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Pictorial and Written History of Bell Systems 151

Posted by michael from the ma-knows-what-you-want dept.
gngulrajani writes "I have wasted an afternoon digging though this website. Lots of old school Bell marketing posters as well as technical specifications for things such as 'Telephone Memory Devices' and a 'dataphone service'."
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Pictorial and Written History of Bell Systems More

Pictorial and Written History of Bell Systems

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  • Baby bells (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) * on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:42PM (#8547435) Homepage Journal
    Hrmmmm. It was about 1983 that I purchased my first computer, an Apple ][+, and I found out that all of the baby bells which had started up had completely unsecured computer systems holding all those handy long distance access numbers. Of course in 1983, I was a 13 year old and hacking like that was more of a game than anything else. I feel bad about getting those numbers now, but we really had no idea it was "illegal" at the time. That experience though did help introduce me to computer users world wide and BBS's like the Pirates Cove and Crystal Caverns which was pre-Internet, but quite the educational experience.

    • Re:Baby bells (Score:2, Interesting)

      by bugnuts ( 94678 )
      You AE hacker you!

      The novation applecat was the most amazing chunk of hardware you could add to an apple in those days.

      • Re:Baby bells (Score:5, Informative)

        by BWJones ( 18351 ) * on Friday March 12, 2004 @05:05PM (#8547697) Homepage Journal
        The novation applecat was the most amazing chunk of hardware you could add to an apple in those days.

        You are not kidding. Those things were fully programable so that one could create a list of numbers to dial (or even dial randomly) and then log the numbers which were answered by computer modems for call back and investigation when you got back from school. I could not afford the Applecat at first and relyed on a cheap modem card and one of those phone handset cradles for a while before I could mow enough lawns around the neighborhood to purchase the Applecat. As I recall, it seems to have pulled about $300 out of my 14year old pockets, but there was a friend of mine (from a decidedly wealthy background) that was doing all sorts of custom programming on his even hooking up an old cassette player to function as an anwering machine which totally blew me away.

    • Re:Baby bells (Score:5, Interesting)

      by einTier ( 33752 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @05:12PM (#8547770)
      Ah, the forgotten Ma Bell. I too remember. I remember using those long distance access lines to dial BBS's all over the country.

      What today's hackers don't realize is how expensive phone service used to be. You either got your phone service from Southwestern Bell, or you didn't get it at all. Your phone? You bought that at the Southwestern Bell store. No, you couldn't just go to Wal-Mart and pick up a $10 phone. Not much choice either, I think there were maybe ten or fifteen available choices. Did I mention how expensive that phone was? Try over $100. For just a regular, standard telephone. Oh, and if you wanted an extra phone (not line!) in your house? That was an extra charge. Just for the working outlet, even IF you didn't plug a phone into it.

      I didn't get the phone bill in those days, so I have no idea what a monthly bill used to look like, but I did know that it was prohibitively expensive to call anywhere long distance. Just to call my father in the next town over cost $0.22 a minute.

      • Re:Baby bells (Score:5, Interesting)

        by BWJones ( 18351 ) * on Friday March 12, 2004 @05:22PM (#8547840) Homepage Journal
        What today's hackers don't realize is how expensive phone service used to be.

        Yes. Thus the whole impetus for getting the long distance numbers. The first month after I got my modem, (before I knew about the baby bell codes), my folks went absolutely ballistic at the phone bill saying to me: "You're Grounded!!!" which of course probably proved critical in my discovering the rest of the "wired" world through the phone codes. Man, they were screaming about my calling all over the country, but really had no idea of what I was actually doing with the computer or the implications. My Mom came in once when I was talking via text term to a friend on the other side of town and she was absolutely marveling at the fact that we could "talk" over the computer lines. This is a woman who had a doctorate but had never seen such a thing before. It's hard to appreciate just how novel that was back in 1983 to the vast majority of the population.

        • Re:Baby bells (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Most people still get a kick out of it. Look at how popular text messaging and IMs are...
      • How about this for expensive. I marry my wife and we're at her parent's house and there were still paying the "rental" fee on an old rotary phone (554) from the 60s. This was in 1998. MIL says but it's only $5 a month!
      • Yup that's what happens when you break up a monopoly. See: Microsoft.

