Where on earth did this come from? You have no idea how much this means to me. This is all stuff I was intensely interested in when I was a teenager, about 25 years ago. I never thought I'd ever hear any of these sounds explicitly identified.
@@pseydtonne Yeah, I have since listened to most of the videos on this channel. I think this must have been the first comment I left here. Given that I left it three years ago, I bet that I was on RU-vid during lockdown and stumbled upon this. Some of these recordings are so good that I suspect they were recorded on an open-reel tape deck and/or with high-quality tape, and they must have been looked after all this time. Cassette tapes over 30 years old often don't fare too well ... Alternatively, he might have had them digitized years ago. In any case, we really are lucky to have this. When I was a kid, I used to hang out in a phone phreak chat room, and we all did all of the same things he did on these tapes. It's so peculiar hearing someone whom I did NOT know talking about this stuff. 😂 Finding a mechanical switch still operating somewhere was like striking gold. Blue-boxable trunks were like diamonds. Most phreaks in the 1990s in the US didn't even bother; nearly all of the people who I knew that were into it lived overseas. In the 3 or so years that I blue boxed, I myself only found ONE number within the US that responded to 2600hz, etc.: It was to somewhere in Ketchikan, AK. All the other toll-free numbers I found terminated overseas. I suspect that between all of us, we knew about every electromechanical telephone exchange operating in the US. I myself found a step exchange in Miami, TX. One. We knew about Nantes, Quebec (he has a video on that one lol), somewhere in rural Michigan ... there were not a lot!
@@pseydtonne I forgot about Miami, TX (or whatever CO served that area). That was a step at least until the late 90s. I suspect not one is operating in the US or Canada any longer. I forget the name of the town in Michigan, but I am positive there was a step exchange there in the mid-late 90s because I chatted with someone online who lived there. There are probably some still operating somewhere in the world. Infrastructure costs money. It was *so weird* calling these places. You'd dial the number, and it would sound like any other call at first, and then you'd hear a massive "CLUNK", and then the line would sound like you'd hear in one of these recordings. It would then proceed to pulse dial the number!
The old network still lives in the network called C* Net. Crossbar Panel switches and even ess still live there. It’s the “Collector’s Network” Check it out.
Another application for crossbar was in testing of leased line services. SMAS and SARTS. It was used by the testboard to connect to leased lines to test a non switched circuit. The tester would connect to the crossbar switch thru a dial up connection and dail MF into a particular circuit to troubleshoot.
The original calls were part of a huge historical preservation project, where we made and recorded about 10,000 deliberately non-completed calls, mostly during mid-1977.
I have a question. I read on Wikipedia that AT&T had its own separate long-distance network for its TWX/Telex. It had a different list of area codes, 610 and 710 to name a few examples. Did you ever experiment with sending facsimile or text and make any recordings? Do you know anything about this? I ask because I'm curious as to how calls were made using TWX. Did the customer dial 1/area code/number just like from a regular telephone network? Did the customer pay for these calls by the minute, just like with regular DDD?. I'd like some info from you on these questions and to hear some recordings if you have any.
Telex was a separate network, But TWX was sent over the regular long-distance network. TWX lines were normally served out of number five crossbar offices, and TWX had its own audible ring, busy, re-order, and intercept tones, which sounded roughly like a low speed modem. I do have some recordings of these tones here and there, As well as some regular phone calls going through link is designed for TWX (it doesn’t work right but it’s kind of cool). So far I haven’t mentioned or published anything about TWX, EXCEPT that in, “how I became a Phone freak, program 11” there is a brief recording of a TWX re-order tone I encountered it early on and thought, “what could this POSSIBLY be?“ I have never seen a TwX or Telex terminal.
The TWX re-order tone comes on right after 13:15. it is just something that I got at the time and wondered about; I didn’t find out it was TWX until I met Bill Acker
The picture on this broadcast was a common one Thru out the bell system. It’s a cross bar switch. It was used on many applications. One being Concentrator Identifier. This was used in answering services up to the 1980s. The concentrator was in the central office and the identifier was at the answering service. Operators used a cord board like the ones that operators used many years ago. It was a great system.😅
