Western Electric 1945
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Number PULEAZE! Part Five:
- Thread starter Ultramatic
- Start date
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Bell Telephone System 1955
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Western Electric 1974
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Bell Telephone 1941
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<script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>@Unimatic - I suppose times change.
The technology's changing a lot, but I also think we're finally moving away from an interim stage of tech which was basically just a hack to reuse old copper networks and involved placing a lot of active equipment into cabinets located near to end users.
All the DSL technologies from ADSL through to VDSL (fibre to cabinet) have that issue. Cable modem services are better as the network was designed to carry high bandwidth TV signals, but it's still not exactly ideal and is a repurposing job.
Most rollouts of fibre-to-home (FTTP / FTTH) are using passive optical networks. In some ways this is more reminiscent of the classic PSTN, as you've no longer got active equipment out in boxes all over the place. The splitters and multiplexers are smaller and are just optical splitters. There's very little to go wrong in them as they're passive technology.
So, I think in a way we might be getting away from the reliability concerns and moving back to a solid public network again.
The biggest issues though are probably end user equipment - a lot of the ISP supplied routers / gateways are frankly, cheap rubbish. If you've decent equipment you'll get reliable service.
Local power interruptions are obviously going to be an issue, but in reality, how often does that happen ? I mean, I could count on the fingers of one hand how many times we've had a power outage since I was born and they were very short and usually caused by a tree falling on a local overhead line tripping out a circuit.
I appreciate in rural areas this is more of an issue due to long overhead lines and in places that are much more prone to lightening strikes etc, but you can overcome that with a UPS and the optical lines are completely lightening resistant and they are not conductive.
The old PSTN had the advantage of extremely simple end user equipment. There's very little can go wrong with a bog-standard telephone, unless you drop it down the stairs or something, but I think all in all we're looking at moving back to a far more reliable network as things progress. It's that interim era that gave VoIP and other techs a bad name. VoIP works wonderfully, if it's not being bolted onto some ropey broadband connection. When the network's built right, the quality of voice is actually drastically improved vs TDM based switching which only supported 8-bit channels and μ-law (US) or a-law (Europe) companding algorithms.
Some of the best audio quality you'd have ever heard on the phone networks was pre-digital, and only within your local exchange, as you could get copper-to-copper connections across the local switch be it crossbar, stepping, panel/rotary or even analogue electronic. Once it went outside the local switch, you were into multiplexing and trunks all of which squeezed the bandwidth using analogue techniques or later digital techniques, but they made things sound worse. Also the sound quality on old carbon microphones used in very old phones was quite poor and they used gate filters in switches to keep the frequencies used within certain bandwidths to prevent crosstalk in switches and bundles of cables.
As for removing my phone line, it was an option between digging up the lawn or attempting to pull the fibre with the old copper cable, so I just decided since I'm unlikely to ever need it again, it was worth a chance.
Realistically speaking though, landline service is now really just an access pathway for broadband and mobile phones really are not phones at all, they're ultra portable computers that happen to be able to make voice calls. The fact that we call them phones at all anymore is a bit of a stretch of the terminology.
It's sad to see some of these old techs disappear and be replaced, but I suppose without the evolution none of us would be posting on this forum either. Or, we'd have to have a party line for people interested in old washing machines with Ernestine listening in for gossip and ensuring we paid up lol[this post was last edited: 11/9/2021-11:04]
The technology's changing a lot, but I also think we're finally moving away from an interim stage of tech which was basically just a hack to reuse old copper networks and involved placing a lot of active equipment into cabinets located near to end users.
All the DSL technologies from ADSL through to VDSL (fibre to cabinet) have that issue. Cable modem services are better as the network was designed to carry high bandwidth TV signals, but it's still not exactly ideal and is a repurposing job.
Most rollouts of fibre-to-home (FTTP / FTTH) are using passive optical networks. In some ways this is more reminiscent of the classic PSTN, as you've no longer got active equipment out in boxes all over the place. The splitters and multiplexers are smaller and are just optical splitters. There's very little to go wrong in them as they're passive technology.
