https://www.telcomhistory.org/ConnectionsSeattle.html
https://m.youtube.com/@ConnectionsMuseum
I feel like they're not well known and there's no place like it!
It has some old working telephone and teletype systems. You can watch the physical switching equipment do its magic. It is truly awesome. The raw speed and accuracy of the mechanical systems is almost unbelievable.
Developing countries have less of a hassle with implementing something based on state of the art.
Lots of hassles with getting new phone lines, new power lines et al in the UK based on old agreements and a nationalised infrastructure. Please stop digging up roads and everything for arbitrary telecoms companies based on some deregulation, some collaboration please :-)
The words "Diamond Cable" still fill me with dread to this day. They dug up half our village to then offer no service.
It's true you don't want a telecom worker laying a gas pipe, however you can coordinate this stuff if you want to. Typically the deepest utility works first then backfills just to the level of the next utility and so forth. However timing is critical, the second utility must be ready to work as soon as the first is done and so on.
The biggest reasons they don't is mostly (in this order)
-They can't time their work to be at the same time as 3 other utilities.
-They can't work out cost and liability sharing, if the last utility to work does the reinstatement and takes liability for it then the telecom company will always pay while electric typically won't pay anything as it's in the middle. The legal demarcation between utilities is also much less clearly defined.
-Contractors typically do all work, not actual utilities and it's in their best interests to dig the road up five times (one for each utility) rather than just once. The same goes for everyone else who gets paid when the road is opened; including, often, the local government (for permits).
"Strowger, an undertaker, was motivated to invent an automatic telephone exchange after becoming convinced that the manual telephone exchange operators were deliberately interfering with his calls, leading to loss of business."
I wonder if the phone company was actually out to get him!
It's really surprising to me how little uptake 2600 ultimately ended up having.
There's a great video from Connections Museum (mentioned further up the thread) where they're going through the operation of, I want to say, one of those crossbar switches? And they start using terminology like "routing table", "longest-prefix matching", and "default route", which all sounds well and good, until you realize they're talking about systems that existed decades before the Internet or even ARPANET, all electromechanical... Dope stuff. Cool to see how things rhyme even as they change.
biofox•9h ago
Considering the telecom system is at the bedrock of almost all modern technologies, it really doesn't get enough love or attention in the public mind.
The dull derelict-looking, and often graffitied, buildings that house the system doesn't reflect just how cool the infrastructure is.
rwmj•8h ago
[1] https://johnchess.blogspot.com/2019/11/david-welch-1945-2019...
toyg•8h ago
edent•8h ago
biofox•7h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchor_telephone_exchange
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_telephone_exchange
lxgr•6h ago
snthd•7h ago
> Q: Is that the name of your unit?
> A: I cannot answer that question, that is a secret.
> Q: Is that the board which passers-by on the main road see outside your unit’s base?
> A: Yes.
> Q: Read it out to the jury, please.
> A: I cannot do that. It is a secret.
>Official panic set in. The foreign secretary who GCHQ had bullied into having us accused of spying wrote that “almost any accommodation is to be preferred” to allowing our trial to continue. A Ministry of Defense report in September 1978, now released, disclosed that the “prosecuting counsel has come to the view that there have been so many published references to the information Campbell has acquired and the conclusions he has drawn from it that the chances of success with [the collection charge] are not good.”
>My lawyer overheard the exasperated prosecutor saying that he would allow the government to continue with the espionage charge against me “over [his] dead body.” The judge, a no-nonsense Welsh lawyer, was also fed up with the secrecy pantomime. He demanded the government scrap the espionage charges. They did.
GCHQ and Me, My Life Unmasking British Eavesdroppers -- Duncan Campbell
https://theintercept.com/2015/08/03/life-unmasking-british-e...
JdeBP•6h ago
Of course, nuclear weapons wouldn't even have had to specifically target exchanges in order to disrupt electronic communications as they already were by the 1980s.
It was amusing to learn a decade ago that the U.S.S.R. military had far more complete maps of many parts of the U.K. than Ordnance Survey published. Apparently down to Soviet spies just walking around a bit, playing tourist.