The Telephone Exchange (1982) British Telecom Schools Film
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- Опубликовано: 14 окт 2024
- ** Contains Flashing Images **
A Pacesetter production for British Telecom.
BFI Database: The invention of the automatic telephone exchange system by Strowger and the history of its development. Looks in detail at various automatic systems and explains how they work, these include: the Strowger switching system; the cross bar selector; the reed relay electronic exchange; and the microchip technology of the System X exchange. Intended for schoolchildren aged 10-16 years.
This is a new transfer of an severely faded 16mm print. Some colour correction has been applied to try and reduce the red cast.
The copyright in this film belongs to BT Group.
ah I love the classic "british professional" voice of the 60-80's television
R-P recieved. pronunciation. Way bbback from 30s to 80s (RIP!)
At least they did not insist that every little detail is a matter of life and death!
And the 1930s-1960s dialects too. We seem to have lost that true British professionalism in our language for some reason nowadays. Jolly good, an excellent presentation. Perhaps one should look to restoring those values.
Alongside narrators and scriptwriters treating their audience as intelligent adults rather than 5-year-olds with phrases such as "WOW! THAT'S AMAAAZING" every other sentence.
My Dad was a commissioning engineer for TXE4 and System X installs, i remember one Saturday he took me to work with him at an exchange in central Brum (i was about 10), i was mesmerised by all the rooms full of wires and switches.
I started work in 1973 installing strowger telephone exchanges.Most of my working life involved telecommunications.Its amazing how it has all changed in the last 45 years
And these old exchanges now consist of an MDF and an optical transmission area, and loads of big empty rooms with lovely wood block floors.
Even the says of the MDF are doomed. Soon to go the same way as exchanges. Fully digital. No more jumpering.
But will be soon be filled with bio modulation and life-force storage systems
Not so much fibre as analogue transmission systems when Stronger was in use. Mainly PCM. All before SDH and WDM.
When you stop to think, technological developments made over the last 70years or so , are amazing
I used to work in a stepping exchange but moved into RF communications before crossbar became a thing. Oh, I am so old :-)
Wow fancy meeting Xjet here. How strange, love your work.
@@allthegearnoidea6752 I am _everywhere_ :-)
5005 Xbar trained me !
It is amazing how these gigantic mechanical systems worked...all these squeezed down to a tiny microchip that can fit in your thumb......nothing but love and respect for the journey
Strowger -> Crossbar -> Reed relay -> digital exchange -> internet phone: Korean telecom companies used them all and I remember them all. What a fantastic rate of technological progress!!
As a BT engineer in the 80s 90s ,00s I frequented many a exchange to mainly drink tea and cannot believe the canteen nor kettle did not get mention !!!!!?lol the secret's out share holders!
I worked as a TelecomTech in SxS, ARE-11 & AXE exchanges. we had a safety motto.
"No job is so important and no service so urgent - that we cannot take time to perform our work safely." which was changed to
"No job is so important and no service so urgent - that we cannot take time to have a cup of tea."
😂😂😂😂 I am still friends with my 1st engineer boyfriend 16 and 21 then,we are now 65 and 70 !❤
I remember the days of GTE in the Los Angeles area. They were too cheap (or broke) to upgrade most of their switches. There were still step-by-step/Strowger switches into the late 1980's/early 1990's, that were not maintained or overloaded. Customers would complain, especially when they realized if they lived in a neighboring area served by Pacific Telephone, they had electronic switching with custom calling features, and not telephones that worked worse than on The Flintstones or on Green Acres (Oliver had to climb up a telephone pole to make a call). Eventually things changed, along with the telephone company being taken over.
And to think now I'm watching this video on my telephone!! The technology shown here is so old and beautiful. I remember as a kid there was a telephone exchange building down the street from me and sometimes in the summer they would leave the door open and I would look in and see rows upon rows of equipment just like this. Now if you look inside of one of the buildings that they even still have there's a couple of computers and nothing but open space!!
And just let me add, that speak and spell was awesome. I have not seen one of those since I was a child
new awesome
I bought a speak and spell as an adult as i never got one as a child!!!!!
While in Bude years ago I worked installing the new System X. Very interesting work, when I was charged with testing all the selectors and uniselectors. Several of them needed a rweak with a screwdriver to free the solonoids. But this was a revolution! At last you could dial direct, exciting times. I believe now that exchange is defunct and abandoned, just an empty building these days.
Dont forget the Power section kept all the buildings and power system running.
I was lucky enough to have worked on the early TXS stronger units right up to TXEs at BT and Cable and wireless over the past 42 years. Great memories especially Mondial House at the beginning, I worked there for many years in the repeater station.
