commodore 64 users. From this, they produced AppleLink Personal Edition. It was launched in 1988. But because it wasn't using the GE backend, there was no way for the regular AppleLink users to interact with the AppleLink Personal users and the service didn't really go for long. The partnership was dissolved in 1989 and the service was rebranded, relaunched as America Online. So anyway, yeah, in 1998, I do know that on the shuttle, the computer that they were using now at that time to read the mail was an IBM ThinkPad running PC DOS.
And I'm not sure when they transitioned from the grid compass to the PCs, but I do know that at that point, they were still using a 2400 baud modem connection because there's a document from 1999 where NA...
> This is the ind of video that could have been a pure-text blog post (with a few images). So, for people who has no patience, whisper can help. The result is way better than YT subtitles, BTW:
Thank you, I don't even bother to click on video links because usually the content bitrate is quite low. So I appreciate your inserting a transcript.
Sure, but Scott Manley started his YouTube career by playing Kerbal Space Program, which isn't really something you can blog about very well, and when he switched to general space news and interesting space facts, I think it makes sense that he would keep using the video format.
Besides, everyone loves listening to his Scottish accent :D
I understand why this transcription may have been downvoted, and why devaluing the creator’s effort & intent in their choice of medium, dismissing diverse learning preferences/accessibility needs, etc. are Bad Things, and I appreciated this transcription being left here. But seriously: others very well might feel the same, but packaging this up with bashing the creator really wasn’t necessary IMO.
It's incredibly funny that despite the sophisticated high-bandwidth data channels available to them, they ended up using a half-duplex modem connection to a custom ground station. It still feels like our world is full of hacks like that, maybe more than ever -- "stupid", and shouldn't work, but do.
A bit of a tangent, but I'm surprised to hear that Clinton was the first sitting president to send an email, in 1998. The Queen sent her first in 1976, which is quite a gap.
'76 is really early. I'd be curious about the circumstances. [Apparently a photo op at a military research base.] Ray Tomlinson at BBN was credited with sending the first email in 1971 and, other than a few chat messages, I wasn't sending email until a fair bit later.
National Archives say that Bill Clinton had a public-facing email address in 1993 and that was probably around the time that (some) normal people were starting to get addresses and sending email.
'98, on the other hand seems really late for sending an email. America was online at that point. In fact, in '98 the concept of email was so ubiquitous that we got "You've got mail" [1] as a movie.
> In any case I'm not sure whatever photo-ops heads of state choose to do says a lot beyond something some advisor pitched to them.
IDK about the 76 email by the queen, but by the time the 90's rolled around I would have thought that electronic communications would have been pretty advantageous. Having everything printed out and hand delivered just seems like a waste of time. Particularly for something as large as the executive branch where there are so many secretaries that need to communicate.
Heck, DHS was primarily pitched and founded because of the 9/11 communication breakdown. I have to wonder how much of that was due to the fact that communications were papers flying around everywhere.
In the early 90s--and even into the mid--at a computer hardware company there were still execs who had their admins take care of all that stuff. There was a big mindset to break, probably mostly with a new generation, for many senior people in the computer industry. (To be clear, most people used email all the time--initially internal and then external as well over time.)
I was born in '98, and I remember when my family got our first computer and an AOL connection, which means it was at least a few years later than '98. I was in a middle-class family in the Midwest. While parts of America may have gotten online earlier, the late 90's and early 2000's were still totally within the period of when Americans adopted the internet.
President of The United States has a reputation of being a low-tech job. The level of security around him means all electronic devices he uses have gone through the wringer of best in class "cyber security."
While '98 feels a bit late Clinton was in office between '93-'00. This sounds like the timeframe e-mail became a critical part of daily life.
27 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 69.7 ms ] threadwere more or less sitting around idle because of course business is happening during the day. So General Electric Network Internet Exchange, or Genie, was launched.
Priced at $6 per hour at night and $36 per hour during the day, Genie had all the best online games at the time and lots of sci-fi writers ended up using the service, including J. Michael Straczynski, who announced some TV show called Babylon 5 on there. And Babylon 5, one of my favorite TV shows, just celebrated its 30th anniversary of the series debuting.
Anyway, back to Apple Link and the shuttle email. On STS-43 the communications experiment was designated DTO-799, PGSD-slash-PADM Air Ground Communications Demonstration. So PGSC is the Payload General Support Computer, the aforementioned Grid Compass, and PADM was the Portable Audio Data Modem. And the modem was of course key in communication back then, right? This would be talking back to Earth. The space shuttle already had amazing communications capabilities compared to all previous space programs. It had been launching the Tracking Data and Relay Satellites, or TDRS. In fact, the primary payload on STS-43 was TDRS-5. These satellites sat out in geostationary orbit and they enabled communications with the shuttle when the shuttle didn't have a line of sight to the ground stations.
The shuttle actually supported digital communications protocols at bit rates that absolutely eclipsed the lowly dial-up connections that us earthbound plebs generally had to deal with. Like the telemetry and the voice communication, all that stuff would take up about 216 kilobits per second. But the shuttle could also send data like a real-time video as much as 50 megabits per second, so it was able to scream out data.
So yeah, there wasn't also an existing teletype communications system on board, so from the shuttle they could send up text to the teleprinter to provide written instructions and messages to the astronauts on their trip. And sometimes these printouts could be huge. They would spill out of the printer in zero-g, making for some comical sights as astronauts tried to make sense of the massive instructions flowing out of this device. So a big part of the air-to-ground communications experiment was to provide a two-way equivalent of this, and maybe one day eliminate the paper copy if it wasn't needed.
