What Became of the Telecom Gold Standard for Reliability?
The United States used to have the most reliable communications system in the world? Now, it is one of the worst. What happened? And why don’t people seem to care? The standard in 1975 for Central Office reliability was that…
Old is New Again
One of the popular trends in cables is braided nylon. They not only look good, but they wear exceptionally well. Unlike plastic coated cables they don’t crack, rarely fray, glide easily, and tend not to kink. They also feel nice…
The History of the Dial Pad
The history of the Touch-Tone dial is remarkably complicated and fascinating. Today we all know the 12 button dial with 123 at the top and * and # in the bottom left and right. (Why aren’t there emojis for Touch-Tone…
Bell Divestiture & Un-Divestiture
What this diagram says to me is that AT&T got it completely wrong in the way they divested themselves in 1983. The fact that it smashed apart and then all came back together is evidence of that. It is important…
COVID-19’s Aftermath for Enterprise Communications
For the half a dozen decades that I have lived we have debated whether the world will evolve so that there is no need to commute, where we can all sit at home and do our jobs while being linked…
1-(700) Killed Tie
Tie-lines were operated by every major company in America by the 1970s. They were bypassing the long distance network, are costing the Bell System vast amounts of money, and had become very costly to install and manage. By some estimates,…
The Early History of the Touch-Tone Dial
Most history books will describe how the Touch-Tone dial was introduced in 1962 at the Seattle World’s Fair. But they are a little wrong. In 1958 the Bell System already had trials running with pushbutton telephones. Morris, Illinois was the…
Dial 9 for Atomic Weapons
All major companies had tie-lines bypassing the Bell System PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) by the 1970s. Sprint was selling “bypass” where you could dial a local 7-digit number, then an authorization code, and then your long distance number for…
Right-to-Repair Again
In the 1960s and early 1970s it was illegal to purchase a telephone and connect it to the phone network. Ever since the beginning of the Bell System the policy decision had been to never sell equipment, only rent it….
What Are Tie Lines
Tie-Lines were a really, really big deal in the 1960s through the 1980s. Every major company had a large staff dedicated to managing the corporate tie-lines. A tie-line was a direct dedicated connection between two corporate locations. If a company…
Theodore Newton Vail
Theodore Newton Vail is the man who really founded the Bell System. He built the nationwide network, he founded Bell Labs. He was quite outspoken. He died in 1920. Surprisingly, little seems to have changed from his time. It’s the…
Bell Labs Holmdel Promotional Videos
Holmdel was an amazing place. A special location and moment in corporate history that may remain unique. The second video (starting mid-way in the second part) starts to illustrate this. Holmdel was the best place I ever worked… Part 1…
The Hawthorne Effect
One of the more interesting discoveries of the Bell System was the “Hawthorne effect”. The discovery was that the mere process of studying the efficiency of an organization will improve the efficiency of the organization. One of the manufacturing facilities…
National Service in War and Peace
Forgotten history. Here’s a lightly edited excerpt from “A history of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: National Service in War and Piece (1925-1975)” During World War II, some 2,000 separate projects for the Army, Navy, and National Defense…
WATS Service
WATS, or officially known as Wide Area Telephone Service, was an outbound only service that would offer customers discounted long distance. Contrary to today’s popular opinion, WATS was not a flat rate service. The notion of paying a flat rate…
Spirit of Service
I worked for and deeply admired the old Bell System. There was an obsession with quality and with service. Every employee had the feeling in their bones that their job was important, even essential. The classic picture of a lineman…
Pre-800 Toll Free
Do you know that during the early planning of toll-free (inbound paid) service there was no notion of using the 800 area code? The plan was to use a special prefix within each area code—552 as I recall—to be toll…
Fun Hacking WATS
I had a lot of fun hacking WATS service in the 1970s. (And, it was legal!) WATS service was a flat rate service offered by the Bell System mostly from about the 1960s through the 1980s. You paid a flat…
CATV Posed No Threat to Telephony
The value of pairs of copper wires to the homes is minimal, and is declining. I see nothing on the horizon to change this long-term trend. I think it has been shown that dedicated copper pairs from a home to…
Tele-Lights
In 1982~1983 I had the pleasure of sitting in the next cubicle over from one of the people who refined the twisted pair ethernet standard we now have. He was a voting member of the standards committee working on the…