AT&T Archives: The Hello Machine (Bonus Edition)
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- Опубликовано: 5 сен 2024
- See new Bonus Editions of AT&T Archive videos at techchannel.att...
Introduction by George Kupczak of the AT&T Archives and History Center.
Directed by Carroll Ballard (Never Cry Wolf, The Black Stallion), The Hello Machine is a short, wordless film-poem, in which he chronicles the building of an entire ESS Mainframe. It's a poetic musing on the connections between handwork and the act of communicating. In the film, he chronicles the act of making and building the mainframe with human hands so carefully that it becomes a handcraft, like weaving or sewing. As he elevates the frameworker to the status of craftperson, the mainframe itself becomes an artistic masterpiece, then brought to life by electricity. Ballard's stance is that it takes humans to connect humans, not machines.
There's a little irony in the title: "The Hello Machine" used to be a nickname for the telephone, but Alexander Graham Bell, the machine's inventor, always thought that "Ahoy" would be a better greeting for a phone call than "Hello". "Hello" was more of Thomas Edison's idea, and is, of course, the one that stuck. In fact, the word wasn't quite as popular as a greeting in English UNTIL the telephone became widely used.
Richard Rosmini's superb soundtrack drives Ballard's points home, with a composition heavy on the strings (like wires!) - old-timey-sounding 12-string guitar and banjo mixed with electronics.
Produced and Directed by Carroll Ballard
Music by Richard Rosmini
Footage courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center, Warren, NJ
Here I am, sitting at my desk, soldering gun at hand, tinkering some simple stuff (just connecting bunch of led strips and their PSUs), looking at this video, jaw dropped to the floor.... I am mesmerized. Considering how old this documentary is, it's just a brilliant masterpiece. Holy Jesus, this is top notch filmmaking.... it was shot and cut so beautifuly. Here, ladies and gentlemen, we see work of true professionals.
At least you can solder and know where to solder what. My dumbass, albeit very fascinated with this stuff, has no clue where the hell to even begin.
The cable job is OUTSTANDING
It really is amazing to see all that AT&T built. The technology, and the volume and scope of equipment, is astounding.
"ESS 439263 PLEASE START." -- the sound of those DTMFs gives me goosebumps every time!! Such a wonderful clip, thank you!!
The good old days. I worked at LA Grand (LSANCCA01/02/03) in the '70s....we had SXS, XBTs, 4A and 4 and 5ESS all working at the same time. I was a great time. All gone to crap now, that's for sure.
"ESS 439263 PLEASE START" was not a valid command. The switch would have been working for several weeks as the techs tested the new switch for trouble. The command to start service would have been something like "CUT- - 1." What we saw in the film was written by the film maker.
@@gpwgpw555 What would the 'Standard" commands to initiate testing and diags in a 1AESS be?
All of the information I have is from My memory (Mrk 1 human brain). The original command language of the 1ESS (Not the 1aESS) used the first second and fourth character not counting spaces( ) or dashes(-).
One command requested the office to type back witch office it was. The command in the Input Manual (IM) was { WHO-RU-. }. We soon found some pranksters would type a reworded command to get the same response {WHORE--.}. Each command had to have two dashes and any data for the command followed the second dash. lets say you wanted to verify information about a telephone number. You would type
VFY-DN-30 555 1234. The command could also be typed VFY-DN-305551234. Spaces did not matter in the message.
You asked about testing and diags. In the 1ESS the processor consisted of the Common Controls(CC), Program Stores(PS), and Call Stores(CS). Commands were in the formants below.
CC-RMV-0. ,CC-DGN-0. ,CC-RST-0. , There were two CCs (0 and 1).
PS-RMV-00. ,PS-DGN-02. ,PS-RST-04. ,A large office could have more than ten PSs.
All of this simplicity was to conserve memory. Most of these commands carried over to the 1aESS.
With the introduction of the 1aESSa new format for 1aESS equipment was used. commands used a from similar to { RST:FS 1,DF 0;UCL! }. This format was more flexible.
