It was always exciting to hear that long-distance noise, anticipating my parents to pick up when I was away at school, or my sister to pick up when I lived in a different state, or know my fiance has just called. This was in the days before caller Id.
I can't thank you enough for this video. I thought I was the only one who "Played around with the phone in the 70's" and took notice of the "CCIS" or "MF" or what I think should have exclusively been called "INTER-OFFICE-ROUTING-TONES". It took me 57 years to finally acknowledge that I wasn't crazy when I would describe to them a "Secret, or Special" "Touch-Tone" stream that could be heard faintly in the background ONLY after dialing a "Long-distance" call. I knew back then what was happening (the senders, or line-finders were mapping out a path to the destination city. AND YES...YES... YES... how I remember the "Charm" of hearing the "White -Noise" of each repeater station kicking -in as the path made it's way across the country! wow! And how I agree with you about the over-all warm and more comfortable Charm the sound of the telephone was back in the 60's and 70's. Especially without that "Damn Digital Delay" (DDD) that we're all forced to tolerate today. Thank You for a most refreshing visit back to QUALITY times that unfortunately none of us will ever see or hear again. Your friend JEFF H. Take care!
How very kind of you to say so! (Actually, the "poor sound quality because I didn't record this," I put in deliberately to make it feel more realistic. :-))
I have to say VoLTE sounds a lot better than GSM/older VoIP solutions. I've noticed that AT&T VoLTE actually sounds worse than T mobile's VoLTE funny enough.
VoLTE (and VoWiFi) are essentially SIP in an IPSec tunnel. It is VoIP, and inherits its properties of being a codec/standards mess. Some have a feature called "HD Voice" and sounds pretty good, but it depends on your phone/modem, software, what the calling carrier supports, what the called carrier supports, what those two are willing to support between eachother...
Phones were neater back then, you got different sounds, busy signals sounded different depending on where you called, ring tones were different, now it all sounds the same
I know absolutely nothing about any of this, but I'm enjoying every long distance video of yours I can get my ears on. This is ofc all way before I was every thought of lol, I was born in 2002 if that gives you an idea. My grandparents used to have a landline telephone system from the late 90s/early 2000s, and starting around 2006 or 2007, if someone didn't have a voice mailbox setup/was full or not working properly, and you were calling someone from let's say, fairbanks, AK, an automated male voice message would say "I'm sorry I can't get to the phone right now", please leave a message and I'll get back to you as soon as possible."
The concept of rooting ”this was a major fascination of myself…” in Australian English rooting has a totally different meaning. As a teenager I too was interested in the concept of rooting😂
Once Mark Cuccia of New Orleans and I were listening to this program, and he observed that having NO direct connection between Dix Hills and Regina, just shows how conservative and prudish the Bell System was.
As Evan Doorbell noted, circuits were connected in series to build out a path to the called party's line. Each switching machine, or switch, would be programmed to choose the best circuit group to route the connection to its destination through a series of switches. For example, a Houston, TX caller might dial a number in San Jose, CA. The call might, hypothetically, be routed to Dallas, which might connect to Sacramento, and then to the local exchange switch in San Jose. There was no central routing. If all circuits from Dallas to Sacramento were busy, the call might be connected to Denver and that switch would search for a connection to Sacramento. One problem the engineers needed to avoid was "ring around the rosy". There might be several switches with circuit groups to a destination, but all the circuits are busy. So, one switch receives the call, finds all its direct circuits busy, and connects the call to another switch with direct circuits, and those are all busy so it connects to a third switch with direct circuits, but those are busy as well, so then the call goes back to the first switch. So, the call loops through 3 switches tying up all the circuits between them. The solution was a hierarchy with rules about going up, down and laterally in the hierarchy that would prevent loops. As Evan Doorbell notes, there were 5 classes of offices, which were numbers in the hierarchy. Another problem was heavy traffic to specific destinations. An earthquake might occur in California or a hurricane in Florida. Suddenly, there is a high call volume to the disaster location. Maybe only 1 in 100 calls will get through. However, a large number of circuits would get tied up routing the calls that could not get through. This impaired the system's ability to connect calls that weren't going to the disaster area. So, AT&T would block, at the source, a percentage of the calls connecting to that destination. The announcement would give heavy call volume to the disaster area as the reason that the call was not being connected. They may have done the same thing on heavy calling days, to keep the number of calls reaching the network down a manageable number that the network could handle. As computer technology advanced, AT&T was in the process of implementing centralized routing. A complete route would be selected before any connection was made. If the called line was busy, the system would find out, not assign any circuits, and generate the busy tone at a switch near the calling party's end. Also, non-working numbers would be handled that way. I don't know how much of that actually got implemented.
That's all basically correct, except that a call from the Dallas region to the Sacramento region would never route through Denver without some sort of manual intervention initiated by traffic engineers. On Mother's Day and Christmas, they would take advantage of the unused business day capacity of circuits to and from New York City, to get more long distance calls completed than would be possible using the usual hierarchy. But this was always a rare, temporary, manually initiated situation.
