43
Above:
A restoration project
where Sprint had not
completed the ring yet,
so several midnight
shifts were required to
do all the cutovers.
Above left:
Larry Johnson poses
in a lab coat.
and implemented bundle technology, Bill Lear
wanted it on the LearFan plane too. ... All this
predated Ethernet by a few years in the
late 1970s."
"We all used
multimode fber back
then, and there were
no patch panels, just
direct termination.
We knew single-mode
fber was the way to
go, and it was in [fber
inventor] Charlie
Kao's original specs,
but the thin single-mode fber needed a laser to
light it, and lasers at the time were only good
for an hour or so. LEDs were long-lasting, but
they needed the larger multimode diameter to
collect the light.
"Fiber technology and fber testing
technology got better frst in undersea
cables, where reliability was critical, and then
transferred to land-based deployments."
"Tere is always a challenge in teaching
someone. We have to balance the time it takes to
transfer the knowledge against how long someone
can be out of the ofce to attend class."
While at Tektronix, Larry worked on the
frst OTDR for outside-plant work, released in
1981. "We had a small budget for educational
institutions so they
could teach people
how to use them. Even
now, many vocational/
technical colleges
can't aford enough
equipment, or the best
equipment, for classes.
I wish there were more
industry support for
schools. At Te Light Brigade, we donate older
equipment when we upgrade, but I would like
to see more funding for colleges, as they do
deserve the best."
Later, while designing the frst Microsoft
fber backbone with 14,000 fbers in the late
1980s, Larry proposed using a mesh architecture
for reliability and also providing excess duct
capacity for future growth. He also proposed
installing a blend of multimode and single-mode
fbers to provide much greater bandwidth and
fexibility with little cost impact.
Would you trust Larry with
a neutron bomb or an MX
missile? Someone did.
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