For a sec I was worried that the audio wasn't captured, then a moment into the video everything got better... phew! Love hearing you talk and your voice coming through like this is great. ☺️💚
I got a chance to visit the museum in October. As we were finishing up the top floor part of the tour, you all were working on the ringing machine and had it spun up and generating the ringer voltage. It was such a treat to see it working. I really enjoyed my visit to the museum, and somehow the ringer was the icing on the cake for me. I don't really know why I find it all so fascinating, but there is something about how much the engineers of those days were able to do with just electro-mechanical parts. Thanks for all the work you do in maintaining these pieces of history.
The 803-c plant came from the Hartford 02 XB Tandem office. The ringing machine at the time mark 2:43 came from the Hartford 02 Toll office. This is one of the machines that I used to routine and might be one that I rebuilt. There were two machines, and AC and DC powered so I can't tell you which one you have. Nice to see that the old girls are still around!
Thanks for your reply! It’s fascinating that there is some personal history here. We’ve got both the AC and DC machines, currently in storage. My dreams of a 6-machine ringing exhibit will have to wait until we have more space ;)
Wow, that brought back memories of the big black machines of the basement of the SxS CO and long lines office where I lived in 1968. Thanks! Hmm, the ringback tone played in the video sounded pretty much like my memory of what it sounded like in the SxS office which probably qualified as big city. Where I noticed the big differences were the dial tones. The panel offices snd SxS had a more raspy sounding dial tone and the busy tone sounded like an interrupted dial tone. Hard to say, the Bell System seems to have been a mash-up of old and new in many places. I remember the third floor of the building being long lines and television coaxial repeaters. The long lines had racks and racks of boards with 216A “tennis ball” vacuum tubes glowing cheerfully while the TV gear appeared to be at least late 1950s era.
I forgot to add, of course there were no SIT tones in the SxS office for error conditions, usually just fast busy. If you left your phone off hook in an idle state, after about one minute, the line would shunted to a crybaby generator which made a very loud “waaaaa waaaaa waaaaa” sound. I believe that was intended to help out on party lines to keep a miscreant customer from busying out the whole party line by taking a phone off hook. The CO had two ring cadences which seemed to be randomly assigned to single party lines. Party lines used a combination of tip-to-ground, ring-to-ground and bridged ringing as well as positive snd negative bias. You could have six subscribers on a party line without having to resort to frequency selective ringing. You could double the party line customer count by using both ring cadences and instructing customers to listen for one or the other. Party lines were pretty much gone by the time I was a kid. A friend’s family was on a party line where they were the only party.
I am from Montreal, Canada Somewhere around '85, I did some phreaking with my Commodore 64 and a tape recorder in phone booth and later from home. I plan on paying a visit to your museum in a near future.
It never ceases to amaze me how much brain power and hard work you all put into the museum and the channel. Thank you all so much for your thoughtfulness and efforts. I can't wait to visit the museum and meet y'all. It's just a long flight from Asheville, NC to Seattle. Cheers, thank you for yet another cool video, and have a great weekend.
Can i just take a moment to compliment you and whoever decided to arrange the equipment behind you? I love how the horizontal.. thingies... Ascend as it progresses to the right. Beautiful stuff. Im a huge fan of yall even though im just a visual artist.
When you're relocating the equipment reminds me of when I took part in moving an whole radiology department, with MRI and CT machines and everything that goes with that. Except that we needed to make a hole in the building to get the MRI magnet out and a huge crane to load it on a truck
I’m glad you were able to get that ringing plant from Hartford. SNET had a lot of old equipment that had been just abandoned in place. The way the Copper switching network is shrinking, entire COs are disappearing. At this rate, the only place you will get to learn about pre-digital telephony will be in museums.
Nice job! I retired at the end of last year, but one of my offices had an abandoned 1950s era Lorain ringing plant in the basement. I wish I could have claimed it!
Id love to visit the museum and almost certainly will if I'm ever in the area again. Id love if a second museum happened, if it was close enough to me in the Washington DC area I'd love to volunteer as well, unfortunately being on opposite coasts makes that rather difficult at the current museum. We do love our museums in this area, but the more the merrier.
