[BC] Older telephone systems

[Harold Hallikainen]

 >> The fun kind of went out of the hobby after even dedicated electronic
 >> cabinets went out of style, and it all became computerized.
 >
 > When you think of all that the basic telephone
 > system could do with so few components and
 > such elementary principles, it truly was and
 > still is a masterpiece. The same is true of the
 > old Kettering ignition system. Points, plugs
 > and condenser.
 >

It truly was (and is) an amazing system. I built my first step telephone
system out of stepper relays from a pinball machine a friend found at the
dump. That was in junior high. In high school, I got a ton of old Western
Electric step equipment and set it up in my garage. We had wires going
through the trees all over the neighborhood. For the ring generator, I
recall there was a box named the SubCycle. Not sure how it worked, but out
came 20Hz AC. That ran through a cam interrupter to give the ring cadence
(the same cam interrupter did busy signal cadence and stuff like that).
There was another box that generated the old (before DTMF) dial tone (kind
of a buzz instead of the musical tone now used). There's a fair amount of
telephone history at http://www.hallikainen.org/BroadcastHistory . One
site linked to has the sound of various sized step exchanges.

Harold