British Telecom film from the 1980s explaining the System X project. Note: I do not own this video. I got it for free from BT's website and I'm making it available for free on RU-vid. Reuploaded with better quality audio.
Bullshit. It was outdated by the time the first prototypes were tested. And when they switch the mechanical off and turned on the all electronic system X it kept crashing and crashing all because the software was buggy and couldn't handle not registered numbers. System X should've been put into service in the early 70s, then it could've had any chance to compete. Instead, companies like NEC dominated the phone switching markets for years.
A fantastic bit of British engineering. I designed and developed a multi-platform software/hardware interface for my company some years ago, and named it System X in reverence. Shame we're switching to Chinese made systems now...
When I was a kid in the 70s, I built a crude telephone system for my house, with simple star services that linked to a car radio tuned to Radio 2, and naughtily, would pick up calls from the BT line if it was ringing. We lived in 51 so in reverence also, I called it System 51.
For those wondering what the opening music track is, it's "Reaching Out" by Richard Myhill. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-X1QhkwHpnPw.html Very 80s!
I like the way it states it will serve the needs of the 21st century. Try saying that now to a 2 year old who’s iPhone is not working because of low data..lol
Being a digital switched system, System X would be more comparable with No. 5 ESS. A better comparison with American No.1 ESS would be the TXE2 & TXE4 switches, which were similarly stored program control with reed switching of conventional analogue circuits. TXE2 first entered service in 1966, not long after the first No.1 ESS in Succasunna, N.J.
Depends on what you mean by digital. Digitally controlled or digitally switched? The first digital controlled exchange was the mid 1950's Highgate Wood, which was a multi-million pound disaster. The first digitally controlled exchanges were the American 1ESS system which goes back to the 1960's. British Telecom remained so far behind in technology due to the Highgate Wood disaster they were considered as a joke by other telcos.
@@fredturpentine6651 No chip, just a knowledge of the facts. Before WW2 Britain was exporting telephone exchange equipment, or licensing local manufacture, to all British Commonwealth countries and more. After WW2 Britain progressively lost all its export markets, because other countries had by then developed superior products, eg LM Ericsson's crossbar. When in 1959 Australia decided to stop buying British equipment, and start buying Swedish Ericsson (as it had much lower maintenance costs, lower purchase costs, and had flexible call routing), the British Government panicked, and sent a high level delegation to Canberra to sort those "colonials" out and make them buy British. They got laughed at and sent packing. That's a fact - you can look it up. The first British electronic exchange, Highgate Wood, built as part of a very large and expensive project led by the BPO and involving all major British telecomms manufacturers, was a complete failure right from switch-on, and was scrapped. That's a fact - you can look it up. System X did at least work just fine, but it didn't measure up against its competitors. It won no export orders, except for the odd small exchange installed in a couple of island communities who got it free as part of a grant. That's a fact - you can look it up. And British Telecom ended up buying Ericsson - that's a fact too.
Ha! System X - a system more less forced on British manufacturers by British Telecom. Announced with much ballyhoo in 1979 and a supposed to be internationally competitive and so would win back markets for British industry. It was none of those things. Expensive and lacking important features considered essential by most phone companies. Nobody outside Britain bought it. But even BT ended up buying large quantities of the proven Swedish Ericsson AXE -10. And of course marketing System X had to work against Britain's long well earned reputation for shoddy cheap work requiring lots of maintenance. That may not have applied to System X, but nobody was going to risk it.
As I understand, System X was way more advanced than competing systems. The problem was more down to the fact it was designed by committee and way over-engineered, making it very expensive to buy and to maintain, in the face of established and proven systems such as the Axe 10 (System Y) and the 5ESS
@@BlueTangWebSystems : System X was first shown in 1979. It came later than AXE-10 (1974) but earlier than 5ESS (1982). One might thus expect System X to be more sophisticated than AXE-10, but this is NOT the case. I don't personally have any experience with 5ESS, so I can't be certain, but I would be very surprised If it wasn't superior in features and performance to System X. The BPO always had fairly primitive concepts of routing for example, but the Bell System was always the most sophisticated wrt routing. There are some factors that complicate the picture, and makes your view dependent on just what you mean by "advanced". Firstly, there is no single AXE-10 or System X. Both systems evolved substantially over the years and new technology (eg advanced silicon) and new market needs (eg VOIP, cell phones 1G, 2G, 4G, 5G) arose. A new AXE-10 exchange today would be, apart from the overarching architecture concepts of APZ and APT, unrecognisable to anyone trained on the first release. AXE-10 and System X are prone to system-wide outages. The architecture of 5ESS makes outages extremely unlikely. A large bomb is about the only way to kill a 5ESS site. Is this feature an "advance" or just good design? Electromechanical exchanges always had this feature, but it sort of got lost in the transition to digital control outside of the USA.
