(continuing)

the shuttle into a phone line and point it at the AppleLink phone number. Well, it turns out that wouldn't work, because the servers running AppleLink's modems required full-duplex two-way communications. So instead, they connected that audio out to a Gateway Macintosh that was set up in JSC. On one side, it had a modem that was connected to the regular AppleLink services through, you know, regular phone line. And on the other side, which actually had to be connected to the printer port, because, you know, normally the modem takes the modem port, it would talk to the shuttle communications. And there was a special piece of software in there that would understand half-duplex signals, you know, tweak them around, repackage them. And on the other side, it would talk to the AppleLink services and make this whole thing possible.

So that's how it was supposed to work. But they did have a number of technical problems. The first time they tried to do this, there was some data switching system on the ground that was asleep. So they had to, like, power cycle their system decoding on the ground. The next time they tried, it failed because that hardware was still sort of in the process of waking up. Finally, the third time they hit send, it sent. And it worked and history was made. Now, an interesting side of this, on this, was that they used the standard AppleLink memo service, which was basically email. But the email addresses weren't protected in any way. So it was, they had to keep the shuttle email address secret. In fact, they registered STS-43 at AppleLink as an address so that curious people would be sending to that address rather than the actual shuttle address.

So anyway, after this flight, the Mac did fly again, but NASA elected to move the communication systems over to their tried and tested grid compass laptops. And I don't have any information on exactly how this operated beyond knowing that it used the same kind of modem. There might have been the same Mac at JSC for all I know, or they might have run their own bulletin board at NASA, right? NASA, BBS. There's very little information on this. There's a few references to the modem still being used and there's some photos of crew using it on later missions.

But I do know that by 1998, the email system was able to receive messages from the general internet because Bill Clinton sent an email to the crew of STS-95, which included Senator John Glenn. And he used a laptop that belonged to somebody that was in the right place at the right time. It wasn't a government laptop, it was like some doctor who was there and they used his AOL account to send a message to the space shuttle. And this is the first time, by the way, a sitting US president has sent an email. Bill was also the only president to attend a shuttle launch. Obama was actually supposed to see STS-134, which would include Mark Kelly, who of course is now a senator. That launch was scrubbed and Obama wasn't there when they retried again.

Incidentally, by the way, AOL also has its roots back in AppleLink because when Apple wanted to find an alternative to paying GE for their very expensive services, they approached quantum computer services, which had built a very similar online system for Commodore 64 users. From this, they produced AppleLink Personal Edition. It was launched in 1988. But because it wasn't using the GE backend, there was no way for the regular AppleLink users to interact with the AppleLink Personal users and the service didn't really go for long. The partnership was dissolved in 1989 and the service was rebranded, relaunched as America Online. So anyway, yeah, in 1998, I do know that on the shuttle, the computer that they were using now at that time to read the mail was an IBM ThinkPad running PC DOS.

And I'm not sure when they transitioned from the grid compass to the PCs, but I do know that at that point, they were still using a 2400 baud modem connection because there's a document from 1999 where NASA is looking for a replacement modem and this is part of the specification. Of course, these days, the space station has amazing communication capabilities and like the space station has Wi-Fi. Not only does it have Wi-Fi, it has Wi-Fi antennas on the outside so they can talk to space suits. And last year, there was actually a demonstration of a video link from an approaching cargo spacecraft from 600 meters away, more than half a kilometer away, they were able to get a Wi-Fi signal. And that's the kind of thing you can do when you don't have tons of other people with Wi-Fi networks clogging the airwaves.

I'm Scott Manley, fly safe.