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Although the respective meanings of “information service” and “telecommunications service” may be obscured by political compromises and commercial interests, common sense distinguishes between them very easily. An information service consists of information “content” plus any distribution medium required to deliver it; a telecommunications service is a medium through which users exchange information. An information service is defined by what it delivers, while a telecom service is defined by the universe of content that it’s capable of delivering.

If we go back to the mid-Nineties and the heyday of America Online, we see AOL providing information services to customers nationwide via the familiar telecommunications services provided by phone companies with local monopolies. Many of AOL’s services were developed by AOL and its partners, and ran on AOL servers. The most important service, however, was indirect access to the packet-switched Internet. This access, poor as it was, was valuable because few individuals could afford any telecommunications service providing full access to the Internet.

With the advent of affordable broadband, individuals no longer needed to use circuit-switched telecommunications services to receive simulated Internet connectivity as an information service; they could actually be on the Internet, free to use any kind of software and hardware that complied with the open standards of the Internet. Anyone with full access to the Internet could connect their own routers and switches, run a webserver, and create their own information services. If the broadband foundations for all this didn’t deserve to be called a “telecommunications service,” what on earth did?

Cable TV service, we will all admit, is better described as an information service than a telecom service. The communications aspects of a CATV network exist only to deliver the television channels for which subscribers have contracted to pay the operator of the service. Cable TV is a one-way single-purpose connection between one distributor of program products and many consumers. Regulation of CATV services can reasonably be limited to the usual consumer protection issues and concerns about RF emissions from CATV equipment.

It turns out, of course, that the network infrastructure required for delivery of digital cable TV can also be used to deliver telecommunications services. Broadband Internet may be delivered by the same cable and the same operator as CATV, but it would be wrong to conclude from this that any telecom services delivered that way have somehow become information services.

Telephone and cable TV companies tend to be local monopolies, horizontally integrated into large corporations. Only a very small number of wireless phone companies can offer nationwide coverage, and these do their best to keep their subscribers locked into multi-year contracts that are very costly to break. As cell phones come to dominate telephony, and television moves onto Internet protocols, the natural evolution of telecommunications services will be toward a single data cable for each home or small business, and probably a single operator in each city or region. The public benefits flowing from competition among wired telecom service providers, such as they are, will tend to disappear. Wireless providers will continue to compete, but increasing consolidation in that market seems certain. With market failure so likely, broadband telecommunications services need to be regulated as utilities, with no more regulatory forbearance than can be justified by the amount of competition that remains.

Any broadband telecommunications service that becomes a local monopoly must be regulated as a common carrier if competition among true information services is to remain as healthy as it has been to date in the history of the commercial Internet. Claims that “network neutrality” legislation is made unnecessary by competition make sense only if we ignore the lack of competition for the essential act of connecting the physical network to user premises. The absurdity of such claims are emphasized by the fact that many who claim that equal access is assured by competition will also claim that regulations requiring equal access will destroy private investment in Internet infrastructure.

If the providers of broadband telecom services are not prevented from treating the content delivered over their cables as their own information service, the result will be a reversion to the old AOL model, in which network owners offer only a simulation of Internet connectivity filtered so as to minimize competition with their own paid information services. Any “innovation” that this model can produce will be miniscule compared with the variety of paid and free information services that an open Internet has produced and can continue to deliver.

[Once again, I’m posting this on the blog and also adding it to my Buchla 700 article-in-progress.]

The original Buchlas were modular analog music machines, devices with amazing capabilities that could be unleashed only by using thickets of patch cords to interconnect their modules in amazingly complex ways. However, in the early 70s, building on the technology of their 200 series modular systems, Buchla and Associates made a simpler system for use in real time. As Donald Buchla wrote in his introduction to Allan Strange’s user’s guide to the Music Easel: “Our goal was to create an instrument for performance. One with a vocabulary that was unpresumptive, varied, and accessible. We weren’t particularly interested in imitation of any extant instruments, either functionally or acoustically. We did want the potential for expressive, real-time performer-instrument interaction.”

The legendary Minimoog was a far more popular performance-oriented synthesizer from the same era. Its characteristic sounds were rather simple, with three harmonically-rich oscillators tracking a monophonic keyboard and getting articulation from a resonant low-pass filter. It provided lead and bass voices for many progressive rock songs, making big thick sounds that could mesh nicely with more traditional instruments. It was less effective in making the the kind of complex, unclassifiable, and often unpitched sounds from which most academic electronic music was constructed. In other words, the Minimoog was exactly what the Music Easel was designed not to be.