Wow, what a project. Excellent work as always, Sarah and Connections team. It certainly does take some "similarly insane people" to help rescue these absolutely irreplaceable examples. BTW, I had no idea that there was so much to the power frames for these things - of course I expected the switching for AC/DC failover and the regulators, but I see there's a lot more than that going on which looks like hours of fun (har har) to trace through against the schematics. I look forward to learning more about it!
I am not sure if i will ever be in the Seattle area, especially since i haven't left Europe in my life so far, but i really hope that one day I can visit this museum. It's a fascinating place and especially the crossbar switches appeal to my love for complex relay logic.
I was watching an old black and white movie the other day and they needed to trace a call to catch the bad guy. It could have been filmed at your place. I kept thinking about your video showing all the steps. Thanks.
The voltages in the switch itself are not hazardous (well, assuming u don't have a heart condition/pacemaker, anyway). I don't know about the ring plant specifically, though. I mean, I've touched a phone line when it was ringing before, and it hurt, but I wouldn't call it dangerous. But that was the customer-facing side.
That’s cool to know. The ringing machines have a regulator for the power. I always wondered how they could go from ringing a handful of phones at 3 am to thousands of phones at 3 pm. Boy they thought of everything. Each little piece is important.
Hey, you know, I never did consider that, but it is a pretty obvious question! I guess I did kinda assume that it was part of how the power was delivered. I knew that they got the power from batteries, but why would that matter in this respect? Current is current no matter where it comes from, lol. I was really into telecommunications stuff when I was a kid, and always figured I'd never be able to see and play with a crossbar. When I read about how they worked, I was simply entranced. The only more intricate mechanical devices I know of are some of the high-end relay-based computers. There's one in Japan that they restored (I can't even imagine the effort that must have taken) and keep in working order that you can visit. You think the crossbar clicks a lot? You gotta hear this thing! I don't remember if it's at a university or a museum, but they will show members of the public around. There's a video on UA-cam I think. But in terms of sheer size, the crossbar frames at the museum dwarf it. But the crossbar is still an astounding work of engineering--especially the "marker".
U know it's the latter lol, let's just call a spade a spade here ... this is not a bootstrapping problem like the chicken or the egg. We are the chickens. 😂
How is ringing on a party line accomplished? I used have quite a few Automatic Electric #40 sets that were originally used on a party line. Much tweaking of their armatures got them ringing at 20Hz.
I hadn't thought about it much in the past, but knowing how telephony directly ties into the history of the internet, the frames at the end look very much like the 19-inch frames I'm used to in datacenters with rows and rows of servers whirring away. Is it the same size? (or at least close to it) that then got adopted by the early computer companies.
In North America telecoms eventually standardized around 23". A modern rack is basically the same except a little bit wider! A Rack Unit is still the same idea at 1.75" hole spacing though having three holes per RU is more of a recent phenomenon. Nortel rolled some weird 27" stuff for their DMS but accompanying accessory bays are 23". If you buy service provider-oriented gear, a lot includes adapters to go into either a 19" or 23" bay. The same racking system is used in radio, television, sound, lighting, and so on
It would be great if you could have both AC and DC machines hooked up. I thought they had both motors on the same shaft but maybe that was just the older versions. I imagine having two entirely separate machines is more resilient but it does make it harder to to run a museum 100 years later.
It's called a ringing generator not a ringing machine. The machine as you so call it its a motor turning, hence why it was called a generator. Even in the electronics age the power supply that generated the ringing voltage was called a ringing generator. The original Specification for Ring Voltage was 110V @ 20Hz, wich provided a really nice buzz if you were working on the termination block and someone called the number you were working with. Now a days the ringing voltage is generated from a simple transistor and a capacitor that emulates a square wave at about 86vac rms @ nearly 20Hz, this is not good enough to ring the old ringer bells on all those phones made prior to 1980.