I grew up in 714. Starting from when I was 11, in the mid-70's, I used the family phone line and the family tape recorder with a suction cup mic from Radio Shack to collect recorded messages mostly from my area code. I would go through the list of prefixes in the phone book and dial the prefix plus 1111, and that would almost always get me to a recording, especially in the small towns. I had to dial one first for toll calls. My parents' line was step, and when I finished dialing the last digit of any toll call, I heard all this clickety-clack, which I figured was the equipment identifying the number I was calling from. Before it split off 619, 714 was geographically huge and had a lot of single-prefix towns. About 25 years ago, I transferred the recording from cassette to MP3 and put it in my music collection. I could post it to UA-cam, but I would need to edit it first to remove some identifying information.
Rochester Tel was one of VERY few independents that actually DID have a lot of Bell System switching equipment. #5 crossbar especially. But they also had at least one North Electric NX1, too.
I'm sorry your experience with VoIP is so poor. In my experience, VoIP is as good as (with no compression), or better than (with HD Voice codecs which are compressed) the current network. I've built my own VoIP PBX at home and I get toll quality audio between phones and even the PSTN. I'm not saying those poor quality CODECs don't exist, but, with modern internet infrastructure they aren't needed by most users.
@@evandoorbell4278 I lived in the 615 area code in TN. I thought it might be in my area code but I would still the long distance tone, followed by a male voice saying something like "the number you have dialed is a test" he would go on to read off a number, then something like, "hang up, otherwise billing will be arranged for this call". And it would come through on the bill! Sometime when I would hang up I couldn't get the dial tone back for like 5 minutes or so, and the phone would be dead. Other times I would call the number and a LOUD alarm would sound followed by what sounded like a female voice miming a busy signal! Other times just the female voice miming a busy signal. I've watched what wondered for years what I was calling lol
![The Sounds of Long Distance pgm 8: DDD from Panel, 4M Dialpulsing, 1977 [re-upload corrects audio]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZhzlDLThFYM/mqdefault.jpg)
This makes me feel strangely comforted
You can "feel the distance" Exactly
It was always exciting to hear that long-distance noise, anticipating my parents to pick up when I was away at school, or my sister to pick up when I lived in a different state, or know my fiance has just called. This was in the days before caller Id.
I can't thank you enough for this video. I thought I was the only one who "Played around with the phone in the 70's" and took notice of the "CCIS" or "MF" or what I think should have exclusively been called "INTER-OFFICE-ROUTING-TONES". It took me 57 years to finally acknowledge that I wasn't crazy when I would describe to them a "Secret, or Special" "Touch-Tone" stream that could be heard faintly in the background ONLY after dialing a "Long-distance" call. I knew back then what was happening (the senders, or line-finders were mapping out a path to the destination city. AND YES...YES... YES... how I remember the "Charm" of hearing the "White -Noise" of each repeater station kicking -in as the path made it's way across the country! wow! And how I agree with you about the over-all warm and more comfortable Charm the sound of the telephone was back in the 60's and 70's. Especially without that "Damn Digital Delay" (DDD) that we're all forced to tolerate today. Thank You for a most refreshing visit back to QUALITY times that unfortunately none of us will ever see or hear again. Your friend JEFF H. Take care!
6:00 the editing was so good it made it believable that the recordings were having an actual conversation
How very kind of you to say so! (Actually, the "poor sound quality because I didn't record this," I put in deliberately to make it feel more realistic. :-))
I have to say VoLTE sounds a lot better than GSM/older VoIP solutions. I've noticed that AT&T VoLTE actually sounds worse than T mobile's VoLTE funny enough.
VoLTE (and VoWiFi) are essentially SIP in an IPSec tunnel. It is VoIP, and inherits its properties of being a codec/standards mess. Some have a feature called "HD Voice" and sounds pretty good, but it depends on your phone/modem, software, what the calling carrier supports, what the called carrier supports, what those two are willing to support between eachother...
Phones were neater back then, you got different sounds, busy signals sounded different depending on where you called, ring tones were different, now it all sounds the same
I know absolutely nothing about any of this, but I'm enjoying every long distance video of yours I can get my ears on. This is ofc all way before I was every thought of lol, I was born in 2002 if that gives you an idea. My grandparents used to have a landline telephone system from the late 90s/early 2000s, and starting around 2006 or 2007, if someone didn't have a voice mailbox setup/was full or not working properly, and you were calling someone from let's say, fairbanks, AK, an automated male voice message would say "I'm sorry I can't get to the phone right now", please leave a message and I'll get back to you as soon as possible."
The concept of rooting ”this was a major fascination of myself…” in Australian English rooting has a totally different meaning. As a teenager I too was interested in the concept of rooting😂
You know it! 😜
It’s sad that nobody did this (or at least nobody recorded it) in Mexico’s network. very interesting!
Wish there was more stuff like this on UA-cam
4:30 OMG that voice made me feel something 💗 I had to repeat
So Dix Hills is fine, but 'Regina' is too risque? I gotta say, the sense of humour in these videos, especially the recording edits, is totally my jam.