Great clip for showing people how these vintage telephones worked. Very nostalgic to see the Strowger group selectors.
Amazing to think how technology has moved on, even from when this film was made, I live just across the road from the main exchange for Portsmouth, it was built in 1958 & back in the 80's you could walk by & hear all the switching equipment clicking & wiring.
The exchange is still in use but now looks rather tatty with lots of empty space inside.
If it ever closed, I'd love to have a look round inside, some of these big exchanges had underground bunkers for use in the event of a nuclear war.
This was a great video highlighting where we came from. I grew up with first a Strowger system and then they switched us over to a Crossbar 2 system in 1968. I don’t recall having any reliability issues during the 20 years on these systems. They always seemed to work and always got the calls through. They cost the phone company more to operate due to the real estate and electricity consumption. In the video it mentions how we will always need operators. Here in Canada they are gone. If you dial zero you will get a fast busy signal (re-order tone). Computers place collect calls now. If you dial 0+area code+number. The younger generation will not know what an operator was. Now we have 911 for emergencies and this service is not even run by the telephone company. The law enforcement offices run 911 and it is considered a municipal government job. Almost everyone is using VoIP now. The internet is our telephone network today. Things have changed enormously since this video and the things in the video they were most certain would never change - have changed.
Here USA too 🇨🇦 🇺🇸 ☎️ 💻 📡 🛰 ☎️ There North America 🇮🇳
It rings a bell in a computers mind.
The pipe fitter dude is a character!!
Lovely to see Mondial House, worked there for a short time with BTI before leaving to join Siemens.
Things moved fast but BTI not fast enough for me.
Now it is all to change again.
VOIP, with do many extras, so much better if done properly. The above and beyond is what we all want?
even antiquated it still boggles the mind how it all works
He speaks so enthusiastically about it. If he new about the Internet and packet switching.
BT had an Experimental Packet Switching Service (EPSS) back in the 1970s and a commercial X.25 Packet Switching Service (PSS) from the early 1980s. Unfortunately BT management and senior engineers were all circuit switching people who backed System X as the answer to modernisation.
Incredible how it all changed. I started out in comms with the RAF in 1983 using multi channel voice frequency for teleprinters. By 89 I was being trained on solid state data exchanges with the Northern Telecom MX1 exchange and Mitel PBX. Within. A few years but early 90s we were moving with packet switching and routing by IP with the OSI 7 layer system .... it’s changed so quickly and in so many ways and all th sold physical,hardware is now being replaced by digital comms
Chris Cain I was just watching this, and though - Chris Cain would love this 🤣🤣🤣
Strowger (step-by-step) exchanges were always a favourite, some 30years after conversion to System x etc the old "electro magnetic" smells are still in exchanges.
We had a very small one in the Loft Theatre installed under the old manual lighting desk. We'd know when Front of House were calling the stage manager to say the audience were in and the show was about to start, because we'd hear the switches moving around. Then a few moments later we'd get our cue to start over the stage talkback system.
Yes they have their own smell.. but these days they’re virtually silent..
"Electro-mechanical"
The big exchange seen at the 1:50 mark is Baynard House. It's still a BT office to this day and now houses some more modern computer networking kit.
Colombo House is still a BT office AFAIK.
The building at 1:50 is Mondial House (next to Cannon Street Station), which has now been demolished and replaced with a rather bland office building
Soon will follow baynard house, faraday and a shedload of other buildings. BT centre at Newgate is gone and now in the process of a rebuild
Thats just sooooooooooooooooooo 1980's I love the voice over!
Thank you brings back memories don’t forget the txe4s
Little did they know in 1982 that all the development during the past 100 years would pale in comparison to what was ahead in the coming decades...
@16:35 Loving the 74 series logic, and the footage of the now demolished Mondial house!
Brilliant ty for memories ❤ i worked GPO in the 70's,loved it 💯
I have been in the industry for over 30 yrs, these BT exchanges are crumbling away.
10:33 That JVC front loading V.C.R. would have been highly desirable in 1982 costing new about £600. A lot of money back then and equivalent to about £1700 in 2019. The favoured must have item for house burglars and easily shifted to some buyers in dodgy pubs.
And you would know all about thieving and fencing with Mersey in your moniker. Mersey Merlin - making your possessions disappear.
I worked on these BPO equipment in New Zealand in the 80's. Then I pulled out our local exchange and installed an NEC Neax 61
And here I am watching this video through the telephone line provided by British Telecom.