Well, the modern spec is 90V, and it was enough for me! 😂 When you say "nowadays", are you referring to actual telecom equipment, or the ATAs that they install in people's homes? If it's the former, they definitely have no problem ringing old phones. I had one of those classic black rotary phones when I was a teenager (mid to late 90s), and it worked fine. BTW, a generator is a machine. Nowadays, you could still call it a generator. Does it generate? Yup. So it's a generator.
@@bsadewitz nowadays as current tech, atas mostly have a very weak ring voltage and most phones use some sort of piezo electric ringer or a speaker so voltage is not such a requirement as with an old coil and bell.
I'll bet everyone who has been to the museum would give you 😎a ringing endorsement! ◡̈
quality zinger
For a sec I was worried that the audio wasn't captured, then a moment into the video everything got better... phew! Love hearing you talk and your voice coming through like this is great. ☺️💚
We've gotta create some drama to keep people tuned-in!
@ConnectionsMuseum could you use a 1AESS switch interrupt analysis handbook #700-524?
I got a chance to visit the museum in October. As we were finishing up the top floor part of the tour, you all were working on the ringing machine and had it spun up and generating the ringer voltage. It was such a treat to see it working. I really enjoyed my visit to the museum, and somehow the ringer was the icing on the cake for me. I don't really know why I find it all so fascinating, but there is something about how much the engineers of those days were able to do with just electro-mechanical parts. Thanks for all the work you do in maintaining these pieces of history.
The 803-c plant came from the Hartford 02 XB Tandem office. The ringing machine at the time mark 2:43 came from the Hartford 02 Toll office. This is one of the machines that I used to routine and might be one that I rebuilt. There were two machines, and AC and DC powered so I can't tell you which one you have. Nice to see that the old girls are still around!
Thanks for your reply! It’s fascinating that there is some personal history here.
We’ve got both the AC and DC machines, currently in storage. My dreams of a 6-machine ringing exhibit will have to wait until we have more space ;)
Wow, that brought back memories of the big black machines of the basement of the SxS CO and long lines office where I lived in 1968. Thanks! Hmm, the ringback tone played in the video sounded pretty much like my memory of what it sounded like in the SxS office which probably qualified as big city. Where I noticed the big differences were the dial tones. The panel offices snd SxS had a more raspy sounding dial tone and the busy tone sounded like an interrupted dial tone. Hard to say, the Bell System seems to have been a mash-up of old and new in many places. I remember the third floor of the building being long lines and television coaxial repeaters. The long lines had racks and racks of boards with 216A “tennis ball” vacuum tubes glowing cheerfully while the TV gear appeared to be at least late 1950s era.
I forgot to add, of course there were no SIT tones in the SxS office for error conditions, usually just fast busy. If you left your phone off hook in an idle state, after about one minute, the line would shunted to a crybaby generator which made a very loud “waaaaa waaaaa waaaaa” sound. I believe that was intended to help out on party lines to keep a miscreant customer from busying out the whole party line by taking a phone off hook. The CO had two ring cadences which seemed to be randomly assigned to single party lines. Party lines used a combination of tip-to-ground, ring-to-ground and bridged ringing as well as positive snd negative bias. You could have six subscribers on a party line without having to resort to frequency selective ringing. You could double the party line customer count by using both ring cadences and instructing customers to listen for one or the other. Party lines were pretty much gone by the time I was a kid. A friend’s family was on a party line where they were the only party.
I am from Montreal, Canada
Somewhere around '85, I did some phreaking with my Commodore 64 and a tape recorder in phone booth and later from home.
I plan on paying a visit to your museum in a near future.
Who doesn't like a solid ker-chunk?!
They are truly one of life's finer pleasures.
It never ceases to amaze me how much brain power and hard work you all put into the museum and the channel. Thank you all so much for your thoughtfulness and efforts. I can't wait to visit the museum and meet y'all. It's just a long flight from Asheville, NC to Seattle. Cheers, thank you for yet another cool video, and have a great weekend.
