Pat,
The second half of V25 #6 is in a different font with a line through
the text. See below:
Can you resend it? Thanks.
David Willingham
In a message dated 1/5/2006 3:32:58 PM Eastern Standard Time,
editor@telecom-digest.org writes:
> And let's not forget about the Southern Pacific Railroad (or was it
> the Southern Pacific Railway?)... As the story has it they were the
> ones who thought up SPRINT!
> Al
> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: 'The outhern acific Railroad nternal'
> Network Telecommunications Department of that railroad -- or
> S.P.R.I.N.T. for short -- did a major re-build of their trackside
> telephone system in the late 1960's. They did such a good job of it,
> they had a huge anount of left-over capacity and decided to lease it
> out to other businesses and companies. That was the original Sprint,
> which a few years later got into residential telecom service as well,
> and has now -- 2005 -- gone through many changes in ownership and
> management. About 1998 or so, Sprint bought the United Telephone
> Company which serves a lot of northern Kansas among other territories.
> PAT]
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well! The absence of the _S_ and _P_ in
'Southern Pacific' and the absence of the _I_ in 'Internal' tells me
what I did wrong. To make the first letters of each word to stand out
demonstrating the meaning of 'SPRINT' I encased each of those first
letters in greater-than/lesser-than symbols which is a no-no if some
of the readers use an HTML reader. Those three letters, when encased
in braces serve to make them 'control' characters or instruction for
use in hypertext markup language. The _P_ when encased like that means
to start a new paragraph, the _I_ when encased in those brackets means
to change to italics and the _S_ I suspect means to 'strike out' what
has been written. The _I_ and the _S_ conditions get cancelled when a
forward slash is inserted before them, that is , the forward slash
'/'causes the condition to be 'closed'. _P_ requires no closure. That
is the reason (I think) why David Willingham's (and Lord only knows
who else) copy of the last issue of the Digest went sour. It may have
just been his copy of a browser which did it, or the version of AOL he
has on his account, or maybe its because back in 1995 when I started a
hypertext (.html) edition the Digest, I should have remembered that
_never again_ would I be able to use '<' and '>' around letters by
themselves in my ouvre each day, text-version be damned or whatever
audience I was writing to as long as there was also an .html version
of the ouvre going out. I have remailed a text-based version of issue
6 to David and if _your_ copy also went sour like that, let me know
and I will remail a copy to you as well. PAT]
GarsDuBell@aol.com