> The era spawning from the 1950s throughout the 1980s can be considered the golden era of telecommunication
I’m not so sure! These days we have FaceTime and dozens of other video and voice call services on our bodies 24/7 - and it’s so competitive among them that they are ALL free! We live in a golden age in a great many ways!
It’s awesome to learn about the engineering and history that got us to to this point.
Bandwidth between Los Angeles and New York, very approximately:
1915: 1 kHz - telegraph lines
1925: 10 kHz - a handful of voice channels
1935: 100 kHz - several frequency multiplexed carrier lines across the desert
1945: 200 kHz - a few more lines - war time expansion restrictions
1955: 5 MHz - coaxial cable and microwave links
1965: 20 MHz - coast to coast simultaneous television and tens of thousands of voice channels
1975: 100 MHz - scaling up
1985: 10 GHz - analog to digital phase change - fibre optic and satellite
I still remember the first time I spoke to a person so far away the sun had set and risen in between.
I think the meaning of this is that it was a golden era for infrastructure build out.
There are certainly impressive things like starlink today. But the cheaper and easier to maintain infrastructure deployed to everyone was more common.
There's a lot of 60s infrastructure still in operation today. Some of it barely maintained (see the campfire fire).