So now the question is, how do you connect a Mac to this space-age digital communication system so it can take advantage of all that bandwidth? Well, it turns out that modifying the digital communication system to support a data link to a device on the flight deck was not possible with resources they had on hand, right? So they just hooked up an old school modem, the portable audio data modem, to an audio channel. And let's be clear, the space channel communications were all digital, including the analog audio, which was converted to a digital format for transmission and then decoded and converted back to audio.
So the modem on the flight deck, it would convert the digital data on the computer to analog audio and vice versa. So the binary data on the computer was converted to an analog audio signal by the modem, fed into the shuttle's audio processor, which could convert it to a digital signal, and then beam that to the TDRS satellites, which would then send it back to the Earth at White Sands, and then that would be sent across the country on data links to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. And there, the data would be decoded, including the shuttle audio. And some lucky person at JSC could have picked up the wrong phone and, you know, sure, no doubt have listened into the modems screeching at them, right?
But anyway, according to the documents that I found, the protocol they used was V27TER, half-duplex. That's a fax protocol that uses 1200 symbols per second at 2 bits per symbol, making a total data rate of 2400 bits per second. And the half-duplex part is significant. It means that this is a one-directional transmission. And when a pair of modems share...
the shuttle into a phone line and point it at the AppleLink phone number. Well, it turns out that wouldn't work, because the servers running AppleLink's modems required full-duplex two-way communications. So instead, they connected that audio out to a Gateway Macintosh that was set up in JSC. On one side, it had a modem that was connected to the regular AppleLink services through, you know, regular phone line. And on the other side, which actually had to be connected to the printer port, because, you know, normally the modem takes the modem port, it would talk to the shuttle communications. And there was a special piece of software in there that would understand half-duplex signals, you know, tweak them around, repackage them. And on the other side, it would talk to the AppleLink services and make this whole thing possible.
So that's how it was supposed to work. But they did have a number of technical problems. The first time they tried to do this, there was some data switching system on the ground that was asleep. So they had to, like, power cycle their system decoding on the ground. The next time they tried, it failed because that hardware was still sort of in the process of waking up. Finally, the third time they hit send, it sent. And it worked and history was made. Now, an interesting side of this, on this, was that they used the standard AppleLink memo service, which was basically email. But the email addresses weren't protected in any way. So it was, they had to keep the shuttle email address secret. In fact, they registered STS-43 at AppleLink as an address so that curious people would be sending to that address rather than the actual shuttle address.
So anyway, after this flight, the Mac did fly again, but NASA elected to move the communication systems over to their tried and tested grid compass laptops. And I don't have any information on exactly how this operated beyond knowing that it used the same kind of modem. There might have been the same Mac at JSC for all I know, or they might have run their own bulletin board at NASA, right? NASA, BBS. There's very little information on this. There's a few references to the modem still being used and there's some photos of crew using it on later missions.
But I do know that by 1998, the email system was able to receive messages from the general internet because Bill Clinton sent an email to the crew of STS-95, which included Senator John Glenn. And he used a laptop that belonged to somebody that was in the right place at the right time. It wasn't a government laptop, it was like some doctor who was there and they used his AOL account to send a message to the space shuttle. And this is the first time, by the way, a sitting US president has sent an email. Bill was also the only president to attend a shuttle launch. Obama was actually supposed to see STS-134, which would include Mark Kelly, who of course is now a senator. That launch was scrubbed and Obama wasn't there when they retried again.
Incidentally, by the way, AOL also has its roots back in AppleLink because when Apple wanted to find an alternative to paying GE for their very expensive services, they approached quantum computer services, which had built a very similar online system for Commodore 64 users. From this, they produced AppleLink Personal Edition. It was launched in 1988. But because it wasn't using the GE backend, there was no way for the regular AppleLink users to interact with the AppleLink Personal users and the service didn't really go for long. The partnership was dissolved in 1989 and the service was rebranded, relaunched as America Online. So anyway, yeah, in 1998, I do know that on the shuttle, the computer that they were using now at that time to read the mail was an IBM ThinkPad running PC DOS.
And I'm not sure when they transitioned from the grid compass to the PCs, but I do know that at that point, they were still using a 2400 baud modem connection because there's a document from 1999 where NA...
As it stands it's not at all reader friendly .. which defeats your stated purpose.
For people who want it, transcription in SRT format is here: https://text.is/O6ZX
I also read SRT's in editors, it's a little different there to being broken up in a HN comment on a webpage on a device.
Thank you, I don't even bother to click on video links because usually the content bitrate is quite low. So I appreciate your inserting a transcript.
Besides, everyone loves listening to his Scottish accent :D
The video is full of well edited historic footage so I don't buy your claim that text is just fine.
It's easier clicking that than making pronoun-filled replies that revolve around personal norms of commenting outside HN guidelines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasta_la_vista%2C_baby
Edit: maybe they could use the laser links?
National Archives say that Bill Clinton had a public-facing email address in 1993 and that was probably around the time that (some) normal people were starting to get addresses and sending email.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ve_Got_Mail
In any case I'm not sure whatever photo-ops heads of state choose to do says a lot beyond something some advisor pitched to them.
IDK about the 76 email by the queen, but by the time the 90's rolled around I would have thought that electronic communications would have been pretty advantageous. Having everything printed out and hand delivered just seems like a waste of time. Particularly for something as large as the executive branch where there are so many secretaries that need to communicate.
Heck, DHS was primarily pitched and founded because of the 9/11 communication breakdown. I have to wonder how much of that was due to the fact that communications were papers flying around everywhere.
"The Final Days" White House Correspondents' Dinner Skit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbbUYhyoWz8
While '98 feels a bit late Clinton was in office between '93-'00. This sounds like the timeframe e-mail became a critical part of daily life.