over, as the chain reaction slowed. By 11:30 P.M. on
Monday January 15, sweating engineers on the midnight shift breathed a
sigh of relief as the last switch cleared-up.

By Tuesday they were pulling all the brand-new 4ESS software and
replacing it with an earlier version of System 7.

If these had been human operators, rather than computers at work,
someone would simply have eventually stopped screaming. It would have
been OBVIOUS that the situation was not "OK," and common sense would
have kicked in. Humans possess common sense--at least to some extent.
Computers simply don't.

On the other hand, computers can handle hundreds of calls per second.
Humans simply can't. If every single human being in America worked for
the phone company, we couldn't match the performance of digital
switches: direct-dialling, three-way calling, speed-calling,
call-waiting, Caller ID, all the rest of the cornucopia of digital
bounty. Replacing computers with operators is simply not an option any
more.

And yet we still, anachronistically, expect humans to be running our
phone system. It is hard for us to understand that we have sacrificed
huge amounts of initiative and control to senseless yet powerful
machines. When the phones fail, we want somebody to be responsible.
We want somebody to blame.

When the Crash of January 15 happened, the American populace was simply
not prepared to understand that enormous landslides in cyberspace, like
the Crash itself, can happen, and can be nobody's fault in particular.
It was easier to believe, maybe even in some odd way more reassuring to
believe, that some evil person, or evil group, had done this to us.
"Hackers" had done it. With a virus. A trojan horse. A software
bomb. A dirty plot of some kind. People believed this, responsible
people. In 1990, they were looking hard for evidence to confirm their
heartfelt suspicions.

And they would look in a lot of places.

Come 1991, however, the outlines of an apparent new reality would begin
to emerge from the fog.

On July 1 and 2, 1991, computer-software collapses in telephone
switching stations disrupted service in Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Los
Angeles and San Francisco. Once again, seemingly minor maintenance
problems had crippled the digital System 7. About twelve million
people were affected in the Crash of July 1, 1991.

Said the New York Times Service: "Telephone company executives and
federal regulators said they were