Can i just take a moment to compliment you and whoever decided to arrange the equipment behind you? I love how the horizontal.. thingies... Ascend as it progresses to the right. Beautiful stuff. Im a huge fan of yall even though im just a visual artist.
When you're relocating the equipment reminds me of when I took part in moving an whole radiology department, with MRI and CT machines and everything that goes with that. Except that we needed to make a hole in the building to get the MRI magnet out and a huge crane to load it on a truck
I’m glad you were able to get that ringing plant from Hartford. SNET had a lot of old equipment that had been just abandoned in place.
The way the Copper switching network is shrinking, entire COs are disappearing. At this rate, the only place you will get to learn about pre-digital telephony will be in museums.
I received my t-shirt order and am excited to wear it when I get a chance to visit the museum!
So glad you like it, and excited to welcome you to the museum, whenever that may be!
Looking forward to see where this goes. 👍
For me, this place and all the lovely people involved, it must be the paradise.
Hope I can visit some day.
Nice job! I retired at the end of last year, but one of my offices had an abandoned 1950s era Lorain ringing plant in the basement. I wish I could have claimed it!
Id love to visit the museum and almost certainly will if I'm ever in the area again. Id love if a second museum happened, if it was close enough to me in the Washington DC area I'd love to volunteer as well, unfortunately being on opposite coasts makes that rather difficult at the current museum. We do love our museums in this area, but the more the merrier.
Excellent, great presentation.
Can't wait for the next part! 💜
you guys are amazing, good luck getting the ring machines up and running !
I can hardly wait to see all the pieces come together, and hear the authentic tones. It sounds like y'all need a larger museum and/or a TARDIS. 🙂
Great!
Wow, what a project. Excellent work as always, Sarah and Connections team. It certainly does take some "similarly insane people" to help rescue these absolutely irreplaceable examples. BTW, I had no idea that there was so much to the power frames for these things - of course I expected the switching for AC/DC failover and the regulators, but I see there's a lot more than that going on which looks like hours of fun (har har) to trace through against the schematics. I look forward to learning more about it!
Cant’t wait for part 2 :)
I am not sure if i will ever be in the Seattle area, especially since i haven't left Europe in my life so far, but i really hope that one day I can visit this museum. It's a fascinating place and especially the crossbar switches appeal to my love for complex relay logic.
Nice progress. can't wait for the next. Good work of you and all you team.
Very cool.
I was watching an old black and white movie the other day and they needed to trace a call to catch the bad guy. It could have been filmed at your place. I kept thinking about your video showing all the steps. Thanks.
The Slender Thread? That was filmed in our place (just not with our particular switch)
@@ConnectionsMuseum How about that. That was it. I just saw the end and I was wrong, they were trying to stop a drug overdose. Cool.
So exciting! I love the old hardware, it's so cool looking. And probably incredibly hazardous. But such _style_!
The voltages in the switch itself are not hazardous (well, assuming u don't have a heart condition/pacemaker, anyway). I don't know about the ring plant specifically, though. I mean, I've touched a phone line when it was ringing before, and it hurt, but I wouldn't call it dangerous. But that was the customer-facing side.
This is amazing, can't wait for part II 🙂
That's pure loveliness. Keep up the great work!
With hair scarf and shop apron! Yesterday: Rosie the Riveter. Today: Sarah the Solderer!
That’s cool to know. The ringing machines have a regulator for the power. I always wondered how they could go from ringing a handful of phones at 3 am to thousands of phones at 3 pm. Boy they thought of everything. Each little piece is important.
Hey, you know, I never did consider that, but it is a pretty obvious question! I guess I did kinda assume that it was part of how the power was delivered. I knew that they got the power from batteries, but why would that matter in this respect? Current is current no matter where it comes from, lol.
I was really into telecommunications stuff when I was a kid, and always figured I'd never be able to see and play with a crossbar. When I read about how they worked, I was simply entranced. The only more intricate mechanical devices I know of are some of the high-end relay-based computers. There's one in Japan that they restored (I can't even imagine the effort that must have taken) and keep in working order that you can visit. You think the crossbar clicks a lot? You gotta hear this thing! I don't remember if it's at a university or a museum, but they will show members of the public around. There's a video on UA-cam I think. But in terms of sheer size, the crossbar frames at the museum dwarf it.
