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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'."
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Nice to see the history of this fine organization being documented. Takes a telephone man to appreciate how much goes into a phone call.
They're still after me.
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This is a recording.
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.
deserve's got nothing to do with it...
"Here at the Phone Company we handle eighty-four billion calls a year. Serving everyone from presidents and kings to scum of the earth.
We realize that every so often you can't get an operator, for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order [snatches plug out of switchboard], or perhaps you get charged for a call you didn't make.
We don't care. Watch this!
[bangs on a switch panel like a cheap piano]
just lost Peoria. You see, this phone system consists of a multibillion-dollar matrix of space-age technology that is so sophisticated, even we can't handle it. But that's your problem, isn't it?
Next time you complain about your phone service, why don't you try using two Dixie cups with a string.
We don't care.
We don't have to.
We're the Phone Company!"
-- Lily Tomlin from "Saturday Night Live: The First 20 Years" (1994 Cader Company).
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Phone Loosers
Not to start a flame war, but I think divestiture was probably a good thing. Does anyone think we would have 1Mb pipes to our homes if we still had Ma Bell?
I week or two ago I found this
Video from the Bell System's Pavilion at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962. It's fairly interesting and amusing. It shows such advances as touch-tone dialing, pagers, and autodialing.
Well, guess what? You posted the damn address on Slashdot now I can't waste an afternoon digging through that website. Now I have to do my job and update a bunch of Windows 2003 servers because M$ can't get its patches right.
Next time you feel the need to not waste my afternoon, DON'T!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
It's not exactly slashdotted... The index page has been changed, but the "deep links" still work... Desperate for this site? Google-cache the base page here and follow the links to the real site. (Until they decide they don't like that either...)
"We're sorry, but your fingers are too fat to dial."
"If you require a special dialing wand, please mash the keypad with your hand, now."
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Now that is a funny 403 message...
"At some point I expect all these to be one company again"
One ringy dingy to rule them all
One ringy dingy to find them
One ringy dingy to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them.
Complexity is Easy. Simplicity is Hard.
the thing that gets me though, is considering todays available technology, why is the sound quality of phones still so bad?
Cost is why.
Instead of getting more hardware, they started using more compression. From a business standpoint it's a no brainer.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
Mostly because it's Good Enough(tm).
They give the phones enough bandwidth to carry the important frequencies for speech. If they gave more bandwidth to phones, they would lose total carrying capacity.
Complexity is Easy. Simplicity is Hard.
And you are correct about Red Stripe beer. There's a reason for that.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
http://mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/which contains a great deal of interesting material collected over the years from the comp.dcom.telecom newsgroup on USENET.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Well the biggest hidden secret fact is that Alexander Graham Bell did not actually invent the telephone. As was finally recognised by the US Congress in 2002, the inventor was a poor Italian immigrant Antonio Meucci.
Meucci had taken a 'one year renewable intent to patent' out on the invention as he couldn't afford the full patent, and a few years later Bell, who had access to Meucci's materials got hold of the stuff and claimed it as his own.
from the article:He sent a model and technical details to the Western Union telegraph company but failed to win a meeting with executives. When he asked for his materials to be returned, in 1874, he was told they had been lost. Two years later Bell, who shared a laboratory with Meucci, filed a patent for a telephone, became a celebrity and made a lucrative deal with Western Union.
Meucci sued and was nearing victory - the supreme court agreed to hear the case and fraud charges were initiated against Bell - when the Florentine died in 1889. The legal action died with him.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
"slashdot : more than six hundred thousand supergeniuses arguing about date arithmetic"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
I have wasted an afternoon digging though this website.
Well, we won't. It has been slashdotted. Bummer. I like old phone stuff.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
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.
It sound "telephonic" because the voiceband frequencies are restricted to only 3200 cycles. This frequency bandpass has been in existence since a technology called t-carrier (DS1)evolved in the late 60's. This was needed at the time because the conversion from analog to digital used a frequency rate of 8000 cycles. Nyquists theorem required at least two samples of the analog sine wave to be able reconstruct it at the receiving end. Restricting the bandwidth facilitated this process with the technology they had at the time. Only eight bits represented each possible 256 bit sample. CD quality signals now have 44 bits representing them. Technology marches on but the Telco's still only have 8-bit representing the voice you hear
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..
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.
Sherwin Gooch's Account of John Bardeen's Lecture (Score:1)
by Baldrson (jabowery@netcom.com) on Tuesday December 28, @08:58AM EST
(User Info) http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery
In any case, I'll check with Sherwin Gooch to see if he has any more direct evidence from Bardeen himself to support the controversial account of the hide-away experimental stand.
I did, and here is Sherwin's response:
Jim,
Thank you for alerting me to your discussion.
To provide a more solid foundation, one should be aware that I heard this story from the horse's mouth.
John Bardeen himself gave a talk one evening at Altgeld Hall on the University of Illinois campus, circa 1978, in which he related various experiences surrounding his inventing the transistor. At the time, people suspected that the scheduling of this presentation may have been related to Bardeen's health.
Professor Bardeen showed us the B&W 16mm film BB&S had made at Bell Labs immediately after they got the first transistor to work (and, presumably, before Bardeen's boss got to work the next morning...) I have seen individual frames and out-takes of this film since, but I don't know if the entire film still exists. The "rolly-cart" with their experimental set-up is plainly in evidence on the film.
It was John Bardeen himself, at Altgeld Hall, who related that his boss had said that the "solid-state amplifying device" which they wanted to develop was "not feasible," and that, "even if it were possible, it would have no practical application." Dr. Bardeen related that sometimes, when his boss stayed at work past 5 p.m., the three of them would become very impatient waiting for him to leave so they could roll their setup out of the coat-closet, and get busy on what they, apparently, thought was the greatest "cool hack" of the day.
I wonder who Bardeen's boss was. His boss should be immortalized in history next to the NASA manager who advised the last engineer withholding approval of the Challenger launch to "put on your management hat!"
One of the anecdotes John Bardeen related was how he had left his set of photographic slides in the taxi which took him to the ceremony to collect his Nobel prize, and all the trouble to which he and the Swedish government had gone in trying to recover them. But their efforts were unsuccessful; the slides were never recovered. Professor Bardeen was extremely apologetic that he didn't have them to use in his presentation, and so we would just have to make-do with his relating the incidents to us.
With my background in computer music, I found one of the pieces of supporting paraphernalia that Dr. Bardeen didn't lose in Sweden quite interesting. He brought along a transparent plexiglas box, approximately the shape of a 6" cube, with randomly distributed 3/4" or so holes (apparently for cooling?) in the sides. On the top were a number (6 or so) of black SPST N.O. push buttons. A small loudspeaker was mounted inside. (There must have also been a battery of some kind, but I don't recall it.) The box contained a collection of electronic components, their leads soldered to one-another ("tacked together"), and hanging in "free space." (He hadn't bothered to use a prototyping board or connecting strip.) There were resistors, capacitors, possibly some coils, and these ~1" long bar things (which were the transistors), of which there were 3. Dr. Bardeen explained that he had had chosen to build this device because it em
Seastead this.
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.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra