When I worked at Bell Laboratories, we were asked to process that famous tape to see if we could recover the 8 1/2-minute gap. We couldn't.

But that wasn't our only brush with celebrity in the Seventies:

One of our research directors built a digital synthesizer that he said he could use to model the behavior of telephone switching machines in the future. He needed someone who had an "intuitive feel" for that application. He invited none other than Stevie Wonder, who, because he was blind, had that "intuitive feel." The building where he did the experiment practically capsized with people hoping to get a glance of Stevie.

Later, he invited Roger Powell, keyboardist for Todd Rundgren's Utopia, to work with the synthesizer. We got treated to a lot of fine music (and even more weird, nonlinear sounds).

Yes, folks, that's what your telephone bills paid for in those days...