In fact, one can broadcast one's own video through the telephone line to viewers across the world!
That's communication for you!
Great overview of switching
Soon the phone company equipment will be decommissioned and everything will be Internet. Great but also a sad day. The old tech was pretty darned amazing when you consider they invented everything pretty much on their own as the need came up. The monopoly of the Bell System was really required back then or it would never have progressed as quickly and efficiently as it did. Still amazing what they accomplished!!
When I joined, it wasn't BT or British Telecom - it was The Post Office and we were all government employees. Showing my age.
Some of the manhole covers in my town still say Post Office! I used to think they were underground pressure pipes for speedy delivery of post! but of course much later in life as a Network Engineer I learned they're Pre-BT Era telephone ducts.
General Post Office
I stand corrected. The GPO indeed.
Post Office Telephones
Used to drive a green Morris minor for post office telephones..lol
Never thought I would miss the sound of those clicks you got when dialling a number, or the sound of a train door slamming in the station. What sounds do you miss from years ago ?
I remember calling the operator and it would ring. The ringing would stop and it would be silent for 2 or 3 seconds, and then I’d hear a spring sound “boing” and the operator would be on the line. I always wondered why there was a boing before they answered. One time I asked the operator if she was using plugs and she said no the switchboards were all switches and the switchboard was made by Seimens Electronics. I never seen them but called into them lots. I always wondered about the boing/spring. It was quite strange.
Sparrows chirping in the hedges (although they are coming back now in some areas).
Pulse dialing? Isn't that still supported?
The sound of one hand clapping when I was alive. Is what I would answer after my demise if I was able to!
Man U fans getting bricked at Euston.
Wowee, in 1982 microcomputers could solve everyone's problems!
and 30 years later they create problems for everyone !
@@yumiwatanabe440 *clears throat* was 37 years later when you said that, now 38 years later.
Much more earlier. In 1974 The company T&N (Telefonbau& Normalzeit) in germany presented their first electronic PABX. It got a time devision multiplex crossbar. All modules were inter connected by coaxial cables. The system called W600. The basic version had 600 telephone ports and could be extent to unlimited. The system was developed in cooperation with Telefunken. The µprocessor was an Intel 8080. The VW plant in Wolfsburg got one of the first with abt 12000 extensions, divides in two units, one in Wolfsburg the other in Hanover, later the production facility in Emden were also connected to the system.
Later , in the late 80th VW switched to Siemens HICOM 300
My brother Charlie invented the first potato based switch. It didn't take off but it made for a delicious meal.
The dear dead days, when the British telecom was the British telecom, and please give the bearer fifteen lashes.
you can thank maggie for selling it off
Got the video formats covered:
10:10 10:32 and 10:24 VHS
10:21 Umatic
10:32 Lower machine is Sony SL-C7 Betamax
10:10 Laserdisc or CED , you can see the guy holding a laser disc cover or a CED caddy in his hands.
@@vk3hau Actually it's VHD, a system very similar to CED. Thorn EMI/Ferguson made a big push in it. Compare the shot at 10:10 with the JVC HD-5500US player.
brought to you in glorious Red o Vision!
😂
Cut my teeth on strowger in73 and ended up replacing System x exchanges with Coax in 2000 and now all those have been replaced with fibre 😳 BT have massive buildings all over the country with hardly anything in them .
Photosensitive epilepsy suffers beware the bright flashing cine film sequence around the 2:30 mark!
I'm not epileptic but that did make me feel a bit weird. Thank you for this! It goes from cx to xx
I remember the advent of system X. What could not be envisaged then is the mobile phone and it's uptake. It is rapidly displacing the landline.
Wish I could go back to this time. I was 10 or 11 years old depending what part of 1982 this was. A chance to do it all over, aaaah youth
From the year I joined BT as an apprentice, bringing back lots of memories.
Ah yes.. The Smell of the deep fried group selector with the release alarm and the sea of pink dockets in the morning..Watching the ammeters on the rectifier cubicals after an rush hour snow storm to see if they would all trip and leave us on the batteries..happy days
Did you get sent to the stores for Skyhooks?
@@neilldehaan2522 No, but the stories of the pranks that went on were legend. As you might expect some had a technical nature, often triggered by plugging or unplugging of some king of device to a 50V battery jack.
The work benches had gantries with a flourecent lamp.
Someone rigged an electromagnet behind the lamp and powered it remotely off a battery jack with jumper wire. Hundreds of washers were then suspended on the magnet. When mate had a really complex relay set open on the bench, the jack was unplugged.....
