[GreenKeys] Things of the past.

[Don Robert House]

Thanks Joe,

At Illinois Bell in the late 70's I was in charge of all special  
service circuit designs going between independent telco's in the 815  
NPA and AT&T Long Lines Division offices in Chicago.  I loved the work  
as I got to work over the phone with many of the independent telcos in  
the northern area of Illinois.  I became familiar with all kinds of  
carrier systems and many different kinds of network channel  
terminating equipment.  Our designs included all of the equipment  
necessary including the station equipment.  After our end links were  
designed we would send them to long lines in the form of an  
engineering information report.

The multipoint circuits that used signaling were very interesting and  
took a bit of research and careful designs so that everything would  
work properly across the country.  Most of the designs required a four  
wire channel with talk-back amplifiers at the end of each leg to make  
sure there would be no "singing."  The largest circuit like this was  
the Super Conference Line, used by the big junk yards across the  
country.  I also designed a alternate data arrangement for the super  
conference line where at a specific time each day the circuit was  
switched to Model 33 Teletype machines so that the yards could have  
paper copies of the parts their customers were looking for.

I think the smallest telco I worked with was the C & R Telephone  
Company of Ransom, Illinois.  Six people ran the whole company that  
covered just two towns.  The largest customer was the railroad that  
passed through town.  The vice president of the company was also the  
toll and special services engineer and technician.  I called one day  
to find out what equipment he wanted to use to terminate a long lines  
circuit in a way station for the railroad.  When he answered the phone  
I could hear a baby crying.  After I told him who I was, he asked if I  
could hold on until he finished feeding their child.  Of course I did  
not mind waiting.

When I started with IBT in 1966 as a Teletype repair dispatcher there  
were 136 independent telcos in Illinois, even though Bell had about 85  
percent of the customer base.  When I retired in 1996 there were only  
6 independents left in the state.  Most of them were bought up by  
General Telephone.

After I moved to California and expanded my museum, I was welcomed  
into the Computer Museum of America.  The location was great and had  
three floors of space for exhibits.  We put many IBM gear and Teletype  
gear on display.  I was the docent for all of the communications  
equipment, including the ENIGMA we had on loan from the National  
Security Museum in DC.  I will never forget the old man that flew all  
the way from New York to visit our museum.  He was a tech sergeant  
during WWII and was stationed near Bletchley Park in England.  He  
worked in code breaking and got in trouble for inviting the British  
women officers to their camp.  Anyway, I really enjoyed showing him  
the ENIGMA and all of our displays of Teletype and secure  
communications equipment.  He left happy as a clam and I finished the  
day hardly able to talk.

Thanks for sharing your experiences.  I appreciate the feedback.  I am  
now wondering how you got from Virginia all the way to Kodiak Island...

Best wishes for a happy and healthy new year.  Please keep warm.  One  
of my friends in Fairbanks lives in a guest cottage next to her  
friend's home.  She has to go to the big house for a shower or to  
cook.  She wrote yesterday that it was too cold to run from the guest  
house to the big house with just a towel so she was wearing a towel  
and her parka.  I checked the temperature... 48 degrees below Zero.    
THAT IS COLD...

73,

Don K9TTY
(aka DESIGNER DR HOUSE)
Network Systems Engineer, Retired
Curator Emeritus, NADCOMM
Ringwood, Illinois USA


On 2 Jan 2009, at 2:44 AM, Joe Stevens wrote:

