[BC] Older telephone systems

[Gary Glaenzer]

>
> 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
>

lots of phone info here

http://yarchive.net/phone/index.html