This was a fascinating read overall but I found the effort to translate everything into modern big-tech terminology very distracting. Furthermore the Gates/Jobs or Microsoft/Apple analogies seem tenuous at best and gives the impression that the author is misrepresenting a story that is already interesting enough on its own.
I liked how he wove it together (or attempted to).
Agreed that he made points which appeared to stop you and think up the story to draw a parallel but I believe there is a cyclical nature to this.
I like seeing the story behind great rivalries, Tesla and Edison, Marconi and Maskelyne, Einstein and Hilbert. Arguably you could say it parallels across the mere premise of rivalry.
Kelvin bandwidth model only accounted for the RC dispersion of the undersea cable, hence it had horrible dispersion and a sub-Hz bandwidth.
It was Heaviside that introduced the loading coil via his solution of telegrapher equation and coaxial cable that made the undersea cable practical. Of course he died a pauper.
Oddly enough, Heaviside's name has been heard in song by tens of millions of people in recent years.
In the musical Cats, every Jellicle Cat hopes to be the one chosen to ascend to the Heaviside Layer.
This may be a metaphorical place in the play, but it is also an actual layer of the ionosphere. Oliver Heaviside and Arthur Kennelly (working independently) predicted its existence in 1902, and it was confirmed in 1924 by Edward Appleton.
Cats is based on the 1939 book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. Shortwave radio was a big deal at the time, and anything to do with radio signals and propagation caught the public's attention.
Today, the Heaviside Layer is known as the E layer, and is much beloved by amateur radio operators for its unpredictable propagation known as "sporadic E skip".
An excellent book on this subject (without any of the heavyhanded Big Tech comparisons) is “Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics”, by David Mindell who also wrote the great “Digital Apollo”.