Wikipedia has more information about the 1ESS and 1aESS switches you could find interesting.
@@gpwgpw555 Obviously. The parsing of the word "please" would utilize valuable memory at the time, no need to waste memory, typing effort and time for being polite to the hardware. It is an artistic touch, which I sorta liked..
These videos are so cool!! My great great grandpa worked for Western Electric back in the early days and it’s really cool to see things he helped manufacture and develop put into action!! So neat!!
one of the best things on the internet. wonderful filmmaking, and a historical treasure.
I really do enjoy this film. Don't know why but I get all teary eyed when I watch it.
They were better times! The Bell System. Made in the USA to last forever. Great customer service. Cutting edge unfettered research still benefitting humankind today!
Well, they only did it to turn a buck, don't kid yourself. AT&T was quite predatory with its technology early on. What made them the R&D, manufacturing and service provision giant was REGULATION. That went away, the whole place went to crap.
The opening scenes and the presenter really bring you in before the weird trip of period music at the films start.
I just love this channel!
I am so impressed with the craftsmanship. A bell engineer taught me cabling, wire wrapping, etc and I still use it today to impress customers. I would love to see more about the digital age how they integrated these new circuits on the CO side. I have worked with them all from dry pair to frame to Tx, xDSL and now fiber on the customer side but always curious how they made it work on the other side.
What’s a 70’s tech documentary without Moog synthesizers?
Things I didn't know existed back then: Pick & place machines, press brakes with automated backgauges, politeness when giving commands to a computer.
In fact, if memory serves me, automatic component insertion had already existed for about a decade by then! It’s incredible how advanced automation was even by the 1950s.
Those polite commands were an artistic touch, real ESS command were quite verbose
I worked at a central office in Boston and we had a No.1 ESS . One of the kids doing the wiring to a frame had drawn a happy face on the ceiling just above where he was working. He was fired for destruction of company property. (This was early 70's , lots of hippies around back then )
Oh my! Has this smiley face caused the malfunction of the frame, since it asserted that humor be present at the facility, which was clearly strictly forbidden?
@@kreuner11 I believe that the Line Switch below the smiley only connected happy calls . He may have been doing other things to make them target him , that I do not know . They didn't go after him for quality of work . It was the Smiley. There was a toxic relationship back then between union and company . I tried to avoid all that , I loved my job of running circuits and later on troubleshooting failures on the ESS.
That's not right to fire him
@@coreybabcock2023 I liked him. You know what the FBI says ; " Show me the man and I'll show you a crime" Like Chucky Schumer said " They had six ways to Sunday to get him" For the most part management was pretty cool back then as long as you got all your work done . I was out a couple days , sick with a bad cold and when I returned the boss wanted to know where my note was . I asked ; Note from who? He said my mom . I was 18 . My mom didn't give me notes . Oh I would give anything to go back to those days .
This is the most remarcable cabling skill I've seen to date.
Plainly amazing work. The tiny sparks of electric "life" right after "please start" into the corridors. Ouch, sweet soul tinkling there.
FYI: The cameraman that filmed this was none other that Zooey's father, Caleb Deschanel. This is not listed in his filmography, but it should be.
The Hello Machine was one of a kind that worked like a computer telephone. I have an A T&T landline telephone but it was made in China.
That was awesome! Damn did ATT really post all these videos. I love it!
The Bell System was great at Public relations. From National Geographic magazine ads to films like these they literally knew how to push buttons..
This is such a great video. I absolutely love the camerawork and editing that went into this. Plus the music which makes it complete. Thanks for making these publicly available. Is there by any chance any high definition versions of these films available? Lots of the shots here are definitely wallpaper material.
I know, right? It’s such a shame it’s only available in potato resolution…
I hated ESS when AT&T first rolled it out, because we could no longer phone phreak (e.g. make free long distance calls, or induce payphones to misbehave, etc.). Thankfully, the roll-out took a couple extra years to reach my home town.
