johnl@harvard.HARVARD.EDU@ima.UUCP (12/31/86)
Bar codes on the mail: The postal service has new high-speed sorting equipment which reads the bar codes and sorts the mail. They also are putting in OCR equipment that reads the bottom line of the address and prints the bar code. Companies that pre-print the bar code on their envelopes are likely to get their incoming mail faster, since the P.O. can skip the OCR step and proceed directly to the sorting. ISDN: There was a whole issue of the AT&TTJ (nee BSTJ) on ISDN earlier this year. The standard 2B+D interface allows one 16KB supervisory channel which is always X.25-like data. This channel is used to exchange messages to control the other two channels, but you can use it for virtual circuit data, too. The other two channels can be used for anything you want, such as high speed data or voice. The channels can be assigned to various services per-call, so at different times you could have two voice calls, two data calls, or one of each. The standards for the X.25-like channel seem to be be pretty well defined, but what they're haggling about now are some rather fundamental things like how to encode voice into the 64KB channel, and how to encode the three channels onto a phone line. There is also a 23B+D interface for larger systems like PBXes, which would map 23 64KB channels plus another 64KB supervisory channel onto a T1 trunk, and there's still wrangling about that, too. Don't hold your breath. John Levine, ima!johnl or Levine@YALE.something