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

[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.

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.

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.

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.