I worked for AT&T at PRBYAKZA FOR 8 years and the company provided a room with a company phone and a phone to use as my own. They didn’t care how much long distance time I used. We also had our own private line FXS lines build at most sites in the state. I mainly worked on a microwave backbone along the pipeline that also served other customers. We provided all the transport for the pipeline including control circuits to gate valves via VHF data radios. We built out and maintained the fiber ring and muxes on the pump stations that controlled power and pumps. After that I worked six years at EGRVAKZA which is the gateway earth station for AT&T that provides long distance to every little village up here.
@@Chris_at_Homecan you make a video blog on this ? And yes I remember when att microwave was still used up till around 89 90 91 ish I was 6 7 8 but I remember it
@@coreybabcock2023 They still use it along the Alaska Pipeline. It’s an NEC 3000S. It has a Sonet output right out of the radio cabinet.
Manually weaving core memory sheets. Now we have smartphones with 128 and 256 GIGABYTES of memory in our pockets.
I am german and i grew up in the seventies and i love this industrial film because of its contrast between
the theme and the music...
I remember that my father collectet some stuff from the “Deutsche Post”.
You can see how well the talents of the team of director Carroll Ballard and his cinematographer Caleb Deschanel worked together here and, five years later, they gave us The Black Stallion!
This just needs the narrator from the "How it's Made" series.
I wonder how many buildings of those switches would be needed to make an Intel i7 processor. would a 1 square mile 10 story high be enough. I honestly don't think so. Will try and figure it out.
On those printers, the letter O has a slash through it and the number 0 is empty, the reverse of the current convention. Really weird to see people accidentally using leetspeak without even kn0wing.
The omission of the letter O and the 0 being substituted is deliberate for it saves space in the programming. You recall they were still using core memory in parts of the 5ESS systems, so software space was at a premium. So they used the 0 and the TTY units were quite accommodating with it. No L33T speak here, even if it does look cool.
@@Nighthawke70 except there are both O with a slash through it, and 0 without a slash in the printouts, so there is nothing saved in this case.
It doesn't quite add up from a programming point of view anyway. Storing a letter O or number 0 in text would still consume the equivalent of a "byte"...
Probably it's more likely the printer simply had the representation of those two characters reversed to what we'd typically see these days.
The phreakers sure loved this little baby too ;)
Good ol card swap. Gotta love it. You usually never see those happen anymore. The 5ESS is a pretty solid switch, it's the copper F1/F2 cables these days that are all going to shit.
What you mean
@@coreybabcock2023 mean you what
Please.. some one tell me. WHERE DID WE GO WRONG?! Amazing American Ingenuity, now given to the Chinese.
Management got greedy and outsourced production to China because of its dirt cheap labour. They ripped your intellectual property off. Simple enough.
The Chinese aren't developing products or innovative technologies at a fraction of the pace of the USA. China is where the American innovations -- such as the iPhone -- are MADE not DEVELOPED.
@@TimGreeningJackson China is taking over the entire world, the New World Order. September 16th 2022
Hard to believe this county used to manufacture things.
Wonderful to see (American) people making things. Times and technology change but I can't help feeling that we've lost the threat somewhat -- the current choice for phone mobile nfrastructure seems to be a choice between Huawei (China), Ericrsson (Sweden) and Nokia (Finland) with US representation being virtually non-existent.
In 30 years time we will look back to the 2020's and laugh. Assuming were still here.
I think i may know where one of the control panels for this ESS might be
I want to get marred married to that movie
Thanks Randy's
All work should be done this way more human hands and less machines.
You never got a dropped signal maybe a dropped call now and again but I live right next to a cell phone tower and I have dropped signals all the time. I need a land line.
Best explanation I have heard is it’s production is like an umbrella shape, right under sucks because it’s designed for distance not close up. Unless your 2x or 4x the height of the tower from the tower you will have none or shit service
WHOAH... what was that numeric display at 8:45? I've never seen such a thing!!
+1 I'd like to know as well.
I've worked around 1A switches and I've never seen one like that. It looks to be a small monochrome with a relatively slow refresh rate (by the standards of today).