So, I think in a way we might be getting away from the reliability concerns and moving back to a solid public network again.
The biggest issues though are probably end user equipment - a lot of the ISP supplied routers / gateways are frankly, cheap rubbish. If you've decent equipment you'll get reliable service.
Local power interruptions are obviously going to be an issue, but in reality, how often does that happen ? I mean, I could count on the fingers of one hand how many times we've had a power outage since I was born and they were very short and usually caused by a tree falling on a local overhead line tripping out a circuit.
I appreciate in rural areas this is more of an issue due to long overhead lines and in places that are much more prone to lightening strikes etc, but you can overcome that with a UPS and the optical lines are completely lightening resistant and they are not conductive.
The old PSTN had the advantage of extremely simple end user equipment. There's very little can go wrong with a bog-standard telephone, unless you drop it down the stairs or something, but I think all in all we're looking at moving back to a far more reliable network as things progress. It's that interim era that gave VoIP and other techs a bad name. VoIP works wonderfully, if it's not being bolted onto some ropey broadband connection. When the network's built right, the quality of voice is actually drastically improved vs TDM based switching which only supported 8-bit channels and μ-law (US) or a-law (Europe) companding algorithms.
Some of the best audio quality you'd have ever heard on the phone networks was pre-digital, and only within your local exchange, as you could get copper-to-copper connections across the local switch be it crossbar, stepping, panel/rotary or even analogue electronic. Once it went outside the local switch, you were into multiplexing and trunks all of which squeezed the bandwidth using analogue techniques or later digital techniques, but they made things sound worse. Also the sound quality on old carbon microphones used in very old phones was quite poor and they used gate filters in switches to keep the frequencies used within certain bandwidths to prevent crosstalk in switches and bundles of cables.
As for removing my phone line, it was an option between digging up the lawn or attempting to pull the fibre with the old copper cable, so I just decided since I'm unlikely to ever need it again, it was worth a chance.
Realistically speaking though, landline service is now really just an access pathway for broadband and mobile phones really are not phones at all, they're ultra portable computers that happen to be able to make voice calls. The fact that we call them phones at all anymore is a bit of a stretch of the terminology.
It's sad to see some of these old techs disappear and be replaced, but I suppose without the evolution none of us would be posting on this forum either. Or, we'd have to have a party line for people interested in old washing machines with Ernestine listening in for gossip and ensuring we paid up lol[this post was last edited: 11/9/2021-11:04]
A.T.&T. 1970
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Bell Telephone Company 1929
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Tollometer 1914
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Western Electric 1959
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Bell Telephone 1982
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Bell System 1965
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Bell Phone Center 1981
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Bell Telephone System 1949
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Coilette 1956
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Bell Telephone System 1962
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Bell Telephone System 1955
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Re: Reply#73
Now thats something I’ve never seen before! Back then Ma Bell charged extra for a coiled handset cord. I’m surprised that I never saw one of these on a handset cord in the 50’s. I wonder if it really worked very well?
Eddie
Now thats something I’ve never seen before! Back then Ma Bell charged extra for a coiled handset cord. I’m surprised that I never saw one of these on a handset cord in the 50’s. I wonder if it really worked very well?
Eddie
Bell Telephone System 1963
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Michigan Bell 1985
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Bell System 1966
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<script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>This one is in French, but was an ad that stuck in my head from a time I lived there.
French area codes changed completely on 18 Oct 1996.
They moved from a somewhat unusual system to something far more like the rest of Europe, with regional geographic area codes that start with 0
The ad is just *extremely* French!
France Télécom (Ma Bell’s somewhat artsy French counterpart) is now called Orange and is one of those the largest telcos in Europe.
French area codes changed completely on 18 Oct 1996.
They moved from a somewhat unusual system to something far more like the rest of Europe, with regional geographic area codes that start with 0
The ad is just *extremely* French!
France Télécom (Ma Bell’s somewhat artsy French counterpart) is now called Orange and is one of those the largest telcos in Europe.