As a “youth” (apprentice) , with jointers I was given a bucket with gas in from the manhole that we had just opened. I was told that this manhole was also full of gas and had to be emptied this way...... Did hear of someone sent to the stores for a long weight...Happy days , then BT came along. Finished in 2000. Was it all that long ago?
As a 12 year old living in a small irish village i discovered a cash making opportunity in the local pay phone box. Those days the coin collection box was separate from the phone and i discovered that if i shove a piece of cloth up the coin return slot i would catch the money as it fell towards the coin box. Free sweets daily
That "switching centre" @ 18:37 was demolished in 2006...
I currently work in the “Exchange “ aka Central Office and it looks nothing like that . Those days are longgggg gone .
lots of platinum and palladium points in the old strowger switches
Relay contacts came in pairs. A couple of maintenance workers once decided that the exchange could do without every other one. They sold them for scrap, till they got caught....
and lots of copper, in busbars and relay slugs
Yeah... My dad's mate had a very small-time scrap yard... And my dad brought me home a "lump" of Stowager switch and said "here... your technical... can you work out how to get the 'platignum' out of this quickly and easily?"
@@edgeeffect in the company i worked for , we used tin snips to cut the point off at the metal which held the contact point then it was put into nitric acid to melt of the metal and all that was left was either the platinum or palladium points.
There should be a warning about the flashing pulsing bit in this video
2:05 If he thinks 100 years is "developing with amazing speed", his brain will explode when he witnesses the rise of the internet.
🎶We've come a long ways, baby!! 🎶
A glaring error at 17:52. when the commentator refers to Contravision although shortly afterwards correctly says Confravision. .Confravision mainly used the protection channels of intercity microwave links. An idea ahead of its time & even now the reason for its failure continues in that people (especially the company seniors) prefer to spend time away from their office in an hotel rather than only an hour or two just down the road.
What did I just watch. Very interesting.
I joined London Directories in 1981. Training using phonebooks microfiche, yellow pages. Very dull work. In the 90s i rejoined BT and was trained on the multi cord system then BTOSS.
I fully embrace the technology move on.
Happy days without mobiles.
I like the music at the end of the film
James Stephenson not stolen from Dire Straits at all 😂
@@UXXV :I thought it was the ending of Dire Straits' "Tunnel of Love"
People had pink skin, and painted everything pink, in the early 80's. Even the sun was pink. Things sure have changed.
In the Galar Region, it was formally known as...
- Galar Post Office Telecommunications (1969-1980)
- Macro Cosmos Telecom (1980-1990s)
- Macro Telecom (1990s-2000s)
- Macro Network (2001-2004)
Now known as MacroNet since 2004.
The first commercial fibre-optic telephone call was made by John Stonehouse the disappearing MP.
May I know the name of the music near the end of the film?
It is like the guitar solo from the "Tunnel of Love", which written by Mark Knopfler.
Now I know what cross-bar is. Knew about the Strowger before. I think in a 100 years that it the exchange will be obsolete and it will be all wireless.
I passed my Basic Auto courses last week. I'm due to start work as a T2A in my local strowger exchange. Any advice?
I was involved in the installation of our SPC equipment to replace all our Strowager and x bar exchanges 30 years ago. I am surprised there is any strowager gear still in use.
Is the Wayfarer at Stone still going. You'd be a TOIT anyway if you had done your basic auto. 😀😀
Nice soundtrack
Well, if I was going to ask random people if they knew how a telephone worked, I wouldn't have included guys who liked they were extras in "DELIVERANCE" !
I never received a fax at the speed of light. What was I doing wrong?
Cor this is in serious need of colour correction.
Everything was an orangey pink in the 60s, just like everything before 1950 was brown and grey. I'm not sure exactly when the change occurred.
+triff As soon as "Colour" and "Saturation" adjustment dials started being added to television sets, I reckon... :-)
It'll soon seem absurd that you used to dial a place, not a person. And phone numbers themselves are becoming obsolete, or at least hidden. I no longer have a land line at all.
If you have a router plugged into a phone socket then yes you DO have a landline and a phone number. You may not use the phone but your broadband comes down the same pair of wires!
Technically speaking: Calling someone's mobile is still a "Station to Station" call...Even if the station is *normally* found to be living in the called party's jeans pocket or bag! :-p ;-)
@@gregoryseager9191 If you use cable broadband, I thought you don't need a phone line.
@@Thorpe That is true, I was talking about the openreach network. Though they still need to maintain the network. They have also announced this year dial tone will be removed from openreach around 2025. You can still make calls, but will work over VoIP. A lot of changes coming.
anyone else watching in 2017!?
