AT&T Bell Labs 1 ESS (Electornic Switching System) Manufacturing Processes (1965) 

My dad worked 30 years for Western Electric. My life and career would not have been the same if he hadn't shared with me, and taught, me many of the things he learned and knew. Miss you dad.

And all of this, the incredibly complex electro mechanical machines, fantastically laborious manual processes, highly skilled labour, time consuming steps, all now obsolete and gone forever, except for this wonderful visible record. It just touched on ic's near the end, I wonder if anyone from that time, looks like the 60's, could have imagined how electronics would develop in the very near future. And the rate of progress has increased exponentially so can anyone now imagine the world in say 2085?! AI is now the big kicker, will it end the world or advance it beyond human imagination?!

I remember when the Wisconsin Telephone Company (a unit of ATT) activated ESS on the Appleton, Wis. exchanges in April, 1978. The dial tone frequency changed. Touch Tone service along with Call Waiting, Speed Dialing, Three-Way Calling, and Call Forwarding became available. Pay phones started changing from rotary dial to Touch Tone, and pay phones changed from 10 cents a call to 20 cents a call. However, pay phones became dial tone first which meant you did not need coins for 911, to reach an operator and for "800" calls. ESS also meant the City of Appleton was able start having 911 service.

Middletown Ohio received its first ESS in the mid '70s Armco Steel was hardhearted there, and they had a complete 10,000 line block of phone numbers reserved for them. It was using a 1920s switch that was so bad it could take over a minute to connect to another local phone. They told Ohio Bell that they would go private if the exchange wasn't replaced. Ohio Bell brought in a 10,000 line ESS in a tractor trailer and switched them to it. Then they added on to the Central Office building, and started installing five identical 10,000 line sections to upgrade the entire exchange. Without Armco forcing the issue, we were scheduled to wait almost 20 years to replace that CO. It was kept in operation with parts from small town COs that were updated, then salvaged the old equipment for parts. On busy days it took multiple attempts to place a call, and you were frequently connected to a dead pair.

In 1970 I worked at 8 Harrison Ave Boston. ( the outside of the building was used as the Headquarters for the all female Ghostbusters movie, it was down in the Combat Zone section of the city. You had to walk by all the strip clubs , peep shows and xrated movie and book businesses to get from subway to the office). There were two ESS machines in that building . I worked on the third floor ESS #1 . The other machine was on the seventh floor. I believe there was a Panel machine on the second floor and a number 5 crossbar on four or five. I wished I had taken pictures. It may have been forbidden to take pictures inside the building, I can't recall. When they changed the code it would take all night to updated the memory cards which I believe were 128 words x 56 bits. Each card was about seven inches by twelve . Just guessing , it's been almost fifty years.

Wow... All of this paved the way to the digital age we now live in. If only the early architects could see just how we've come- BILLIONS of transistors in a single small chip.

I swear that they sampled some of these telephone sounds for the movie war games.

Very impressive camera work.

It is almost unbelievable now to see the amount of handwork that went into these various processes. And to think this was just a step in the evolution of the technology and switching systems we have today. Note that almost all of the employees on the assembly lines were women.

The 85 million phones in actual use today

6 million bits is only 750 Kilobytes. modern computer systems deal with terabytes of information now.

Is Paul Richards the narrator?

I bet today all this is done by Machine and computer. More jobs lost.