    • Re:Baby bells (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I got my first computer in 1977, a Heathkit H-8. It wasn't until 1986 that got my first modem, a 1200 baud radio shack (it had an answer/originate switch). I was with my dad one day, and sardonically laughed as I told him, "Heh heh, I have a modem now!" Fortunately my dad said, "You're 18, you can go to jail." This from a man that had copies of the article from Bell System Technical Pubs (I think that was the name of the journal - it was from 1956 or so) that talked about 2600 hz. Talk about confusing s

  • Nice (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rackman ( 724476 ) *
    Nice to see the history of this fine organization being documented. Takes a telephone man to appreciate how much goes into a phone call.
  • Google cache of interesting essay on similar subject. http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:mmj9bjFJqFoJ:w ww.fastforwardproject.org/tech/index.php%3Ftech%3D phone%26sub%3Dessay+western+union+see+no+use+in+th is+telephone&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

  • Where are the pictures of .. (Score:3, Funny)

    by burgburgburg ( 574866 ) <splisken06NO@SPAMemail.com> on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:43PM (#8547447)
    the Phone Police [imdb.com], man?

    They're still after me.

  • The number you have called (Score:4, Funny)

    by bugnuts ( 94678 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:43PM (#8547453) Journal
    Service Temporarily Unavailable
    The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

    This is a recording.
  • We had a couple in our dorm room. Nowadays, I've got two in my office here at work. Clients are always impressed by them and make comments.

    Never underestimate good office decor.

  • Telephone company history? (Score:5, Funny)

    by MalaclypseTheYounger ( 726934 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:47PM (#8547496) Journal
    "Here at the Phone Company we handle eighty-four billion calls a year. Serving everyone from presidents and kings to scum of the earth.

    We realize that every so often you can't get an operator, for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order [snatches plug out of switchboard], or perhaps you get charged for a call you didn't make.

    We don't care. Watch this!
    [bangs on a switch panel like a cheap piano]
    just lost Peoria. You see, this phone system consists of a multibillion-dollar matrix of space-age technology that is so sophisticated, even we can't handle it. But that's your problem, isn't it?

    Next time you complain about your phone service, why don't you try using two Dixie cups with a string.
    We don't care.
    We don't have to.
    We're the Phone Company!"

    -- Lily Tomlin from "Saturday Night Live: The First 20 Years" (1994 Cader Company).

  • Of copper pipes and microwaves (Score:5, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:48PM (#8547510)
    I talked to a Bell executive a few years ago and he had an interesting stories about how the Bells created new technologies.

    At the same time that fiberoptics were invented, Ma Bell had another high-bandwidth long-distance telecom technology in the works. Microwaves travelling in underground copper pipes could carry a modestly high bandwidth signal for long distances. They actually had an entire factory to creating the equipment (pipe, connectors, repeaters, edge boxes, etc.) When fiber came out (with its superior cost structure and tech performance) they simply killed the concept and the factory and adopted fiber.

    • Re:Of copper pipes and microwaves (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Myself ( 57572 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:59PM (#8547640) Journal
      This sounds like the logical extension of the L-carrier systems. Before digital encoding was invented, radio techniques (frequency division multiplexing) were used to shift the frequency of each voice channel, and pack dozens of channels into a wide-band signal which could ride a twisted pair, or itself be muxed into a still wider signal, which was transmitted on coaxial cable.

      I'm guessing that the megahertz-range signals on the coax were then muxed into gigahertz-range signals to be transmitted down the tubes. Fascinating.

      Lots more details at long-lines.net [long-lines.net] for the curious.
      • Wait, are you talking about solid copper wires, or hollow pipes to be used as waveguides?

        If it's the latter, that's pretty damn cool.
        • Into the few-megahertz range, twisted pair wire works remarkably well. This is the stuff we're all familiar with as phone lines and cat-5. The number of twists per unit of length determines how resistant it is to interference, hence cat-5 is much more tightly twisted than cat-3. Each pair in a multipair cable is twisted a slightly different amount, to prevent inductive coupling and crosstalk between pairs.

          The signal sent down a twisted pair is bipolar and "balanced", so that the two wires are carrying mirr
    • Microwaves travelling in underground copper pipes could carry a modestly high bandwidth signal for long distances.

      You can see some of these pipes at the American History Museum of the Smithsonian, in their communications and computers exhibit on the first floor. They really are like plumbing! The exhibit shows something like a joint between two pipes--both pipes taper gracefully down to the joint from a diameter of about 3cm to 1cm.