The Music Easel’s main sound source is a single “Complex Oscillator,” by which its makers meant a pair of oscillators combined in such a way that one would be normally be connected to the audio outputs while the other provided a signal for modulating the amplitude or frequency of the main oscillator. Using one audio-frequency signal to modulate another produces sounds more complex and interesting than the simple waveforms of the Minimoog. In addition to its repertoire of modulation techniques, the Music Easel’s Complex Oscillator offered an additional “timbre” control to modify its waveforms. While the Music Easel’s simplest sounds include the triangle and pulse waveforms that Moog-style instruments have taught us to expect from synthesizers, its more complex sounds suggest the sounds of percussion instruments, plucked strings, or bells without exactly mimicking them.

The Minimoog offers keyboard players a familiar user interface with its little piano-like monophonic keyboard; the Music Easel offers pressure-sensitive touchplates instead of keys, although the layout of a traditional two and a half octave keyboard is preserved. But the Easel’s “keyboard,” with its multiple output jacks, knobs, and switchable offset voltages, is obviously designed for something other than prog-rock keyboard solos. Quoting from the description on Buchla’s site,

The connectives are as important as the elements to be connected. Interconnection within the Music Easel is accomplished with a combination of switching and patching, a system which is flexible, expedient, and open ended. Logical, compact organization and color coded graphic feedback facilitate rapid and effective interaction. Multiple correlations between a performer’s actions and the Music Easel’s responses are readily implemented, enabling a degree of expressive articulation heretofore impossible with electronic instrumentation.

The keyboard was just one part of the Music Easel’s system for generating control voltages to drive its audio components. There was a low frequency oscillator for generating control pulses, a random voltage source, an analog sequencer for generating repetitive multi-step voltage patterns, and a pair of envelope generators with voltage-controlled attack and decay. Most of these were analogous to parts of the Minimoog and other conventional synthesizers, but the Music Easel let its user decide how all the pieces would fit together.

Because the Music Easel was designed at the beginning of the microprocessor era, before the first personal computers, there was no practical way to offer digital control of all the possibilities the Easel offered. Instead, it provided a brute-force analog solution for recording and retrieving information about the interconnections among its components: it allowed sophisticated users to replicate the connections defined through the Music Easel’s front panel by soldering appropriate resistors between points on “Program Cards” that plugged into an external slot. No one would do this today, but in the early 70s the only alternative was plugging patchcords into jacks and setting knobs and switches – a slow and error-prone process, and one that a performing musician would otherwise have to do many times in front of an audience.

I have written these notes and provided the links below to present the Music Easel as an important ancestor of the Buchla 700. It was less ambitious and probably more successful than the 700. It used different technology, but revealed a similar philosophy of electronic music performance. Where the Easel put one complex analog synthesis channel under a performer’s control, the 700 offered a dozen virtual channels, with digital storage and MIDI communications for instrument definitions, musical sequences, and entire compositions.

Allan Strange’s Music Easel manual is online:

Programming and Meta-Programming the Electro Organism: An Operating Directive for the Music Easel

YouTube has a number of good resources for learning about the Music Easel. Someone has put up demos of the Complex Oscillator, using an oscilloscope to show the waveforms corresponding to the various sounds:

Music Easel – Scope – Sine/triangle

Music Easel – Scope – Sine/square

Music Easel – Scope – Sine/spike

Music Easel – Scope – AM

Music Easel – Scope – FM

Music Easel – Scope – everything

Aaron Lanterman, mentioned above as the creator of the Buchla 700 Preservation Page, has posted YouTube videos in which he demonstrates his own versions of some of the circuits in the Music Easel:

Adaptation of the timbre circuit from the Buchla Music Easel

Adaptation of the pulser from the Buchla Music Easel

Adaptation of the envelope generator from the Buchla Music Easel

Adaptation of the balanced modulator from the Buchla Music Easel, part 1

Adaptation of the balanced modulator from the Buchla Music Easel, Part 2

There’s also a cute video of the Music Easel in action. Note Cohen’s demonstration of the Program Card’s bent-circuit flakiness near the end of the video:

Charles Cohen at the Buchla Music Easel

I suppose I’m still hopeful. On one hand, passage of a bill that makes so many concessions to the Big Players makes cost control very scary, and lets Democrats claim more progress than they really made – on the other, it may actually do some good for actual people, and it can’t fail to change the way Americans talk about these issues. As David Frum admits, once you get past the crazy rhetoric, it’s hard to imagine mass opposition to the specifics of the bill: “…how many votes could we muster to re-open the ‘doughnut hole’ and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage?”

