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[GenePink]

BTW I love the history of the Bell System.

I'm on board with that. Seen this?

Step-By-Step switch 1951, youtube

Gene

[Stephen Swaffer]

Is that at an aluminum ladder?

There is a functioning step by step switch on display at the Iowa State Fairgrounds.  Small but interesting history of the Bell System- as long as you are ok with seeing stuff you once bought or used as " state of the art " in a museum display.

[g'bye, Dick Rees]

I'm on board with that. Seen this?

Step-By-Step switch 1951, youtube

Gene

Golly!!!

[GenePink]

... as long as you are ok with seeing stuff you once bought or used as " state of the art " in a museum display.

Story of my life, you should see my home A/V system, most everything is from the '70s. An exception would be the CRT projector that is much newer, from the mid '80s.

Hey, it's old, I'm old, perfect fit.

Gene

[Scott Holtzman]

Is that at an aluminum ladder?

There is a functioning step by step switch on display at the Iowa State Fairgrounds.  Small but interesting history of the Bell System- as long as you are ok with seeing stuff you once bought or used as " state of the art " in a museum display.

Late response, did get a few glimpses of the thread while on road.

I love the history of the Bell Systems and Bell Labs.  Been to Murray Hill and Whippany professionally a few times in my career.  Never got to meet Claude Shannon.

Anyway, worked on many Pioneer displays and events.  If you have a chance to visit a Pioneer museum (Telephone Pioneers of America) it's very interesting.  On my bucket list is one in Maine and two in GA.

[Lance Hallmark]

Working right now at my "Day Job", 1:30 am, ha! Moving TDM T1 & DS0 circuits off of Sprint network to other carriers as Sprint is dropping all TDM services. Most of my work revolves around SS7, a communications protocol for telecommunications. It's slowly going away, but the people up high already think it's done with, putting my 20 year tenure in jeopardy. One of my former coworkers spent 46 years total with GTE and the later incarnations. It was pretty cool hearing how they first developed and perfected things like caller ID, call waiting, toll free, etc... It's an amazing infrastructure that will be going away, along with the stability that was designed into it.

[Scott Holtzman]

Working right now at my "Day Job", 1:30 am, ha! Moving TDM T1 & DS0 circuits off of Sprint network to other carriers as Sprint is dropping all TDM services. Most of my work revolves around SS7, a communications protocol for telecommunications. It's slowly going away, but the people up high already think it's done with, putting my 20 year tenure in jeopardy. One of my former coworkers spent 46 years total with GTE and the later incarnations. It was pretty cool hearing how they first developed and perfected things like caller ID, call waiting, toll free, etc... It's an amazing infrastructure that will be going away, along with the stability that was designed into it.

Tampa Sweetwater office was my very first job in the telephone business.  I was an intern with GTE and had a knack for data so ended up doing prescription data provisioning on 110 cards for analog data circuits and D4 DDS sub rate configuration for digital lines.  Our office was getting the first GTD-5 in Florida and I soaked it all up.

Switched to the non-wireline world with paging and happened to be at the carrier that won the A-Block grant for Tampa.  10 cells, we wondered how we would ever sell enough capacity.  Hooked up those v.35 connections to the F-Links into the end office.  It would be a few years before we got A-Links into an STP.  I love SS-7 and the wireless extensions using TCAP.  I also did early IS-41 mobility management (all over TCAP) for IS-95 CDMA networks when PCS was in it's infancy.

 The company that purchased my VoIP carrier last year, Sangoma, whom I work for now has an SS-7 stack for VoIP gateways.  They can't kill us off yet though think if you take a look at SIP and packet switched voice system you would make an easy transition.  Plenty of jobs for NOC guys at  Envoy/Bandwidth.com/L3 PM if you ever want to chat.

[Lance Hallmark]

Tampa Sweetwater office was my very first job in the telephone business.  I was an intern with GTE and had a knack for data so ended up doing prescription data provisioning on 110 cards for analog data circuits and D4 DDS sub rate configuration for digital lines.  Our office was getting the first GTD-5 in Florida and I soaked it all up.

Switched to the non-wireline world with paging and happened to be at the carrier that won the A-Block grant for Tampa.  10 cells, we wondered how we would ever sell enough capacity.  Hooked up those v.35 connections to the F-Links into the end office.  It would be a few years before we got A-Links into an STP.  I love SS-7 and the wireless extensions using TCAP.  I also did early IS-41 mobility management (all over TCAP) for IS-95 CDMA networks when PCS was in it's infancy.

 The company that purchased my VoIP carrier last year, Sangoma, whom I work for now has an SS-7 stack for VoIP gateways.  They can't kill us off yet though think if you take a look at SIP and packet switched voice system you would make an easy transition.  Plenty of jobs for NOC guys at  Envoy/Bandwidth.com/L3 PM if you ever want to chat.

Thanks, good to know. I'm based out of the Tampa Bay area, we probably know some common telephony people from back then. I build all the TDM SS7 links and some of the Sigtran as well. I had also put in around 8-9 years of NOC work as well.

[Jonathan Johnson]

The company that purchased my VoIP carrier last year, Sangoma, whom I work for now has an SS-7 stack for VoIP gateways.  They can't kill us off yet though think if you take a look at SIP and packet switched voice system you would make an easy transition.  Plenty of jobs for NOC guys at  Envoy/Bandwidth.com/L3 PM if you ever want to chat.

I find it interesting that in the early days of digital communications, digital data communication rode on top of analog voice networks.

Now, it's largely flipped: analog voice communication now rides on top of digital data networks. Gone are the days where you had a copper to copper connection between you and Albuquerque.

[Scott Holtzman]

I find it interesting that in the early days of digital communications, digital data communication rode on top of analog voice networks.

Now, it's largely flipped: analog voice communication now rides on top of digital data networks. Gone are the days where you had a copper to copper connection between you and Albuquerque.

Long haul Coax (DS3 and higher) carrier systems were on there way out in the late 70's.   These were digital links.  Digital radio was also still around for some long haul paths.  I have only seen a few analog sideband microwaves that used frequency division multiplexing on the baseband carrier.

It was a cool time.  Predivesture, network still built and ruled by Bellcore.  Then Judge Harold H. Greene changed everything.  Politics of the phone system is still politics so I will stop there.

[ProSoundWeb Community]