Pictorial and Written History of Bell Systems

gngulrajani writes "I have wasted an afternoon digging though this website. Lots of old school Bell marketing posters as well as technical specifications for things such as 'Telephone Memory Devices' and a 'dataphone service'."

Comments

Baby bells

[BWJones]

Hrmmmm. It was about 1983 that I purchased my first computer, an Apple ][+, and I found out that all of the baby bells which had started up had completely unsecured computer systems holding all those handy long distance access numbers. Of course in 1983, I was a 13 year old and hacking like that was more of a game than anything else. I feel bad about getting those numbers now, but we really had no idea it was "illegal" at the time. That experience though did help introduce me to computer users world wide and BBS's like the Pirates Cove and Crystal Caverns which was pre-Internet, but quite the educational experience.

Re:Baby bells

[bugnuts]

You AE hacker you!

The novation applecat was the most amazing chunk of hardware you could add to an apple in those days.

Re:Baby bells

[einTier]

Ah, the forgotten Ma Bell. I too remember. I remember using those long distance access lines to dial BBS's all over the country.

What today's hackers don't realize is how expensive phone service used to be. You either got your phone service from Southwestern Bell, or you didn't get it at all. Your phone? You bought that at the Southwestern Bell store. No, you couldn't just go to Wal-Mart and pick up a $10 phone. Not much choice either, I think there were maybe ten or fifteen available choices. Did I mention how expensive that phone was? Try over $100. For just a regular, standard telephone. Oh, and if you wanted an extra phone (not line!) in your house? That was an extra charge. Just for the working outlet, even IF you didn't plug a phone into it.

I didn't get the phone bill in those days, so I have no idea what a monthly bill used to look like, but I did know that it was prohibitively expensive to call anywhere long distance. Just to call my father in the next town over cost $0.22 a minute.

Re:Baby bells

[BWJones]

What today's hackers don't realize is how expensive phone service used to be.

Yes. Thus the whole impetus for getting the long distance numbers. The first month after I got my modem, (before I knew about the baby bell codes), my folks went absolutely ballistic at the phone bill saying to me: "You're Grounded!!!" which of course probably proved critical in my discovering the rest of the "wired" world through the phone codes. Man, they were screaming about my calling all over the country, but really had no idea of what I was actually doing with the computer or the implications. My Mom came in once when I was talking via text term to a friend on the other side of town and she was absolutely marveling at the fact that we could "talk" over the computer lines. This is a woman who had a doctorate but had never seen such a thing before. It's hard to appreciate just how novel that was back in 1983 to the vast majority of the population.

Re:Baby bells

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people still get a kick out of it. Look at how popular text messaging and IMs are...

Re:Baby bells

[Anonymous Coward]

I got my first computer in 1977, a Heathkit H-8. It wasn't until 1986 that got my first modem, a 1200 baud radio shack (it had an answer/originate switch). I was with my dad one day, and sardonically laughed as I told him, "Heh heh, I have a modem now!" Fortunately my dad said, "You're 18, you can go to jail." This from a man that had copies of the article from Bell System Technical Pubs (I think that was the name of the journal - it was from 1956 or so) that talked about 2600 hz. Talk about confusing signals - haha.

Again fortunatly, I had friends that convinced me the local telephone switches were ESSs and had no MF trunks I could blue-box. Maybe this wasn't strictly true but the little lie may have saved me being made an example of in our local court system.

Nice

[rackman]

Nice to see the history of this fine organization being documented. Takes a telephone man to appreciate how much goes into a phone call.

I've seen a few of these before

[Melvin Daniels]

We had a couple in our dorm room. Nowadays, I've got two in my office here at work. Clients are always impressed by them and make comments.

Never underestimate good office decor.

Of copper pipes and microwaves

[G4from128k]

I talked to a Bell executive a few years ago and he had an interesting stories about how the Bells created new technologies.

At the same time that fiberoptics were invented, Ma Bell had another high-bandwidth long-distance telecom technology in the works. Microwaves travelling in underground copper pipes could carry a modestly high bandwidth signal for long distances. They actually had an entire factory to creating the equipment (pipe, connectors, repeaters, edge boxes, etc.) When fiber came out (with its superior cost structure and tech performance) they simply killed the concept and the factory and adopted fiber.

Re:Of copper pipes and microwaves

[Myself]

This sounds like the logical extension of the L-carrier systems. Before digital encoding was invented, radio techniques (frequency division multiplexing) were used to shift the frequency of each voice channel, and pack dozens of channels into a wide-band signal which could ride a twisted pair, or itself be muxed into a still wider signal, which was transmitted on coaxial cable.

I'm guessing that the megahertz-range signals on the coax were then muxed into gigahertz-range signals to be transmitted down the tubes. Fascinating.

Lots more details at long-lines.net for the curious.

Re:Of copper pipes and microwaves

[freshmkr]

Microwaves travelling in underground copper pipes could carry a modestly high bandwidth signal for long distances.

You can see some of these pipes at the American History Museum of the Smithsonian, in their communications and computers exhibit on the first floor. They really are like plumbing! The exhibit shows something like a joint between two pipes--both pipes taper gracefully down to the joint from a diameter of about 3cm to 1cm.

