Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway
From: roy%phri@uunet.uu.net (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: The Way It Used To Be
Message-ID: 
Date: 11 Aug 89 00:50:01 GMT
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Reply-To: Roy Smith 
Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY)
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X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 290, message 6 of 13

In  zygot!john@apple.com
(John Higdon) writes:
> If you live in an area that still has functional electromechanical CO equip-
> ment, do whatever it takes to wangle a tour before it's all gone forever.

	The British Science Museum (I hope I got the official name right)
in London has a small stepper-driven exchange set up as an exhibit.  They
have about 20 phones in front of a panel of stepper switches (I'm sure I'm
not using the right terminology; these are the ones that step up once per
dial pulse and then step around once per pulse on the next digit).  You can
pick up a phone and watch it grab a stepper. As you dial, you can watch the
stepper step in sync with the dial and when you finish 2 digits, another
stepper is grabbed.  When the answering phone hangs up and breaks the
connection, the steppers go di-di-di-di-di-di-dit! back to the rest
position.  It is absolutely facinating to watch.  If it wasn't for the fact
that there was the rest of the museum to see, I probably would have spent
half a day there.

	They also have one of the early (the first?) automated
dial-the-time machines.  The spoken digits and words were recorded
optically on rotating glass disks.  The proper combination of words was put
together by mechanically switching to the proper tracks on the various
disks.  And you thought read-only optical disks were a new invention!
--
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
{att,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu
"The connector is the network"

[Moderator's Note: The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago also has
such an exhibit in their Telecommunications Exhibit Area. It is fun to
watch.  PT]