Once Mark Cuccia of New Orleans and I were listening to this program, and he observed that having NO direct connection between Dix Hills and Regina, just shows how conservative and prudish the Bell System was.
you could also pronounce it "ruh-gee-nah"
As Evan Doorbell noted, circuits were connected in series to build out a path to the called party's line. Each switching machine, or switch, would be programmed to choose the best circuit group to route the connection to its destination through a series of switches. For example, a Houston, TX caller might dial a number in San Jose, CA. The call might, hypothetically, be routed to Dallas, which might connect to Sacramento, and then to the local exchange switch in San Jose. There was no central routing. If all circuits from Dallas to Sacramento were busy, the call might be connected to Denver and that switch would search for a connection to Sacramento.
One problem the engineers needed to avoid was "ring around the rosy". There might be several switches with circuit groups to a destination, but all the circuits are busy. So, one switch receives the call, finds all its direct circuits busy, and connects the call to another switch with direct circuits, and those are all busy so it connects to a third switch with direct circuits, but those are busy as well, so then the call goes back to the first switch. So, the call loops through 3 switches tying up all the circuits between them. The solution was a hierarchy with rules about going up, down and laterally in the hierarchy that would prevent loops. As Evan Doorbell notes, there were 5 classes of offices, which were numbers in the hierarchy.
Another problem was heavy traffic to specific destinations. An earthquake might occur in California or a hurricane in Florida. Suddenly, there is a high call volume to the disaster location. Maybe only 1 in 100 calls will get through. However, a large number of circuits would get tied up routing the calls that could not get through. This impaired the system's ability to connect calls that weren't going to the disaster area. So, AT&T would block, at the source, a percentage of the calls connecting to that destination. The announcement would give heavy call volume to the disaster area as the reason that the call was not being connected. They may have done the same thing on heavy calling days, to keep the number of calls reaching the network down a manageable number that the network could handle.
As computer technology advanced, AT&T was in the process of implementing centralized routing. A complete route would be selected before any connection was made. If the called line was busy, the system would find out, not assign any circuits, and generate the busy tone at a switch near the calling party's end. Also, non-working numbers would be handled that way. I don't know how much of that actually got implemented.
That's all basically correct, except that a call from the Dallas region to the Sacramento region would never route through Denver without some sort of manual intervention initiated by traffic engineers. On Mother's Day and Christmas, they would take advantage of the unused business day capacity of circuits to and from New York City, to get more long distance calls completed than would be possible using the usual hierarchy. But this was always a rare, temporary, manually initiated situation.
I grew up in 714. Starting from when I was 11, in the mid-70's, I used the family phone line and the family tape recorder with a suction cup mic from Radio Shack to collect recorded messages mostly from my area code. I would go through the list of prefixes in the phone book and dial the prefix plus 1111, and that would almost always get me to a recording, especially in the small towns.
I had to dial one first for toll calls. My parents' line was step, and when I finished dialing the last digit of any toll call, I heard all this clickety-clack, which I figured was the equipment identifying the number I was calling from.
Before it split off 619, 714 was geographically huge and had a lot of single-prefix towns.
About 25 years ago, I transferred the recording from cassette to MP3 and put it in my music collection. I could post it to UA-cam, but I would need to edit it first to remove some identifying information.
Please post these, i'm sure some of the content in them has never been heard since.
The Norway, IL long distance switch connected South Dakota to the rest of the long distance network.
One thing about Rochester NY at least at class 5; it is served by a non-Bell independent phone company.
Rochester Tel was one of VERY few independents that actually DID have a lot of Bell System switching equipment. #5 crossbar especially. But they also had at least one North Electric NX1, too.
I don't know why I'm watching this 🤣
Lol at the sensual angle of the sectional center term 😜
**cuckoo, cuckoo** ...Hm, two o'clock.
I'm sorry your experience with VoIP is so poor. In my experience, VoIP is as good as (with no compression), or better than (with HD Voice codecs which are compressed) the current network. I've built my own VoIP PBX at home and I get toll quality audio between phones and even the PSTN. I'm not saying those poor quality CODECs don't exist, but, with modern internet infrastructure they aren't needed by most users.
Anyone remember dialing 123456789*0#? It would say something like the number you have dialed is a test, and you'd get charged
1-234-5678 went to a number in YOUR particular area code, so only someone from your area will remember it. You might want to mention where you lived.
@@evandoorbell4278 I lived in the 615 area code in TN. I thought it might be in my area code but I would still the long distance tone, followed by a male voice saying something like "the number you have dialed is a test" he would go on to read off a number, then something like, "hang up, otherwise billing will be arranged for this call". And it would come through on the bill! Sometime when I would hang up I couldn't get the dial tone back for like 5 minutes or so, and the phone would be dead. Other times I would call the number and a LOUD alarm would sound followed by what sounded like a female voice miming a busy signal! Other times just the female voice miming a busy signal.
I've watched what wondered for years what I was calling lol
@@jonnaking3054 Did you live anywhere near Oxford?