I'm being misunderstood, I'm going try to to explain better. I literally opened my original response to tyingq with "I'm not saying you're incorrect" as I did

I'm being misunderstood, I'm going try to to explain better. I literally opened my original response to tyingq with "I'm not saying you're incorrect" as I did not want to invalidate anything they had written. I was not trying to argue a single point. I just found the grammar/set theory of "A similar thing happened in the US military" odd when that specific thing (the Long Lines microwave network) happened in the US military in a big way. On your newly introduced point: "military had contracts with AT&T, but those were a tiny subset of microwave efforts". I do not describe the backbone of AUTOVON as a "tiny subset" of anything... The AT&T Long Lines was an engineering marvel. The achievement to reliably transmit coast to coast audio, video, and data through hundreds of redundant radio/switching sites was huge - that simply did not exist before. AT&T Long Lines is very significant to the history of microwave communications in the military specifically through AUTOVON. I'm absolutely not arguing against the existence of military microwave tech independent of AT&T - I feel like this is obvious, but I also feel I have to state it outright after reading your comment.