But the crossbar is still an astounding work of engineering--especially the "marker".
You guys did a great job.
I don't know whether this hobby drives us all nuts or whether it attracts us because we're nuts to start with :)
Yes :)
U know it's the latter lol, let's just call a spade a spade here ... this is not a bootstrapping problem like the chicken or the egg. We are the chickens. 😂
How is ringing on a party line accomplished? I used have quite a few Automatic Electric #40 sets that were originally used on a party line. Much tweaking of their armatures got them ringing at 20Hz.
I want to hear the Static between the ringback signals like in Panel and CX1. CX5 did not have static between rings.
brings back good memories
4:39 The fastest, most cut throat negotiations I have ever seen! LOL
6:44 I don't know who defaced "AUTO START" to say "AUTO FART" or when they did it but I applaud their efforts.
That's what I thought when I saw it for the first time. They're the hero we need.
@0:03 Looking okay? No! You look MARVELOUS!!
I hadn't thought about it much in the past, but knowing how telephony directly ties into the history of the internet, the frames at the end look very much like the 19-inch frames I'm used to in datacenters with rows and rows of servers whirring away.
Is it the same size? (or at least close to it) that then got adopted by the early computer companies.
Yep! This is where the 19 inch rack originated :)
In North America telecoms eventually standardized around 23". A modern rack is basically the same except a little bit wider! A Rack Unit is still the same idea at 1.75" hole spacing though having three holes per RU is more of a recent phenomenon. Nortel rolled some weird 27" stuff for their DMS but accompanying accessory bays are 23".
If you buy service provider-oriented gear, a lot includes adapters to go into either a 19" or 23" bay. The same racking system is used in radio, television, sound, lighting, and so on
Hey your videos are sick. I love it.
I'm curious... What models of ringing machines did WECO have, and which ones were used in 1XB and 5XB offices?
Gosh I wish I lived there, would be in there to help in a flash. Will get there one day from Aussie.
@12:30... Ehh hem! Standing on the ladder like that.... Grrr :P
I was just going to say, go to the WEST Seattle CO's basement, but it looks like you maybe made it there... Good luck!
big city tones!
So your ringing machines produce 20 cycles for ringing ?
It would be great if you could have both AC and DC machines hooked up. I thought they had both motors on the same shaft but maybe that was just the older versions. I imagine having two entirely separate machines is more resilient but it does make it harder to to run a museum 100 years later.
[Morgan Freeman voice] "Sarah was not in the center of the frame"
crap I have to wait a few days to see it working!
kool
Every time someone mentions "City Ring" I hear it like it would appear in South Park.
Old school land line phones, got it.
Why are this Video is sometimes so fast.
It's called a ringing generator not a ringing machine. The machine as you so call it its a motor turning, hence why it was called a generator. Even in the electronics age the power supply that generated the ringing voltage was called a ringing generator. The original Specification for Ring Voltage was 110V @ 20Hz, wich provided a really nice buzz if you were working on the termination block and someone called the number you were working with. Now a days the ringing voltage is generated from a simple transistor and a capacitor that emulates a square wave at about 86vac rms @ nearly 20Hz, this is not good enough to ring the old ringer bells on all those phones made prior to 1980.
Well, the modern spec is 90V, and it was enough for me! 😂
When you say "nowadays", are you referring to actual telecom equipment, or the ATAs that they install in people's homes? If it's the former, they definitely have no problem ringing old phones. I had one of those classic black rotary phones when I was a teenager (mid to late 90s), and it worked fine.
BTW, a generator is a machine. Nowadays, you could still call it a generator. Does it generate? Yup. So it's a generator.
@@bsadewitz nowadays as current tech, atas mostly have a very weak ring voltage and most phones use some sort of piezo electric ringer or a speaker so voltage is not such a requirement as with an old coil and bell.