Help! Ma Bell

The first company I solicited to help FLEX was the phone company. Realize: in 1970 Ma Bell was a monopoly. But I addressed the phone company in the person of an elder in my childhood church, Mr. Kraus, the father of two of my public school classmates. Had I a budget, a paid secretary, stationary to spare, I would have made copies of all my proposals. But no: in 1970 I was proposing digital data keeping for the world, but still had none myself. I typed a letter on erasable typing paper: and mailed it. Take my word for the accuracy of what I report: or wait till Judgment: I've trusted all along that God will have copies: of everything (and that God can prove that they're uncorrupted.) (Such a cosmology may be naive, but I'm referring to pk (and US) in 1970!)

My letter asked Ma Bell for seed money. My appeal to IBM was far more detailed. My phone company letter was my first draft of my first such appeal. I explained that the point was to implement Ivan Illich's design for a cybernetic learning web. I pointed out that the phone company would be instrumental in the operation of such a learning network: as would be the post office, local real estate ... People were phoning in their information; we were phoning out information.

My letter suggested that the phone company could cooperate with me in designing a way to use the phone company's infrastructure to bill FLEX uses. I even proposed something analogous to a area code for such billing. In other words, I was proposing that the phone company co-invent with me 900 numbers! Call FLEX, agree to pay, and $3 gets added to your bill, Ma Bell depositing all the $3s to a FLEX bank account. My royalty from the phone company alone could have financed everything!

Mr. Kraus never answered my letter. Mr. Kraus never told me whether or not he forwarded my request to the powers. For all I know Mr. Kraus, sunday school teacher in our church, could have destroyed the letter, and proposed 900 numbers to the Ma Bell Powers himself!

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I've lots of details from Knatz.com yet to add to my Help! IBM post and many more never yet told anywhere. But I'm afraid there aren't many untold stories about my phone company letter of 1970. I never heard form Mr. Kraus or from anyone else in the phone company. You can speculate as freely as I can: depending on your interest, on your IQ, your power of imagination ...