It just started snowing here in Kodiak Alaska.  I read some of Don's  
postings, K9TTY.  I really enjoyed them and it brings back a lot of  
memories of when I worked on the east coast for a telco.  Actually,  
before that, I worked at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard and spent a  
wonderful 6 months in the teletype shop on the 5th floor of building  
510.  I was the only shop 67 electronics tech there, the rest were  
machinists from shop 35.  There was one very quiet older fellow who I  
later learned had been in the Bataan death march.  He was very patient  
teaching me a lot of stuff that I only figured out much later was very  
valuable.  Mostly they had me installing RFI filters in model 28  
ASRs.  The radio section which I worked in later actually had a model  
19 in the shack.  I would get on the air on HF or UHF and have QSOs  
with the other tech on board the ships in the yard just for testing.   
This was with a URA-8 demod and a URC-32 transceiver.  Later I was put  
in the shop that maintained all the shipyard's internal FM mobile  
radios and base stations.  I got into the WeCo strowger exchange they  
had in the shipyard occasionally to run jumpers on the mainframe for  
radio circuits.  Later in 1970 I got a call that there was a vacancy  
at the Norfolk and Carolina Telephone and Telegraph company in my home  
town.  As the shipyard was not as much fun as it had been, I jumped at  
the chance and became a Transmission Technician for this independent  
telco.  They had about 25 or so exchanges in NC and VA.  I was one of  
two technicians the company had to maintain all their microwave, cable  
carrier and special circuits.  There was open wire with telegraph on  
it along with physical voice circuits.  You could hear the thumping  
noise on the voice circuits from the telegraph keying it's polar  
signal from one wire to ground.  We had WeCo O and H carrier, WeCo N1  
and N2 carrier and just about everything Lenkurt ever made.  Lenkurt  
33, 45, 46 ...  Lenkurt 45 on 74 radios.  Even one microwave hop with  
Panhandle X carrier serving subscribers.  There were several voice  
circuits that had multiple telegraphs on them.  VF-931 was one of the  
voice circuit numbers.  They normally fed the loop with +130 volts on  
one side and -48 on the other.  There was a 130 volt wet-cell battery  
bank in each exchange that had telegraph.  It was not nice when the  
installer hanging on the pole by his spikes in the rain came in  
contact with one of those telegraph pairs.  I spent a lot of time  
troubleshooting open-wire lines.  We had three crossarms going north  
for about 30 miles and one crossarm going south for about 45 miles.  I  
used Murray, Varley and other tests I have forgotten now with a  
Wheatstone bridge.  I could often put the guy on the road within sight  
of the trouble.  When the company surplused their WeCo H carriers,  
K4VHV and I hooked up some filters to interconnect our home telephone  
pairs to each other above 7.5 KHz.  We had an H carrier circuit  
between our ham shacks.  Around this time, the telco being all rotary  
dial with Strowger switches, we decided to build a touch-tone  
autopatch on our two-meter repeater.  I designed and built a huge  
kluge of a contraption that stored DTMF digits on relays and then  
outpulsed them to telco.  Telco had no DTMF service.  Even our  
intertoll trunks to AT&T were dial pulse, most with SF signalling.   
Even our EAS circuits had 4-wire E&M channels with external term  
sets.  Every circuit through the toll center was on jacks at every  
point.  2-wire jacks, 4-wire jacks and 6-wire jacks.  Racks and racks  
of jacks.  I made a recording of the last call on the O carrier on the  
open-wire line to the north.  It was me and the other tech cutting the  
circuits over.  During this time Al, K4VHV, and I were operating a  
Model 28 on the air.  We could melt RG-8 with the continuous duty  
transmitter.  We had a Drake L4 but it wasn't up to the task of RTTY.   
We built a 4-1000 linear with a pole-pig hooked up backwards for the  
high-voltage supply.  We had to switch to RG-17 for the coax.  I don't  
know what the statute of limitations is on that, but we ran some  
power...  Those Drake T4X series of radios were very good for teletype  
as they had a terminal on the side of the VFO that you could attach a  
simple FSK circuit.  Tonight I have been working on my basement  
Strowger telephone exchange.  I've been trying to hook it up for the  
collectors net with Asterisk.  I have Asterisk working very well on  
several computers.  It's the interfacing of the computer to the  
electro-mechanical switching Strowgers that is giving me trouble.  I  
had everything working then the card in the computer quit.  It sure is  
easier to fix a model 15 than a computer...  At N&CT&T, we had an  
Automatic Electric SATT toll ticketing system for direct dial long  
distance billing.  It used a Kleinschmidt 6-lever paper punch if I  
remember correctly.  Later they switched it out for a 9-track magnetic  
tape drive.  I wish I had taken more pictures during that time.  Of  
the pictures that I have, a few are on my web pages http://www.kadiak.org/joe

Each email that comes across this list with remembrances like this  
gets stored here permanently and is valued very much.  I love to read  
them again and again. I really enjoy the WWII period of technology.  I  
get to explain to hordes of cruise-ship passengers what punched tape  
is for and why you would need it.  I have fun asking them what is the  
5th power of two.  That is 2 states (binary) and 5 holes in the tape  
for 32 characters.  Many of our younger visitors have never even seen  
a typewriter!  We have several (never enough) manual typewriters out  
to play with.  We let them dial the phones on the Strowger switches  
and jam up all the keys on the manual typewriter by hammering all the  
keys at once.  They get a hell of a bang out of it all.  They can  
crank the old phones and scream in a very high squeal when somebody  
answers one of the other phones in the museum on the same magneto  
line.  I don't mind fixing this stuff at all.  It's important to let  
them experience it all themselves.  Museums behind glass cases turn me  
off. They can get in the 1945 jeep and try their best to break it.   
It's Ok, we will fix it later.  There is one rule, they have to wear a  
military uniform.  We have a large rack of them for their use.  A 5th  
grade blonde girl in a sailor suit behind the wheel of the jeep is  
quite a sight.  There are a few 5th grade teachers here who bring  
their classes to the museum as close to December 7 as possible every  
year.  Our museum is a half-mile up a road that is not kept plowed in  
the winter.  They hike the whole lot of them into the park on foot if  
necessary, rain or shine.  Has anybody else tried to explain to a 5th  
grade class how a model 15 printer works?  Once in a while you get a  
really live one who asks really good questions.  That one student  
makes it all worthwhile.  It does concern me though, that I haven't  
been able to recruit a young person to learn how to continue this...   
The high-schoolers that get interested leave for college and never  
come back.

Tomorrow morning, just about daylight, I will be tying up the M/V  
Kennicott at Pier 2.  Thus begins 6 straight days of ferry service for  
Kodiak then 8 days of no ferry while she runs to Prince Rupert BC.   
Gotta earn some money to buy more boatanchors.

Don, thanks for making me remember.

Joe Stevens, WL7AML
Kodiak Military History Museum
http://www.kadiak.org

Alaska Marine Highway
http://www.dot.state.ak.us/amhs/

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