That display is what they call a "projection display", a certain type of numerical display device that used an in-line array of transparencies, one for each digit, while an array of lenses would direct the light from a incandescent bulb in the display to the proper transparency, and then project it to the front of the display. A company called IEE (Industrial Electronic Engineers) made these displays under the "In-Line" brand back in the 60s & 70s. Here's a link that explains it more in detail:
www dot decadecounter dot com/vta/tubepage.php?item=10&user=0
Otis elevator also used the technology for a small number of installations.
It's a projection display. Each number is a little slide in front of a bulb, with a lens to focus it on the screen.
I wonder on the printer/terminal, the “OH’s” have a slash thru them but the “zeros” do not? I had always thought zeros had the slash thru them. Regardless, I enjoy this movie immensely.
Wow, I thought I was the only one who noticed that.
No, it wasn’t just you guys! :)
Can anyone clarify for me when voice would have been digitized in the bell system? It seems like the advent of the t1 was it, as I see references to 'codec' at the end of the connection, but I can't wrap my head around the whole thing! on this ESS the voice was analog, but the circuits were digitally controlled, is that right? Thanks for any thoughts, this stuff is so interesting!
Yes, AFAIK and to the best of my knowledge, the 1ESS switch was digitally controlled via a embedded computer in the switch for its switching fabric, but the actual voice circuits it switched were analog. The ESS didn't become fully digital until the 4ESS introduced in 1976, IINM, and I do believe the 4ESS could directly interface to T1 lines and handle their separate digital DS0 circuits directly.
I've also read that T1 lines were first introduced in the early 60s by Bell, so I'd assume most early T1 lines then would've had to terminate to analog circuits at the CO possibly via special terminal equipment functioning as ADC/DAC converters before and after interfacing to the analog switches of the day (SxS, Crossbar, 1ESS, Panel, etc.)
I can answer that...the first digital short-haul carrier system using PCM encoding was the Type "T" carrier system in 1959. The long-range plan by the Labs was to start using digital carrier systems that would simply "plug in" to a down-the-road digital switch, which we didn't see at the end offices until the 5ESS came in. The 1 and 1A were digitally controlled analog switches, as was AE's EAX. It was when T carrier and 5ESS come in that the analog voice was eliminated from the end offices, but only on trunked lines incoming via T-CXR. Analog loops still have to be encoded in the office for short loops. The 4ESS was the first fully digital "time-space-time" switch, that was first deployed to replace the XBAR 4A machines in the AUTOVON system in the early '60s. THe first civilian application was the 04T machine in Chicago, which replaced an early 4A XBAR toll switch.
DeserT BoB Awesome, thank you!!
The original T1 was terminated in the central office into a T1Channel Bank. It had 26 300-3000HZ analog voice channels. Go to link to the old SF movie and you can see some at 51:22 the movie is starship invasions (1977). ruclips.net/video/QESnwxRUxyw/видео.html
@@gpwgpw555 I wonder where they filmed that, maybe a training office? I doubt they'd let them walk around and rip off bits of an active frame
Just incredible, now just hink about how much telephone calls can be processed these day's,, all being digital.
what did you say? sorry, you're breaking up .. it's garbled
Yet when national emergencies happen, the lines still get overloaded. With all the micro processing power available today, you’d think they’d have even higher overhead.
@@truthbydesign5146 I would hazard that our voice telephony today is far less reliable than back then. Of course, back then there were legally mandated service standards…
More switches please
Actually this is 1AESS office it is alive and well AT&T had about 28 offices I still support them in Naperville Illinois.
It was the "latest thing" when I first hired on....XBAR still reigned supreme, and out in CA, we still has a lot of old 197-type SXS....clackclackclackclack! My home phone in LA was on SXS until the HLWDCA02 1AESS was cut in in 1978.
This film was made in 1974. It is a 1ESS. The 1AESS was not deployed until 1977. You can see the 1ESS AMA Tape drive at 7:33 and in a central office at 8:51 next to the MCC TTY. This film was not made in only one place. The Frames would have been put together at a Western Electric Plant. The Completed frames would be shipped to the central office. I Started working on the 1ESS and 1AESS in 1976. Still have dreams about them. I started in SXS.