P.S.: I scooped this Slashdot story on Metafilter about a year ago! *gloat*

--Tom

Re:Of copper pipes and microwaves

[Myself]

Into the few-megahertz range, twisted pair wire works remarkably well. This is the stuff we're all familiar with as phone lines and cat-5. The number of twists per unit of length determines how resistant it is to interference, hence cat-5 is much more tightly twisted than cat-3. Each pair in a multipair cable is twisted a slightly different amount, to prevent inductive coupling and crosstalk between pairs.

The signal sent down a twisted pair is bipolar and "balanced", so that the two wires are carrying mirror opposite signals. There's an excellent explanation of this. T-1 signals ride twisted pair for several kilofeet between repeaters. The N-carrier system (low rate analog multiplex) also used twisted pair, but I don't know how far it would go between terminals.

Above a few megahertz, twisted pair gets unacceptably lossy and noisy. Higher speed signals are carried on coaxial cable, which we all know and love for its role in television wiring. The characteristic impedance of coax is determined by the ratio of the center conductor diameter and the distance to the inner surface of the outer conductor. Very early coaxial lines were made by suspending thin rods inside sections of copper pipe, by means of cardboard disc insulators. Soon a method of manufacturing flexible cable was developed, and has remained largely unchanged.

Signals carried on coax are "unbalanced", where the outer conductor is grounded and the inner conductor carries an AC wave. The need for the ground reference means that coax runs between buildings can become part of a ground loop, and cause all sorts of electrical problems. T-3 circuits use coax, but only for very short runs. (A T-3 that leaves a building does so as a DS-3 carried on fiber.) The L-carrier system, which multiplexed several N-carrier signals together, used thick coaxial lines for long-haul runs across the countryside.

As you approach the gigahertz range, coax also becomes too lossy, and hollow waveguide becomes the obvious choice. Waveguide can be rectangular, ovoid, or circular in cross-section, which effects the polarization of the signals carried in it. The inner dimensions influence loss and frequency range. Personally I'm not familiar with the buried waveguide system, but the TD and TH microwave systems used waveguide to connect the antennae with the terminal equipment.

Re:Red Stripe beer tastes like bongwater

[Thud457]

That Dataphone (tm) reminds me of "The Desk Set" starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy!

And you are correct about Red Stripe beer. There's a reason for that.

Memories

[brain1]

I particularly remember the Motorola Pulsar and Pulsar II mobile phones. Personally I had one of the General Electric MASTR-II ones with a local common carrier. Also I refurbished quite a few of them for use on privately owned systems as Ma Bell surplused them. They cost about $3500 apiece new, so they were the tools/toys of the rich lawyers, business execs and doctors, and not the local teenager walking around a mall.

What you take for granted clipped to your belt or in your pocket used to take up a chunk of your car's trunk with thick control cables and a control head mounted on the transmission hump of your car. The things transmitted 25 watts of RF over 152 / 158 MHz full-duplex and could kill a car battery in no time flat. Coverage was spotty over about 12 miles and it had no privacy as anyone with a scanner could listen in. (and you panic about 100 milliwats out of a typical cell phone, heh heh...)

Now they run for days on a lithium ion battery and you dont fix them - you just throw them away.

Re:Memories

[dave3138]

Out here in rural Minnesota, you can still pick these systems up with a scanner. The base puts out a constant tone which periodically IDs itself in morse. I haven't actually heard any conversations on them though....

Anybody knows this kind of phone?

[Udo Schmitz]

On the site I saw thosein this picture. Anyone here has a clue what kind of phone that is and who made it? Those or very similar ones are often seen as decoration in the IKEA catalogue and I always wondered where to get it.

Here's *my* blast from the past..

[pair-a-noyd]

I personally own a Rolm CBX II 9000 w/PhoneMail system and buttloads of RolmPhones.. Plenty of pix, http://www.systemrecycler.com/rolm

Yes, it's my personal property..

The good old days

[lofter59]

Boy does that site bring back memories. My best buddy in junior high and I were obsessed with Bell, Western Electric and everything telephonic. Spent many a day chasing after phone trucks to bug the guys, they were our heroes (blushes). Dumpster diving behind the exchange to find great racks of relays and stuff full of mercury and other fun things. Some of our highlights:
-Made the TV news for building an exchange in my buddies basement from salvaged parts that connected houses on our block (pretty much his doing)
-Learned how to draw that modern bell logo by heart- put it on everything.
-My delight at finding a '604b' tool at the base of a phone pole (it was a dual ended nut driver)
-6 button business phones and 50 conductor cable with funky wide plugs.
-We could tell whether an exchange used regular relays or rotary step-switches by the sound on the line.
-Many odd admin type phone numbers that did fun things- can't remember what all now.

Yes, we were obsessed.

Re:Judge Green and the MFJ

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if you know your history, you'd know that the Bell System plan had 1Mb pipes on the last mile by the late 80s. That it took another decade is part of the disaster that was the breakup.

Re:Of copper pipes and microwaves-A watery Wave.

[Cylix]

wave guide is very generally very clean and occassionally throughout has some pvc cross hatches. Wave guide for bends and flexibility is a slightly different construction.

If you have any obstruction or not properly bending the radio waves you will get reflection back the tube. (VSWR) This is bad and too high of a reflection will cause your equipment to shut down.