Telephone Exchanges in the UK

[tdeck]

If anyone is interested in telephone exchange technology at all, I highly recommend checking out the Connections Museum in Seattle. They have multiple eras of electromechanical switching equipment up and running, and a huge collection of cool old phones, teletypes and payphones. They also have a great YouTube channel with very knowledgeable people.

https://www.telcomhistory.org/ConnectionsSeattle.html

https://m.youtube.com/@ConnectionsMuseum

I feel like they're not well known and there's no place like it!

[tobinfekkes]

Another excellent museum is the Kodiak Military History Museum at Fort Abercrombie, on Kodiak Island, Alaska.

It has some old working telephone and teletype systems. You can watch the physical switching equipment do its magic. It is truly awesome. The raw speed and accuracy of the mechanical systems is almost unbelievable.

[g-mork]

Don't miss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfOzyIib7wU for some young folk urban exploring what turns out to be a still active exchange, full of ancient and modern tech

[indrora]

I'm a volunteer there. It's always wonderful when we get groups who come through who have someone that worked for Ma Bell or who did work on the old analog telephone exchanges in the world.

We're opening a second location like the first in Denver, to take over the hard-to-visit one in the corporate head office.

[evolextra]

I know one guy who make something cool with old Telephone and electronic stuff https://this-museum-is-not-obsolete.com/

[_joel]

You can go and play with an old branch exchange, with all the whistles and er, bells at "This Museum is (not) Obsolete". Run by Sam from Look Mum No Computer. If you're ever near Ramsgate in the UK.

https://this-museum-is-not-obsolete.com/

[cph123]

He also has a fascinating YouTube channel, I'm a big fan. Lots of old musical equipment and experiments in addition to telephony.

[linker3000]

See also in West Sussex:

https://www.amberleymuseum.co.uk/explore/explore-communicati...

https://www.amberleymuseum.co.uk/explore/explore-communicati...

[dugmartin]

My dad was a telephone engineer/manager with GTE in the US. As a kid in the mid 1970s he used to take me with him to the local exchange building to deliver donuts to the guys on duty (he was that kind of boss). The security was interesting - there was a tube built into the masonry with a 90 degree angle that had a mirror. He would pick up the phone on the outside wall and say his name and an identifying number and then the door would buzz open. The building was a few stories tall and had no windows, which I think was a Cold War thing.

We would deliver the donuts to the break room which usually had at least one guy smoking in it (it was the '70s). A couple of times we went into the switching room which still had rotary dial switches clacking away as people dialed in numbers. There was an overwhelming smell of ozone in the room. It was all very cool to 5 year old me.

[thorin]

My dad worked at BT and used to take me to different exchanges at the weekend normally on Saturday mornings. I guess he claimed a day in lieu for working a couple of hours and then we went for lunch or pottered around the shops. In there were all sorts of interesting things. Piles of discarded electronics of various eras. Several computers and terminals for connecting to mainframe systems. I remember a Sinclair QL and Amstrad PCWs I think. He would let me play around with the terminals, no idea what OS was on there maybe VAX or VMS, use the printers and Microdrives. I was really interested in all that stuff as a kid but didn't really have anyone to learn from as my dad was more of a lineman, having started in the Royal Signals. Fun times!

[biofox]

This is an impressive feat of cataloguing!

Considering the telecom system is at the bedrock of almost all modern technologies, it really doesn't get enough love or attention in the public mind.

The dull derelict-looking, and often graffitied, buildings that house the system doesn't reflect just how cool the infrastructure is.

[rwmj]

My physics teacher in the 1980s (sadly RIP a few years ago[1]) told me that the location of telephone exchanges was a UK state secret. The theory was that the Russians would nuke them destroying the country's ability to communicate, but as their location was a secret that outcome could be prevented. 40+ years on, I wonder if any of that was actually true?

[1] https://johnchess.blogspot.com/2019/11/david-welch-1945-2019...

[oniony]

The Avoncroft museum of buildings in Bromsgrove, near Birmingham, UK, is worth a visit. They have a bunch of old telephone boxes all working and hooked up to an exchange they have on site. I spent like an hour talking to the guy in there about it all, pretty fascinating.

https://avoncroft.org.uk/avoncrofts-work/special-collections

[ehecatl42]

If you find yourself in that part of the world, there's also a carpet museum in Kidderminster, and the Black Country Museum in Dudley. A little bit further north and then there are a slew of industrial museums in Ironbridge.

[Neil44]

I was going to post this, I had a fab time in that little room with all the click-clacking gear.

[ricardo81]

Our old countries (and their tech) building on top of old.

Developing countries have less of a hassle with implementing something based on state of the art.

