Re: Reference book survey - SUMMARY

["Amy Smith/Westford/IBM" <amy_smith -at- us -dot- ibm -dot- com>]

>For those of you not familiar with Newton's Telecom
>Dictionary, I highly recommend it. It is both informative and
>entertaining, something you cannot usually say about a dictionary. 
Imagine
>a dictionary written by ME and edited by Andrew Plato and you'll start to
>get the idea of its tone.....

I second this recommendation! A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far 
away, I used to be a telecom analyst for a market research firm. I read 
everything published by Harry Newton. In fact, he used to publish a very 
popular magazine for the interconnect industry called, oddly enough, 
"Interconnect." 

NB: For you infants out there who started working in the post-divestiture 
era, 'interconnect' referred to any company that had devices or services 
that 'connected' to the The Bell System (caps intentional).

Anyway, Interconnect was the Mad magazine of the telecom industry - witty, 
fun, and irreverent. Also chock full of good information.

And Newton's Telecom Dictionary is the only place where I found a *really* 
useful definition of 'erlang.'

Now that I think of it, another useful reference for basic telecom 
concepts is "Engineering and Operations in the Bell System", published by 
Bell Labs. I imagine that this is out of print, but worth getting your 
hands on if you can find it. Good for when you need more in-depth 
information than Newton's Telecom Dictionary provides. Now that I no 
longer write about telecom, mine is doing double duty as a book end, but 
every once in a while, I take it out and remember the heady  days of the 
post-divestiture era, when the RBOCs ruled, MCI was the long-distance 
king, and citizens everywhere no longer had to fear The Phone Police. :-) 
:-) :-) 


****************************************************************************
Amy Smith, Domino/Notes User Assistance 
Lotus Software/IBM Software Group
Phone: 978.399.5009  Tie line: 399-5009 
Email: amy_smith -at- us -dot- ibm -dot- com
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