Hill Associates Classroom
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October 19-23, 2026 - FDIC Introduction to Telecommunications and Networking

Oct 6, 2026

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This page links to resources that might be interesting or useful during class. It’s not an assignment and nothing here is required reading. But as we move through the week, I’ll post links related to class topics, assignments, and other interesting nuggets.

  • My email is matt@hillvt.com, you can call or text me on 802 899 0704 anytime for help.

Monday October 19

  • When’s the last time you saw a fax machine at a bank? Fax is old tech, but persists. Why do you think that is?
  • You may find the story of Claude Shannon interesting. His work made modern data communications possible. If you prefer your history in movie form, there is a cute short documentary about him. You needn’t watch the whole thing (it’s on Amazon Prime if you want to), but you might find at least the trailer interesting. Where did you think Anthropic got the name for their AI? (that last link may be broken for you sorry.)
  • If you’re bored by history, that’s a shame, but just know that Claude S is the guy who figured out that we should use bits to process, store, and communicate information. It might seem obvious now, but it was quite revolutionary in 1948. There – now you don’t need to watch a tedious historical documentary! How do you think Shannon’s work might have influenced how banks operate today?
  • Remember that great horrible day in October 2021 when all of Meta’s properties (meaning Facebook/Insta/WhatsApp/etc) disappeared from the internet for about 6 hours? This is why that happened. The article is pretty detailed, and you probably won’t grok it all quite yet, but a quick scan might give you some ideas. By the time we’re through with class, you’ll know enough to understand most of it. What if it had not been Meta, but a Core Banking Service Provider who had suffered this fate? Could that happen?