The degree of asymmetry in markets is a central fact defining how people and firms behave. On the one hand, we have the idealized entrepreneur, who must find a way to make other people’s lives better in order to convince them to pay him. On the other, we have the rent-seeker who controls some resource that other people need, or has some other hold on an existing market that assures him of income and profits.

The idealized entrepreneur is assumed to have a big idea that will make him rich and make the world a better place. But what eventually makes him rich, if anything does, is something that allows his firm to be a rent-collector. In the high-tech world, one might imagine that there’s always room for a better idea. But we have seen how Microsoft, Intel, and a few other firms have the power to lock out competitors for long periods of time by turning interoperability into something they can collect rent on. This isn’t something that will last for human generations, but it can easily persist through a number of technology generations. The classic example here was IBM, which used its control over what can be connected to what as the basis for around twenty years of control over the direction of computing technology.

Only when qualitatively different technologies come along are these companies forced to compete with others to have their technologies accepted. IBM legitimized the personal computer in the eyes of most business people, but after just a few years it found that it didn’t have enough proprietary technology in the PC to keep its hooks in the PC marketplace. Microsoft and Intel did. Now those companies, clinging to the PC paradigm just as IBM hung on to mainframes and integrated office systems, are finding it difficult to acquire their accustomed degree of market power in the music player and smartphone domains.

The biggest prize in high-tech has been the one that nobody’s been able to get. The whole Internet boom of the Clinton era was built around the hope that some company was going to become the Microsoft of the Internet, i.e., that it would make its proprietary technology indispensable in a way that would allow Microsoft-style rentier behavior. If that had happened, it would have run counter to the basic principles of the Internet, which were set down not by a corporation, but by an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. Interoperability on the Internet existed by decree. It wasn’t something that could be handed over to the rent seekers – who had developed every previous networking technology, all of which fell far short of the universal usefulness that the Internet has.

Google has a dominant position in Internet search, and a strong position in many other aspects of Internet technology, but so far they haven’t become a gatekeeper. (Their strength in Web advertising makes them a rent collector, but this is not of much importance to Web users.) You probably use Google search because you know it works, but if Bing or something else later turns out to be better, you have exactly the same access to the next search engine as to Google.

When we hear discussions of “net neutrality,” all we need to know is that the opponents of neutrality represent interests that want to break the Internet in such a way as to let the “free market” – the rent seekers – take over. What they’re asking for is the right to run their part of the Internet as if it were their own cable TV system or cell phone network – to shape their customers’ use of the Internet by treating the things that make them money differently from the things that don’t.

This being America, they’ll probably get it…

Steve Jobs told us that any new mobile device in the range between the smartphone and the laptop would need to be better at something than any alternative – which “netbook” computers are not.

But it really all comes down to niches, applications, and form factors. The iPad is better than anything else – for some user, in some role – if it happens to match the particular set of performance and convenience requirements that define that role. If not, not. Like netbooks, the iPad offers a new compromise. Apple’s marketing and sense of style may succeed in making this particular compromise look like something intrinsically wonderful, but it seems obvious to me that there’s room for many different form factors and feature sets in the gap that Apple is targeting. I like the looks of the iPad, but I don’t want one – if I have to protect a ten inch screen, I’m going to want a clamshell case over it, and that might as well have a physical keyboard to reclaim the display real estate that virtual keys would take. Different people will have different concerns.

I think it’s significant that Google is attacking that gap from two directions, with Android for smartphones-and-up, and Chrome OS for PCs-and-down. Of course Microsoft also has real Windows and Windows For Gadgets, whatever it’s called this year, but Microsoft remains committed to the higher end. It was Microsoft, after all, that turned the netbook into a mere cheap laptop, with tiny slow hard drives and full desktop operating systems. Linux/ARM devices are likely to evolve in different directions. Everyone will be looking for a sweet spot, and different users and vendors will find it in different parts of the spectrum.

This becomes Mac-vs-PC all over again. Do you want integration and style, or choices? It will be a no-brainer for most people if Apple tries to have too much to say about who can provide applications and content.