One fascinating fact about the North American Numbering Plan (country code 1) is that there is no inherent way to identify numbers by technology as there was developed in most of the rest of the world. You're entirely unable to tell the difference when dialing 10 digits whether you're dialing a landline or mobile (which resulted in a mobile party pays system in North America). The rest of the world utilizes technology-specific numbering so you can identify technology (which results in a calling-party pays system, and calls to mobiles are typically more $$ to place than a call to a landline. It's actually illegal to differentiate technologies in US/Canada (New York proposed a cellular-only area code which was shot down toute suite!)
European numbering plans tended to encode a lot of geographical routing information into the number itself.
If you take the Irish system as an example, and the same applies in a lot of European countries, it works like this:
For landlines, the country is divided into 7 large “directory areas” which in the old days were literally the 7 telephone books. 01, 02, 04, 05, 06, 07 and 09.
Each of those codes is then further subdivided by adding an extra digit. Usually the principal town / city got 1. So Galway for example is (091), Cork (021) and so on. Smaller towns then other numbers, so you’d have (062), (064) etc and some area codes used a second layer like (0401) wheee they had more than 9 codes. Then local numbering is 5-digit in low population areas, 6-digits in others or 7-digits in some areas. It just depended on demand/population.
On the landline network number analysis is done live as you dial, so you get instant connection too. You’ll also get a reorder / error message if you hit a block of numbers that doesn’t exist, and that will happen before you compete the number. Like say 031 99x xxxx doesn’t exist, your call gets dumped at the 031 99
With mobiles that isn’t done as you send the digits with the send/call button and VoIP usually doesn’t bother either.
The structured number allowed routing without much number translation - so as you just dialled through the old network when long distance was introduced back in 1956 here. Charging also tended to be done by prefix.
The way charging worked in the old network (Strowger, Crossbar and earlier digital) here used impulses.
Calls were charged in “Units” not in money values. Each unit cost say 10 pence.
A local call used to coat 1 unit, untimed and a long distance or international call used 1 unit per x minutes. The more expensive the destination the faster the impulses.
Each time a unit elapsed, the telephone exchange recorded it on a subscriber meter, or on a computer system. The impulses could also be sent out as a 12kHz tone. That was interpreted by pay phones and also by PBXs for billing. You could even get a meter that plugged into the phone and request the meter pulses to be turned on.
They stopped using those sometime in the 1990s, other than for pay phones. Later pay phones had their own charging software built in and just used an initial meter pulse from the network so they knew the call had connected and to unmute the mic and begin charging.
Most payphones also wouldn’t allow you to dial extra digits before the call had connected and the mic remained muted until the first pulse was detected, so a lot of American Blueboxing etc never worked in Europe. I remember making calls on a line with an Ericsson crossbar, and it made none of the interesting noises I’ve heard on recording phone phreaks in the US heard. When the switch was talking to the network, you were connected to a comfort tone that just sounded like “tick tick tick tick..” mimicking a clock sound. When it created the path, you’d get a clunk and ring/busy etc. Any exotic inter office signalling MF tones and pulses during call setup we’re hidden/muted.
If you were using a pay phone you deposited coins or inserted a prepaid smart card (optical cards in some European countries too) and a value was displayed on a little display in units. Older coin phone didn’t display anything, but you just loaded them with multiple coins in advance. When you hung up, unused coins were returned.
When the payphone detected an meter pulse, it knew the call was connected and debited one unit or dropped a coin and as each unit ticked away, the credit was debited or the coins continued to drop. The more expensive the call, the faster the units ticked by.
None of that stuff is used anymore as billing is far more flexible and complex and there are umpteen companies involved.
When mobile phones arrived in around 1984 or so, they wanted to preserve the caller pays model and also didn’t want mobile phones to be tied to a specific geographical area, so the numbering was kept separate and calls to mobiles were more expensive than landlines, but you didn’t pay anything to receive calls.
As time moved on that’s become largely irrelevant. Everyone’s operating on unlimited call bundles these days and the number of landlines is dwindling fast. So we’ve something like 63 landline area codes with about 2 million active users and maybe 5.3 million active mobile lines using just 3 area codes.
