Venus Equilateral

From: Beverly Erlebacher 
Subject: science fiction
Date: 	Mon, 26 Mar 90 01:46:28 EST

I have started reading "Venus Equilateral" a book of stories by radio
engineer George O. Smith, copyright 1942.  In the first chapter he
describes the technology of the future:

	[ Description of cheerful young woman on Venus taking phone
	message from customer, typing it into teletype, reading it
	back for confirmation, and assuring customer of delivery
	on Earth within the hour.]

	The punched tape from Operator No. 7's machine slid along the
	line until it entered a coupling machine.

	The coupling machine worked furiously.  It accepted the tapes
	from seventy operators as fast as they could write them.  It
	selected the messages as they entered the machine, placing a
	mechanical preference upon whichever message happened to be
	ahead of the others on the moving tapes.  The master tape 
	moved continuously at eleven thousand words per minute, taking
	teletype messages from everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere
	of Venus to Terra and Mars.  It was a busy machine; even at
	eleven thousand words per minute it often got hours behind.

	[ Description of beaming the message on the master tape up
	through the Heaviside layers, to a space station where]
	
	It was amplified, it was dehashed, destaticked and deloused.

	[ It is then sent across 67 million miles of space to Venus
	Equilateral Station (in Venus Trojan orbit) where ]

	The signal was amplified and demodulated.  It went into a
	decoupler machine where the messages were sorted mechanically
	and sent, each to the proper channel, into other coupler machines. 
	Beams from Venus Equilateral were directed at Mars and at Terra.
	
I have the following questions:

1.  By the time of this story, will paper tape technology have advanced
to the point where continuous and prolonged 11,000 word per minute tape
motion is feasible with reasonable mean time between tape snarls?  
Consider that we apparently have one machine automatically taking tape
from 70 machines.

2.  Is there a significant explosion hazard from paper dust raised by
all these paper tapes? 

3.  Is paper dust and chad (or whatever you call the round chad from
tape punches) a problem in closed environment of a space station?

4.  How can the cheerful young woman assure her customer of 1 hour delivery
when the coupler is "often hours behind"?  Why are they proud of an obviously
underconfigured system?

5.  In addition to the cheerful young women, how many people must be employed
to manage tape resources, e.g. fetching new tape from the stock room, changing
spools, disposing of used tape, perhaps after archival storage, hauling chad,
vacuuming up paper dust, not to mention servicing the machines, untangling
tape snarls and patching them up with sticky tape, etc.?

6.  How many trees die for the sake of these tapes?  What is the cost of 
lifting the tape from Terra's gravity well and conveying it to Venus and
Venus Equilateral?  What do they do with all the used tape?  In space no
one will empty your blue box.  I imagine the station enveloped in a writhing
cloud of used paper tape and round chad.  They could burn it to provide extra
CO2 for the hydroponics (if any).  Perhaps they fire it into the sun. 

The first story seems to be about a cheerful young male engineer and his
cheerful young female secretary who work on Venus Equilateral.  The engineer
has been acting as chief since his elderly boss became ill and retired.
The Company has just sent up a pompous bean counter to take over this post
and put the business on a more profitable footing by implementing cost-cutting
measures.  The engineer (who has a phd) is somewhat disgruntled, though still 
cheerful, and expects the new man to screw up amusingly.  Although the reader's
sympathies are supposed to be with the engineer, i kind of sympathise with
the bean counter.  If the engineer is such a hot shot, why doesnt he apply
himself to obvious technical improvements, despite his phd?  for example, he
could eliminate local paper tape operations entirely by wiring up the receiver
to the transmitters with some electronic sorting stuff in the middle and avoid
the expensive and wasteful practice of locally punching each message twice. 
the technology is certainly up to it - after all, they seem to be able to manage
perfect error-free end-to-end transmissions.  they either have compute power
for error correction protocols or adequate memory for retries over long
transmission delays.

Ha, ha, ha. Take me back to [ the alphabetic list ] [ the date-ordered list ].