Clifton, I was in Naperville a few times going to the AT&T School. In Oklahoma, we cut the last of our 1AESS switched to 5ESS's and DMS100's in 2000.
Back then when soldiering irons were hotter, the ones now these days don't get hot enough
Actually, the other way around. The modern RoHS type solders without lead need higher temperatures.
@@JonFether We don’t use red-hot soldering irons any more.
It was a special type of soldering iron even for the time. IIRC it’s some kind of carbon tip, not metal that gets wetted with solder.
That's the way it was when I was 3 years old, good ole 1974! Ole Tricky Dicky would resign that year with Ford taking the hot seat, and the Vietnam War would come to an end the following one.
Epic 'stache at 5:00.
Now this equipment was retired around 10 15 years ago and replaced with fiber and smaller rack units i wonder if pots lines still exist though ????
Any chance of interviews or tours of the old cold war sites?
Most of the White Alice sites in Alaska are gone. The antennaswere torn down sometimes with explosives. The only site I know that still has the antennas is in Nome, Alaska. I had some time while there once and went up to the site and checked out all the old equipment just rusting away. I’ve been to many to the radar sites around the state but I wasn’t with AT$T then.
@@Chris_at_Homewould love to restore it if I had the cash flow
7:42 thats quite the mlticore
Wow pick and place in the 70s
7o's nano technology.
Auto insertion machine, the forerunner to pick and place. Components were fed in on a single strip, in the order they were to be inserted. Board indexed from location to location, and the insertion head trimmed, bent, and inserted the parts into the PCB.
What’s incredible is that automatic component insertion wasn’t even new at that point - it had been around for over a decade, IIRC!
Which at&t mainframe is this?
HELLO IS THIS THE OS GIRL FROM THE MOVIE HER ? WHERE IS HER ?
....2600 HZ ... tone
any of you remember why..?
+Jason Wilson I used to work for Bellcore and mostly dealt with high speed digital technology but did learn a lot about the analog side. But I don't know why the 2600 Hz tone. It's well within the voice channel. Was there a convenient frequency standard?
The long distance trunks use to Whistle at 2600 hz..
It was a mischievious way of making free LD phone calls in the early 70s...
I did find that with a google, but I thought you were asking why they chose 2600 Hz. Guess that was just a tone well within the band of a voice signal that they arbitrarily picked.
All the tones including DTMF where listed in the IEEE Publications......
In-band SF. I can still hear it ringing in my head, along with 1000 for line-ups.
Reminding us of the gross analog manual foundation of the digital dream
having Flashbacks from the Freaky wah-wah tune
What's he standing next to?
"Oh."
[7:11] Those are busbars. Fuhhh.....
Whoa
God bless Thank you Lord in Heaven for the blessings
hrm. 4E's have relays??
The intro to this film showed a 4ESS MCC ( Master Control Center). Note the color blue. In the vintage part of the file, the MCC is gray. It is a 1ESS MCC. The 4ESS Switch was a four wire space division toll switch. The 1ESS Switch was a two wire space division local exchange Switch. Both were electromechanically Analog switches controlled by computers. The 5ESS was the first digital(like you CD music player) time division switch. It did not have so many relays. From 1976 I worked on the 1ESS, 1AESS, and 2BESS for over 25 years. They were great machines in there day.
don't know how to edit My Text. 4ESS was Digital Like the 5ESS.
That godawful music brought back memories I buried decades ago.... bad memories. Bell bottoms and hippie hair.
" Bell Bottoms".. how ironic.
4:43 hottie detected. Also, thumbs up for the 70s analog synth music.
might be considered film art or whatever..certainly not educational. I still do not know how electronic switching works ..must look elsewhere. thanks for posting all the same.
Awesome! JAjajajajajajajaAJajajaja!
The narrator has the most annoying voice, if he would call me I wouldnt pick up
So tedious too bad there's no narration
Rotten "music"
Rotten movie
Rotten "art"
Isn't groovy