The highly structured numbering was just very shored to electromechanical switching systems. It’s totally unnecessary really since the network went digital in the early 80s but changing them was also pointless.
You can now port landlines to mobile numbers or mobile numbers to other technologies so it’s becoming a bit irrelevant.
We also used to have complex shared cost numbers, mostly used by businesses. The caller and the receiver both paid part of the costs.
1850 charged local rate connection fee and 1890 charged as a timed local call and so on. They got rid of all of those recently.
We now just have 1800 toll free or 0818 which is just a non geographical area code, which is popular with business users as you don’t have be fixed too a particular official physical area. They just charge out of your bundled minutes as if they’re regular landline number.
The one handy thing about the system is you can still tell where a number is by just looking at the area code as they’re regional. [this post was last edited: 3/20/2022-01:00]
If you take the Irish system as an example, and the same applies in a lot of European countries, it works like this:
For landlines, the country is divided into 7 large “directory areas” which in the old days were literally the 7 telephone books. 01, 02, 04, 05, 06, 07 and 09.
Each of those codes is then further subdivided by adding an extra digit. Usually the principal town / city got 1. So Galway for example is (091), Cork (021) and so on. Smaller towns then other numbers, so you’d have (062), (064) etc and some area codes used a second layer like (0401) wheee they had more than 9 codes. Then local numbering is 5-digit in low population areas, 6-digits in others or 7-digits in some areas. It just depended on demand/population.
On the landline network number analysis is done live as you dial, so you get instant connection too. You’ll also get a reorder / error message if you hit a block of numbers that doesn’t exist, and that will happen before you compete the number. Like say 031 99x xxxx doesn’t exist, your call gets dumped at the 031 99
With mobiles that isn’t done as you send the digits with the send/call button and VoIP usually doesn’t bother either.
The structured number allowed routing without much number translation - so as you just dialled through the old network when long distance was introduced back in 1956 here. Charging also tended to be done by prefix.
The way charging worked in the old network (Strowger, Crossbar and earlier digital) here used impulses.
Calls were charged in “Units” not in money values. Each unit cost say 10 pence.
A local call used to coat 1 unit, untimed and a long distance or international call used 1 unit per x minutes. The more expensive the destination the faster the impulses.
Each time a unit elapsed, the telephone exchange recorded it on a subscriber meter, or on a computer system. The impulses could also be sent out as a 12kHz tone. That was interpreted by pay phones and also by PBXs for billing. You could even get a meter that plugged into the phone and request the meter pulses to be turned on.
They stopped using those sometime in the 1990s, other than for pay phones. Later pay phones had their own charging software built in and just used an initial meter pulse from the network so they knew the call had connected and to unmute the mic and begin charging.
Most payphones also wouldn’t allow you to dial extra digits before the call had connected and the mic remained muted until the first pulse was detected, so a lot of American Blueboxing etc never worked in Europe. I remember making calls on a line with an Ericsson crossbar, and it made none of the interesting noises I’ve heard on recording phone phreaks in the US heard. When the switch was talking to the network, you were connected to a comfort tone that just sounded like “tick tick tick tick..” mimicking a clock sound. When it created the path, you’d get a clunk and ring/busy etc. Any exotic inter office signalling MF tones and pulses during call setup we’re hidden/muted.
If you were using a pay phone you deposited coins or inserted a prepaid smart card (optical cards in some European countries too) and a value was displayed on a little display in units. Older coin phone didn’t display anything, but you just loaded them with multiple coins in advance. When you hung up, unused coins were returned.
When the payphone detected an meter pulse, it knew the call was connected and debited one unit or dropped a coin and as each unit ticked away, the credit was debited or the coins continued to drop. The more expensive the call, the faster the units ticked by.
None of that stuff is used anymore as billing is far more flexible and complex and there are umpteen companies involved.
When mobile phones arrived in around 1984 or so, they wanted to preserve the caller pays model and also didn’t want mobile phones to be tied to a specific geographical area, so the numbering was kept separate and calls to mobiles were more expensive than landlines, but you didn’t pay anything to receive calls.
