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It Ain't Necessarily So

I wrote a few more AIN'Ts that Ian rejected, but were again picked up by the IEEE's Technology and Society journal. Then I returned to invention and how we sometimes don't get it. This one made it into Telemanagement for May, 1991.

Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention

If there is one thing necessity is not the mother of, it is invention. People invent for various reasons, but almost never because some product is needed. Let me illustrate with examples of some real necessities which have not yet been invented.

The other day, for reasons too complex to go into, I had to catch a bus. In our area, buses have electronic displays telling where they are going; the driver can make changes without leaving his seat. But these displays are traditionally located on the front of the bus, over the windshield. As you have doubtless guessed by now, I approached the bus from the rear, and saw it starting to pull away. I ran desperately forward, and finally got a glimpse of the destination; wrong bus. I could have dropped dead of a heart attack. Why can't the clowns who design buses put a destination display on the rear of the bus, so we can tell whether or not it's worth running after?

Another problem: have you ever walked into a wash room carrying a book, a parcel or a briefcase? There is no known way to wash your hands while holding a book in one of them. Why don't the clowns who design washrooms provide some means for stashing packages while one is otherwise occupied?

A pet peeve: clock radios can only be tuned with a knob that drives an invisible pointer over a dial that is unreadable after you take off your glasses. Further, if you want to catch the news and then shift to the music station before going to sleep, you can't do it. The Heaviside layers shift at night, and what you think is your music station is actually coming from the far end of the country. In the morning, when the Heaviside layers go back where they belong, you wake up to static. Why Don't The Clowns Who Design Clock Radios Provide Push-Button Tuning?

A real monster: did you forget to check your oil? More than one engine has been lost for lack of lube. But the only way to do it is to open the hood, find the dip-stick, pull it out, wipe it off, stick it back in, pull it out again, and see if your oil is between the right marks. In the meantime, you have managed to flip some drops of oil on your fan belt, encouraging it to fall into pieces when you are in the middle of Death Valley, Chicago, or some place worse. Why don't the clowns who design cars find some way to provide a dashboard indicator for oil level?

The PBX business is just about as bad the above examples in not allowing necessity to mother required inventions. A catalog of some of the things that were omitted from original PBX designs is staggering: restrictors, call detail recording, automatic route selection, sets to emulate 1A2 key, message waiting lamps, a recorded announcement rather than dial tone for Direct Inward System Access (DISA), etc. , etc. But in all the above instances, somebody else sprang into action and offered the function the user required. External restrictors from Stromberg Carlson and North Electric, followed by Phonetele, showed what could be done. Remember the ZapCall and the WATSbox? 1A2 is still with us, along with electronic emulations, but most PBXs have added business telephone sets, and most have line cards than can light MW lamps under program control. Lexar, at least, is building in the Automated Attendant to make DISA work properly.

But PBXs still make no effort to deal with answer supervision on CO Trunks. A company called Gemini Telemanagement Systems is attempting to follow in the pattern described above, particularly for hotels and motels where failure to charge the customer for local calls loses money, and charging for calls that are not answered loses customers. After reading about Gemini in another journal, I called them to find how their machine works. First, it buffers the CDR records coming out of the RS-232 port. Second, it bridges to all the outgoing trunks, like the Phonetele Restrictor, and monitors call set-up. If it detects first the presence and then the absence of ringing for longer than six seconds, it assumes the call was answered and lets the CDR record go on through. It can be fooled by ringing followed by an intercept announcement, for instance, but it's a step in the right direction.

The question is, why didn't the PBX people do this first? By not needing a separate call-record buffer and a per-trunk scanner, a PBX should be able to provide some means of answer detection much less expensively than Gemini. But the pattern is the same as with restriction, CDR, and all the rest. There is a lesson to be learned from all this. If I could figure out what it is, I'll bet I could get somebody to produce a push-button clock radio.

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