> 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.

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).