In very rural areas of the bell system era the phone co had a system of providing dial tone beyond the range of the central office. It what’s called a “pair gain” in the 1970s and early 80s digital hadn’t yet been introduced into the local loop. Enter Anaconda. It was an 8 channel analog system using double side band and to take 2 pairs of wires and make 8 channels for subscriber lines. There was also bigger systems that provided dial tone service to up to 30 lines. It was all analog. Kind of like radio over wires. It’s similar to HAM radio SSB.
They did that in more densely populated areas as well...a giant pain in the ass if you worked for a CLEC, like I did, leasing facilities from the ILEC.
Ha! How about that? We also drove through York, Pennsylvania during our August 1976 phone trip, but the independent company there had payphones we couldn't record on.
In the 1970s GTE was the phone co. In Los Gatos, Ca. Now Frontier. They were mostly all step by step in the 1970s. In rural areas they had small central offices in the far rural areas of their coverage area. To make a call you used a dtmf phone then the central office converted the dtmf to analog, then you heard MF tones when the call was sent to pacific telephone aka att to place the call. It was a long process just to place a call outside of the local area
So you'd use a touch-tone phone and wait for it to finish pulse dialing? Did it start converting from the moment the first digit was pressed, or only after you'd dialled the whole number? I was born in 1980, and got into phreaking as a teenager. I do not recall ever having used a non-ESS telephone line, though it probably happened when I was young at some point.
When I hired on the bell system they still had 2 party lines. 1970’s. We had to wire phones to tip party or ring party. There were a few 4 party lines out there in very rural areas. The installer had to wire up phones accordingly when the service was ordered. The caller had to listen before calling to make sure someone wasn’t using the line before they called. This created other issues. Other people could listen into your conversation.
I remember that in the mid 1970s when I was a kid. I picked up the receiver and heard a woman talking to someone and had to wait to call my best friend. This was in a small city in Canada.
wow. The post dialling delay (PDD) on some of these calls would never in your wildest dreams have been deemed acceptable in Australia on any network no matter how many technologies were being switched through. In all fairness we only had three by the '80s, Step, XBar and AXE electronic. The longest PDDs in those days were XBar origins to indial PABXs which overflowed via SxS tandems. Even those would be less than 3 seconds. Wish I had had the forethought to record some of those calls.
Before this I was getting into 60's Kmart Store music tapes, but this blows those away. Is there any way to listen to just the audio. I did find the narration interesting especially some of the descriptions of logging and signal distortion. Always been a fan of cross talk. Miss those mysterious voices.
There's a 1XB in seattle that does the same sound in the background, One time i called a SUP test line on there and when it picked up and hanged up i can hear someone in the background saying HELLO!!! and at that point i started freaking out what i just heard.
![The Sounds of Long Distance pgm 8: DDD from Panel, 4M Dialpulsing, 1977 [re-upload corrects audio]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
