[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-...