[GreenKeys] Re: Bell System History

[Bob Camp]

Hi

AUTODIN = TTY AUTOVON = Greenkeys for the DOD

More or less it was the military equivalent of TELEX or TWX. It ran 
from the early 1960's through some point in the late 1980's or early 
1990's. Google gets lots of hits on it.

	Take Care

		Bob Camp
		KB8TQ


On May 7, 2004, at 9:13 PM, Don Robert House wrote:

> Thanks Ben,
>
> Did you have any experience with the 205B dataset for secure voice or 
> maybe it was secure data.  What was AUTODIN?
>
> Don
>
>> More trivia from Autovon.   You are correct in that the extra four 
>> buttons were FO, F, I, P.  However, this was a later version.    The 
>> four buttons were as follows:
>>
>>                                    Early     Meaning        Later    
>> Meaning
>>                 Top:            SF        Super Flash     FO Flash 
>> Override
>>                                      F          Flash F        Flash
>>                                      I           Immediate        I 
>> Immediate
>>                Bottom:        P         Priority                P 
>> Priority
>>
>> There were five levels of precedence.  If you just picked up the 
>> handset and dialed a call, the precedence level was routine.  If 
>> things were OK, your call would go through.   However, if we were in 
>> a nuclear war, and some of the network had been bombed out, you might 
>> not get dial tone.  Or maybe you would get dial tone, but then a fast 
>> busy after dialing.  In this case, you punched P before the call, 
>> which bumped you up to Priority.   And so forth on up to the highest 
>> of the five levels, originally called Super Flash, and later Flash 
>> Override.  It was felt that the term "Super Flash" had too much Buck 
>> Rogers in it.
>>
>> If the network was congested, and you came in at a higher level of 
>> precedence, you might cause a lower level call to be disconnected. At 
>> the time of disconnection, a tone was injected to the original call 
>> so they would know why they had been dumped.
>>
>> The original network had four each 4-wire switching centers, and each 
>> telephone homed on two offices, which was a neat trick. Equipment at 
>> your base would decide, when you went off hook, which CO your call 
>> would be routed to, and the other CO got a data message telling it 
>> that you were busy off-hook.   This was probably an early form of 
>> CCIS or SS7.  The whole idea was that one of the four switches could 
>> get nuked out, and all of the stations on Autovon could still talk 
>> with each other, although with reduced trunk capacity.
>>
>> The locations of the four CO's were, and probably still are, secret. 
>> The trunks went on coaxial cable buried at least four feet down, over 
>> routes which were also secret.  The story was that the CO machine 
>> were at least two stories underground, making them impervious to all 
>> but a direct hit from a nuke.
>>
>> Ben Stephens=
>>
>
>
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