I was an Operator in the UK in the 1980s and we handled multiple calls at the same time. Sometimes we weren't on the line when the Bell Operator answered, and then would hear: "Operator waiting. Operator waiting. Operator leaving the line." They all sounded exactly the same and rarely deviated. Very professional.
Man I wish this was still a thing today, with all the quirks and variety I would never get off the phone, I was born in the late 90s. The closest thing to this is Shortwave Radio.
I was born in 1980, and I managed to do this using my computer to generate the tones. It was pretty much dead in the US, but I used 800 numbers that connected to operators in other countries. It was more complex than the way they did it in the US; you had to send two different frequencies at once for like 200ms or whatever it wanted (they were very particular about this, if you got it wrong, it would either not work or hang up on u, you couldn't be off by more than like 30-50ms), wait for it to bleep back at you, then send another frequency for a little longer than the first, then it would bleep back at u again and u were in. But eventually I figured out Greece, which let me call anywhere in the world and access a lot of the operator-only stuff that he mentions in other videos. I was doing this around when you were born. A couple years later, it went digital and the party was over. I had figured out Argentina, Belize, Chile, and Macau, but most of those I could only figure out how to call in-country with. Greece, on the other hand, was powerful. Calling from that, you were an operator and could do anything an operator could do, pretty much. I could call special operator-only operators in the US and ask them to do an emergency breakthrough to someone's line and they would just connect me and then leave. 😂
I remember hearing those multifrequency tones (beep boop beep beep boop) back in the 1970s while making calls from the San Fernando Valley to my grandparents' house in East Los Angeles. I forgot how noisy connections were with all the clicks and ticking sounds.
I miss the whole experience of calling long distance. Having to keep calls as short as possible..... They were expensive and only allowed for special occasions.
The muitifrequncy sounds are so awesome!! Reminds me of when I call my grandmother in prince George's county and I calling from small town in Montgomery County Maryland . I still have my 1980 Bell system telephone and a landline. Great memories.
I have an 80s or 70s rotary phone on the wall of my shop. I had to make a call the other day and started dialing AND thinking, "Dear God when did I use a rotary last?" Hey it still worked!
I love those SxS switches that just kinda let you hear the actual AC current on the line. What kind of a switch were you on that handled pulses that fast? And WOW, crosstalk on some of these calls is just ABSURD.
If you listened to his other tapes you might already found out. Evan Doorbell at that time in Lynnbrook had 2 phone one connected to a Western Electric Number 1 Crossbar switch (1XB) and the other to a Number 5 Crossbar (5XB). In this tape he called using the line connected to the 5XB which right after that sent him to a XBT switch (tandem ver of 1XB) which is where the MF outpulses to the Long Distance network come from after the silence. About the Greek phone system on your other reply, yeah OTE (the Greek phone company, formerly state owned) is just weird in general, though they did a big upgrade during the late 90s and early 2000s in anticipation of the 2004 Olympics and them no longer having an absolute monopoly in the landline telephone system and they changed the numbering plan multiple times. Don't know much more since I was still a baby during the early 2000s, and didn't get interested into phones after I moved out of Greece, though they have a museum and you can see their entire collection online incl. switching machines in their website (otegroupmuseum dot gr).
Growing up in Czech in middle of the 90´ I remember vaguely the disctinct sound the lines were making especially the "dialtone" which came up after going off hook which was not a continious one but more compared to a an alternating slower busy tone - also establishing calls took "longer" than what we are used today - I wonder if there are any recordings I reckon that this might still be the time where the system had some of the soviet stuff left in, so probability high it was partly mechanical still?
Generally speaking the former Soviet bloc was slower to replace its electro mechanical equipment than other countries. Unfortunately there aren’t any recordings from these places made on the ground that I know of.
Those are multifrequency tones coming from the switching center in Hempstead NY. This is how it communicated the called number to the next link down the chain. Those tones were used all over the old telephone network, but you usually didn't hear them. We're fortunate that many switching machines, including Hempstead Tandem 3, DID let us hear them. Phone phreaks were able to use those tones (in combination with other techniques to reset the circuits) to control the telephone network directly. You can hear what it was like to do that at the end of this program: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-eiQ2MwMdYPk.html
@@evandoorbell4278 I have an old copy of Cool Edit 2000 (which eventually became Adobe Audition) which I still use today. It can generate either DTMF or MF (CCITT R1) tones.