Hello 2018 viewers, from 2017! Hello also to 2117 viewers. RUclips was good while it lasted. Blockchain decentralisation is on the way!
I'm replying from the future!
2018 :-)
@@Rysin3 its December 2018, RUclips is still going strong!!
I wish you would have told me that I would have my own RUclips channel by now oh, I could have gotten started early on it!!
2019 ;)
and just like that 15 yrs later it all went belly up :D
If alexander graham bell invented the telephone, who the fuck did he ring?
1:30 "Signals - one is 'bip' and two is 'bip-bip" Well done mate, you're thinking 3 decades ahead - digital.
Also the signals used for nickels and dimes on American coin phones.
Love it....Soundd like at 6.00 , my wife is changing gears
System X still in use today. Possibly being scrapped in 2025 "And on and on she goes"
Is there a version with green colour included?
Sorry, no! The print was completely faded to red. I know that the colour balance is rubbish but it's the best I can do. Blame the laboratory for using rubbish Eastman film!
@@ephemeralfilm Eastman film hated green..it's a shame it knocked all the other stocks out of the market..
@@Witheredgoogie That explains why alot of my 1980s photos have gone a slight pink Colour !
@@NOWThatsRichy NOW, That's Richy. It could also to do with the fixing process. 'The fix' was the last stage of the developing process and is important for longevity as it stabilised all the elements. If you sent your film to one of those mass '50 pictures for 50p' type orgs then they didn't have the budget to spend too much time or the chemicals on the fixing process...your picture had appeared and that was good enough. Likewise with this BT films here they were regarded as ephemeral and so they probably got the best price on processing thus 'the fix' could be cut down in the procedure.
Anyone knows the piece of music around 1:45
Phenomenal!
Haahaa. I work on Trader Voice systems. We still use Verticals and Horizontals - even though they’re now virtual.
How those car phones worked at that time? Does they use cellular antennas?
you had to book a radio channel!!!
System 4 was one of the fore runners to cellular phones, ths was a radio based system. Our manger at the time in L/NW had as a trial two of these fitted our vans. This system didn't work to well with external ladder racks, unless the van was pointing in the rigt direction.
Speed of light.....oooohhh.......u mean Fibre!!!!
Uni-selectors, group selectors and the final selector. The diagrams are burned into many a GPO engineers brain.
This definitely needs some sort of seizure warning
2020!
what about the baby who was left outside the phone booth just so the mother can make a phone call!!!
I'd have liked to see her place that call on her iPhone back in those days... :-p ;-)
Millennial 0 zero 1 one year before me y
Ahhh well done - another selling point for a mobile phone ie it's helps moms not to have their babies snatched!
what about it?
Hi there phone exchanges are all digital now . Back then the crossbar and the selector couldn't handle speedail to quick for them . Digital exchanges can handle mobile masts from mobile to Landline and Landline to mobile . Digital quicker and clearer .
@ mark butler TXE4 was analogue but could handled DTMF no problem (I think what you refer to as “speed dial”) and was enhanced to add CCITT No 7 signalling to integrate with digital exchanges/routing
They used stronger switches in 1982?
what is the name of the building at 12:41
That's Baynard House. My old HQ in the City Of London. Keith. Still in use today.
17:55 Nah, it’ll never catch-on.
11:20 some say hes still running to this day
Ah...Ma Busby! Inventor of the crossed line, shocking rental rates, and the per-minute interest rate on calling charges! :-p ;-)
Any word on what happened to anyone who tried blasting a certain audial frequency in the 2KHz range^ down a UK circuit, and what punishments for this Ma Busby would seek in redress? :-)
(^ - A frequency strongly associated with a certain American breakfast cereal, and a certain magazine from the state of New York. :-)
Is this a TXE-4? Thanks :)
TXE-4 was the improvement they described using reed switches. TXE was the fact they used the reeds, and the number 4 was when they added a cyclic store where we had to feed incredibly thin wires through a series of ferrite loops, and when the wire was pulsed by someone picking up their phone it generated a burst in each of the coils so it corresponded to the number.
I don't remember everything about them, but I do remember tracing faults with a 'storage oscilloscope' that simply had a really long fade time on the CRT tube :)
Ah, thank you, I loved visiting these old exchanges when they were open :)
Leaps and bounds !!! Openreach rule!
Each telephone number's got its own wire!
what did a DACS do
Just think that nipper in the pushchair at the beginning is in his 40's now!
Nah mate he died. He hung himself because he couldn't pay his phone bill
And then come along this thing called the internet...
Arhh the bars and lics