[rozzie]

Tangentially related: if you're fascinated about how all of this vintage equipment used to work, and if you find yourself near downtown Seattle on a sunday with an hour or two to spare, I strongly encourage a visit to: https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/

It's an incredibly rare opportunity to see geek geezer volunteers keep this central office telephone switching equipment up and running, and they'll proudly show you how it all works. A combination of aging techs and students constantly maintain equipment ranging from crossbar switches to an ESS.

It's a labor of love, and you'll want to leave something in the tip jar just to say thanks.

[twilight00]

I can also highly recommend the Connections Museum.

As someone who has spent his career in networking and automation, it was fascinating to see the ingenious electromechanical ways people found to automate early circuit switching. In addition to the working step-machine, panel switch, and crossbar switches, they have a collection of teletypes and other miscellaneous curiosities. The power systems necessary to run the CO and provide dial tone to the area were also quite fascinating.

As an example, one of the small curiosities that particularly fascinated me was a device that read out the current time. This automated a minor facet of what human operators could do that the electromechanical switching systems could not: telling the current time.

https://www.aarp.org/work/careers/call-this-number-for-time-...

[GeorgeDewar]

I've watched many of the videos on their YouTube channel and have been blown away by all the cool stuff in that museum, and the talented people that keep it going!

It's high on my list of things to see in the US when I next get a chance to spend some time there (which could be several years away so I hope it keeps going strong).