[GreenKeys] This will take you back many years...

[Randy or Sherry Guttery]

Doug Alderdice wrote:

> Just as a point of clarification, "panel" was strictly a Bell System 
> product used in large city switching centers and worked with vertical 
> motor-driven selectors.  The system you are talking about was 
> Stromberg-Carlson's XY switch which was found in many independent COs.

Obviously - I'm not a phone guy and my 50+ memories are undoubtedly 
confusing several things together. I do recall that at some point the 
guy I was with (who was a telephone service guy) mentioned something 
about "panel"- and this was in a building that covered much of a city 
block and was pretty much wall to wall with huge racks of "stuff"... The 
smaller system we visited a couple of days later (in Long Beach or 
somewhere in that part of the southland) sounds like what you describe 
as the XY switch - which I got a lot better look at - as it was a much 
smaller building and we were the only ones in there at the time. It 
wasn't until I was in the Navy - (1970/1) that I saw a switch that 
stepped "up" - then stepped around an arc of contacts. This was a local 
exchange on the Navy Base at Dam Neck, Va Beach. I remember how noisy 
the thing was - esp. since it was so much smaller than the larger 
exchanges I'd seen years earlier.

best regards...
-- 
randy guttery

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