As time moved on that’s become largely irrelevant. Everyone’s operating on unlimited call bundles these days and the number of landlines is dwindling fast. So we’ve something like 63 landline area codes with about 2 million active users and maybe 5.3 million active mobile lines using just 3 area codes.
The highly structured numbering was just very shored to electromechanical switching systems. It’s totally unnecessary really since the network went digital in the early 80s but changing them was also pointless.
You can now port landlines to mobile numbers or mobile numbers to other technologies so it’s becoming a bit irrelevant.
We also used to have complex shared cost numbers, mostly used by businesses. The caller and the receiver both paid part of the costs.
1850 charged local rate connection fee and 1890 charged as a timed local call and so on. They got rid of all of those recently.
We now just have 1800 toll free or 0818 which is just a non geographical area code, which is popular with business users as you don’t have be fixed too a particular official physical area. They just charge out of your bundled minutes as if they’re regular landline number.
The one handy thing about the system is you can still tell where a number is by just looking at the area code as they’re regional. [this post was last edited: 3/20/2022-01:00]
Telephone books / directories
It’s amazing when you think back on it how much was involved in what seems like something very simple nowadays, with ubiquitous internet, information systems and powerful search engines.
This video is from 1979 from the U.K. GPO which operated the phone system there until the early 1980s when BT was spun out and privatised.
It’s amazing when you think back on it how much was involved in what seems like something very simple nowadays, with ubiquitous internet, information systems and powerful search engines.
This video is from 1979 from the U.K. GPO which operated the phone system there until the early 1980s when BT was spun out and privatised.
That was a fun blast from the past---with the privatized North American telephone system, these were done at a more local level (rather than by the GPO). Reuben Donnelly was one big directory printer (they also printed the Sears Catalogue as well as magazines).
My grandparents lived in suburban Chicago, but not in an Illinois Bell territory, so they had a wimpy telephone book only covering Des Plaines and Park Ridge, the areas covered by that company, but there was always a big Chicago phone book hanging around for dining room booster service
They tended to use exchange boundaries in our area to provide the smaller phone books, which wasn't always convenient when one lived near a boundary---
My grandparents lived in suburban Chicago, but not in an Illinois Bell territory, so they had a wimpy telephone book only covering Des Plaines and Park Ridge, the areas covered by that company, but there was always a big Chicago phone book hanging around for dining room booster service
They tended to use exchange boundaries in our area to provide the smaller phone books, which wasn't always convenient when one lived near a boundary---
In the U.K. the GPO lost its monopoly in 1981 and was privatised as BT in 1984.
Here in Ireland phonebooks were a whole lot simpler, as the population is only about 4 million.
We had an absolutely ludicrous number of area codes (63 codes at one stage!) for the scale of the population, but they’re regionalised so the first two digits of the area code are for a broad region.
We had 6 phonebooks, 4 of which had the white pages and Golden Pages (Yellow pages) combined into the same physical book - you just flipped it over and opened it at the back for the Golden Pages.
Only the (01) Dublin and Cork (02) areas had separate books. The rest didn’t have enough population.
Our codes just divide the country into 7 broad areas and then sub-divided those further into 3 digit dialling codes - so you could always tell where you were calling / where incoming caller ID is from just by looking at the first couple of digits.
For example the 02 area - divides into Cork City (021) xxx xxxx and then smaller towns would be (022) xxxxx (023) xxxxx (024) xxxxx … right the way to. (029) xxxxx
All of the codes except Dublin worked like that and the number of digits in the local number varies from 5 to 7 depending on the demand. Most rural areas only have 5 digit local numbers, but a lot have been merged and are 7 digit. Whatever way the old Ericsson crossbars and ITT crossbars worked, they didn’t seem to be bothered by mixed length numbers. When digital arrived in 1980 that became even less of an issue.
The company that owned Golden Pages managed the whole directory publication setup commercially and the old P&T just gave them a franchise. They used to always feature photographs (often from a completion) or kids drawings and so on on the front cover.
