The origin of two-way channels

This paper pursues the history of Shannon´s two-way channel. Shannon introduced his two-way channel at the 4th Berkeley Symposium in 1960. The corresponding paper (Shannon 1961) generalizes results from two earlier key papers. The author mentions the driving forces that led him to this generalization, considers whether Shannon had possible applications or real-world channels in mind, and discusses how Shannon, his Bell Labs colleagues, and his contemporaries looked at communication problems in the days of the late fifties and early sixties