2018-01-21 WECo 555 Manual Switchboard
This Western Electric 550 or 555 manual switchboard was used in the OUSD Administrative HQ when it was in the old bldg on Glassell that is now the Chapman University College of Law. It was rescued from the dump. I hope to find a new local home for it where it can be seen by
(Read More…)
2018-01-02 Telephone Bell
We were discussing gong type telephone bells on FB group Bell Telephone… Back maybe ten years ago I snagged an AT&T bell out of a bldg before the bldg was remodeled. It was a bell without an enclosure, the two bells were exposed, with the clapper between them. It connected directly to the incoming line
(Read More…)
2017-12-21 Message Waiting Light Headaches
From FB group Bell Telephone Ohhhhh, Ed Vaughn, you gave me a big headache. Those message waiting lights… We had a 1200 baud MW line directly from the CO to our PBXes, and one PBX then distributed it to dozens of others in the district over the network, not by ethernet, but by XNS over
(Read More…)
2017-11-21 Phones And Line Levels
From FB group Bell Telephone… In the days of analog phones like 500s and 2500s, Ma Bell had the phone matched to the line, so whatever the line length was, it compensated and the signal levels were very uniform, it worked great. Then came along the full duplex digital system, and everything went to hell.
(Read More…)
2017-11-04 Change a Princess Phone Light To LED
From FB group Bell Telephone… a reply to Lucky225 I fixed the same problem. A single 1N4003 rectifier diode in series with the LED. If you think there’s too much flicker, add a 220 uF capacitor across the LED. The LED must have a resistor in series, start with 1000 ohms (brown, black, red, gold
(Read More…)
2017-10-19 Santa Ana College Early History of Datacomm
From my post to FB group Bell Telephone… We were having problems with one of our 4 wire point to multipoint datacomm circuits. Every morning at a little after 9 AM the circuit would go down. I called in the problem and a Pac Bell tech came out, but couldn’t find a problem. Next day,
(Read More…)
2017-10-16 AT&T Breakup
From comments on FB group Bell Telephone.. Ed Vaughn said: That story makes me ill. Why break what was perhaps the best-run machine in the world? I replied: Why? Well, it wasn’t the first time AT&T was forced to comply with government’s decisions. Like you said, it was a machine, and whether or not it
(Read More…)
2017-09-21 Kid Was Totally Into Telephone Central Offices
Posted to FB Antique Telephones group as a reply to Kevin J. Fitzgerald I helped some students in our computer lab, and one high school kid, I think his name was Robert, was totally into phones. He had written a Basic program that printed a list out, with the various exchanges in the 714 area
(Read More…)
2017-09-02 Switchboard At OCSD Regional Training Center (Sept 15)
From my comment on the FB group Bell Telephone Pat Chicas I worked for RSCCD, which owns the Sheriffs Training Center. Man, I would have loved to slap their hands! The OCSD installed their phone system on prem, and we supplied the data circuits, so our patch cords and theirs shared the same patch panels
(Read More…)