They stopped publishing physical phonebooks in 2020. The were only available by special request by about 2007. By 2019 they were only sending out 2400 copies so they gave up entirely as there was no demand.
France originally launched their Minitel videotext services to avoid having to publish physical phonebooks. It morphed into a full interactive text system in the early 80s
Weird one I’ve heard here was the recorded wrong number messages now just say “The number you have dialled has not been recognised - please search online for a new number and try your call again.” Rather than “… please check the telephone directory, or call directory enquires and try your call again.”
End of an era.
Here in Ireland phonebooks were a whole lot simpler, as the population is only about 4 million.
We had an absolutely ludicrous number of area codes (63 codes at one stage!) for the scale of the population, but they’re regionalised so the first two digits of the area code are for a broad region.
We had 6 phonebooks, 4 of which had the white pages and Golden Pages (Yellow pages) combined into the same physical book - you just flipped it over and opened it at the back for the Golden Pages.
Only the (01) Dublin and Cork (02) areas had separate books. The rest didn’t have enough population.
Our codes just divide the country into 7 broad areas and then sub-divided those further into 3 digit dialling codes - so you could always tell where you were calling / where incoming caller ID is from just by looking at the first couple of digits.
For example the 02 area - divides into Cork City (021) xxx xxxx and then smaller towns would be (022) xxxxx (023) xxxxx (024) xxxxx … right the way to. (029) xxxxx
All of the codes except Dublin worked like that and the number of digits in the local number varies from 5 to 7 depending on the demand. Most rural areas only have 5 digit local numbers, but a lot have been merged and are 7 digit. Whatever way the old Ericsson crossbars and ITT crossbars worked, they didn’t seem to be bothered by mixed length numbers. When digital arrived in 1980 that became even less of an issue.
The company that owned Golden Pages managed the whole directory publication setup commercially and the old P&T just gave them a franchise. They used to always feature photographs (often from a completion) or kids drawings and so on on the front cover.
They stopped publishing physical phonebooks in 2020. The were only available by special request by about 2007. By 2019 they were only sending out 2400 copies so they gave up entirely as there was no demand.
France originally launched their Minitel videotext services to avoid having to publish physical phonebooks. It morphed into a full interactive text system in the early 80s
Weird one I’ve heard here was the recorded wrong number messages now just say “The number you have dialled has not been recognised - please search online for a new number and try your call again.” Rather than “… please check the telephone directory, or call directory enquires and try your call again.”
End of an era.
A 1987 field training video from BT explaining how to look for chargeable items on repairs … just shows how those utility companies think …
I can’t speak for the situation in Britain, but here they ditched equipment rental in the early 1990s. Before that they used to install all your internal extension wiring and rented a range of phones and other equipment. You could also buy your own, but in theory you weren’t supposed to install your own extension wiring, but in reality they could do nothing about it if you did and the wiring is just two pair. I know my parents had DIY extensions in the 80s. I think in the U.K. it was common that DIY extension wiring was plugged into an official BT socket to avoid “tampering with plant and equipment”.
With landline faults, they only take responsibility up to a demarcation socket, which has a test socket that disconnects your extensions and with fibre services they have never supported anything beyond their own NTU. The fibre service is provided up to a termination socket and your ISP provides the router, which is just self install.
post was last edited: 4/9/2022-20:10]
I can’t speak for the situation in Britain, but here they ditched equipment rental in the early 1990s. Before that they used to install all your internal extension wiring and rented a range of phones and other equipment. You could also buy your own, but in theory you weren’t supposed to install your own extension wiring, but in reality they could do nothing about it if you did and the wiring is just two pair. I know my parents had DIY extensions in the 80s. I think in the U.K. it was common that DIY extension wiring was plugged into an official BT socket to avoid “tampering with plant and equipment”.
With landline faults, they only take responsibility up to a demarcation socket, which has a test socket that disconnects your extensions and with fibre services they have never supported anything beyond their own NTU. The fibre service is provided up to a termination socket and your ISP provides the router, which is just self install.
post was last edited: 4/9/2022-20:10]
Bell 1981
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