Lots of hassles with getting new phone lines, new power lines et al in the UK based on old agreements and a nationalised infrastructure. Please stop digging up roads and everything for arbitrary telecoms companies based on some deregulation, some collaboration please :-)

[jansper39]

No thank you, my Cityfibre connection is 2/3 of the cost of a BT hosted one and is 150Mb up and down, instead of BT's asynchronous offering. Installed in a couple of days of ordering too.

[f4c39012]

someone from the local gas company told me that the reason the utilites don't work together is that they can't because of rules - electric and gas need to be kept separate for safety, and the surrounding soil means water leaks can be absorbed away from other utilities' pipework. I didn't dig any deeper

[jonatron]

I visited an exchange back in 2009, when Local loop unbundling (LLU) on ADSL was big, and fibre was limited to large business and datacentres. The huge generator was probably more interesting than the racks of concentrators. I'm not sure how much battery back-up power time the new PON systems have, I assume less than a generator backed system.

[danw1979]

Was this the BT demo exchange somewhere in Essex ? Bishop Stortford maybe ?

I did that tour around the same time and it was fascinating ! right in the middle of the 21CN (ethernet core network) transition.

[ipdashc]

In a similar vein, but for the US: https://www.co-buildings.com/ (And a shoutout to https://long-lines.com/)

[bdsa]

My dad (who worked for BT in various positions) claims he was involved with the decision to move the exchange in our/their village from one end to the other. Coincidentally, closer to the end in which we lived, which I gather would have a non-trivial impact on our internet speed.

I think this probably coincides with the time period we got ISDN, very early, and I was amazed by the concept of _always connected_ internet. I can still vividly remember watching GoZilla download a game demo at 7kb/s, stunned and excited.

[bloomingeek]

Although I never went into one of these buildings, in the early 80's I was a sub-contractor burying cable for SWB. I was always amazed at all the property they controlled. I had access to all their construction yards, which were spread out all over the city, some of them in the suburbs. Protecting these yards from theft was always a nightmare for them.

[dboreham]

Interesting to see Kinghorn in the database (01592-89) because I toured the exchange as a child sometime in the late 1970s before it was brought into service (my Dad knew a bloke who worked for GEC). iirc it was a TXE4 system then, or at least of that generation. Building in a very poor state of repair now. Probably hasn't been painted since 1979!

[arethuza]

I walked past there the other day (on the Fife coastal path) and wondered what the shabby building was - I had assumed it was an abandoned light industrial unit.

[mojo74]

Shout out to Milton Keynes Museum for their archive of handsets old and new as well as interactive examples of telephone exchanges:

https://miltonkeynesmuseum.org.uk/collections/view-our-colle...

[heraldgeezer]

Really, its own internet system before the internet. Massive load of calls. The routing has to be correct. I never understood it before working in telecom, but phones numbers are unique... for routing, like IP-addresses. And it could never go "down". In the 80s it was all digial too (Ericsson switches) and had to be real-time.

[merlynkline]

Before modern digital electronics, telephone numbers were literal routes - when the turned dial on your phone ran back to zero, a corresponding 10-pole motorised rotary switch at the exchange turned and connected you to one of 10 lines. This connected you to another such rotary switch for the next digit, until eventually you were connected to the final destination. The ingenious Strowger exchange.

[psychotaurusaqu]

Combination of Ericsson and GEC/Plessey/BT "System X" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(telephony)). Erisson AXE10 was known as "System Y" in the UK and a hedge against buying exclusively System X equipment.

[ipdashc]

> Really, its own internet system before the internet. ... for routing, like IP-addresses.

There's a great video from Connections Museum (mentioned further up the thread) where they're going through the operation of, I want to say, one of those crossbar switches? And they start using terminology like "routing table", "longest-prefix matching", and "default route", which all sounds well and good, until you realize they're talking about systems that existed decades before the Internet or even ARPANET, all electromechanical... Dope stuff. Cool to see how things rhyme even as they change.

[voidUpdate]

I used to live pretty much opposite the village exchange. It was just a very boring and nondescript little building, backed up by the picture on that website. I bet it was much more interesting inside though

[bravesoul2]

I recall there was a voting system by BT circa 2002 to get your local exchange upgraded to "broadband" (i.e. not just 56k dialup) if it wasn't already.

[GJim]

No.

It certainly wasn't a voting system. Rather, it was a decent enough system used to help gauge demand in a given area. (Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of demand for ADSL in university towns, and much less in retirement-town-by-the-sea).

[backendEngineer]

and it's gone... 429 :D

[bravesoul2]

Distributed curiousity attack

[penguin_booze]

Now, where are the STD jokes?

[ThePowerOfFuet]

The site won't let me past the initial verification page in either Firefox or Vanadium.

Is their content really so sensitive that it must be "protected" to such a degree?

[domh]

Working fine with Firefox on Android here. Desktop or mobile?