      P.S.: I scooped this Slashdot story on Metafilter about a year ago [metafilter.com]! *gloa
    • This sounds just like a modern wave guide... only using horrible amounts of distance in between.

      Wave guide may be a great deal more durable then fiber optics, but as far as pounds per diameter in terms of bandwidth... I think fiber may have the victory here.

      I could see a myriad of potential problems upgrading any large infrastructure.

      Still, its interesting stuff to play around with when you get the chance.

  • You could waste even more time... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chris_Stankowitz ( 612232 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:49PM (#8547514)
    at this site Phone related site.

    Phone Loosers [phonelosers.org]

  • i got the ill communication

    call me a llama but the beastie boys and some old school phreakers at hacker cons are the only references to 'ma bell' that i come across..

  • I live in California, which is serviced by SBC. When I visited Michigan I was surprised to see that my parents are also serviced by SBC. At some point I expect all these to be one company again, competing with Telekom and others off-shore companies.

    It's like watching the T2000 come back together.

    • Re:There will again be one Bell... (Score:5, Funny)

      by mph ( 7675 ) <mph@freebsd.org> on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:53PM (#8547571)
      I live in California, which is serviced by SBC.
      It used to be that companies would "serve" their customers. But at some point, they borrowed a new term from the livestock industry, that sounds almost the same but means something completely different.

    • Re:There will again be one Bell... (Score:4, Funny)

      by BdosError ( 261714 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @05:00PM (#8547643)
      "At some point I expect all these to be one company again"

      One ringy dingy to rule them all
      One ringy dingy to find them
      One ringy dingy to bring them all
      And in the darkness bind them.
    • Down south here in texas, we also have SBC. That sounds like the entire western half of the US right there.

    • Re:There will again be one Bell... (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Lets think about it:
      Ma Bell was this giant corporation that ran most the phone systems in the country. Definatly a big monopoly, yet by 1964 they had deveoped:
      Touch Tone Dialing;
      Call forwarding:
      AutoDial(granted, it was done by dialing 2 numbers, and the central system would 'know' who to dial)
      Pager service;
      and many others.

      So it seems to me that large corporations do innovate. As a matter of fact, there R&D far surpased any R&D that is happened at any of the small spinoffs from the break up.

      I'm not

  • Judge Green and the MFJ (Score:4, Insightful)

    by crumbz ( 41803 ) <<remove_spam>jus ... o spam>gmail,com> on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:50PM (#8547532) Homepage
    Not to start a flame war, but I think divestiture was probably a good thing. Does anyone think we would have 1Mb pipes to our homes if we still had Ma Bell?
    • Definitely. Not to mention cheap cell phones, cheap long distance, cheap internet access, and so on. And the system works just as well as it used to under AT&T, if not better.
    • Oh, we'd have 1MB pipes (1.536Mbps most likely) all right... you'd just need a second mortgage to afford one month of service.

    • Uh, let me think for a while... Yes! Of course. Most obviously.
      I dont know if you're aware that a lot of other countries still have these evil, gigantic phone monopolies. And we do have 1 Mbit internet acess :)

    • Re:Judge Green and the MFJ (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually, if you know your history, you'd know that the Bell System plan had 1Mb pipes on the last mile by the late 80s. That it took another decade is part of the disaster that was the breakup.

    • Not to start a flame war, but I think divestiture was probably a good thing. Does anyone think we would have 1Mb pipes to our homes if we still had Ma Bell?

      Quite likely we would have. Ma Bell has (had) a long record of pushing technology and responding to customer demands. (So long as the demands weren't for cheap service, or faster service. Ma charged as much as the regulators would let her get away with, and deployed repairmen and technology on her own schedule.)

      Not to mention that thar's money in t

  • This is from a print ad concerning the "Plot" to bury AT&T with a black and white picture of a bunch of people with shovels on top.

    We're going underground. Bit by bit we're burying our telephone lines in many parts of the country to give you better service.

    Our purpose is not just to unclutter the landscape, although neighborhoods will look neater. Underground cables are rarely affected by storms. And they're never kayoed[?] by falling limbs or wayward autos.

    Our service is good but we keep tryin

  • I week or two ago I found this
    Video from the Bell System's Pavilion at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962. It's fairly interesting and amusing. It shows such advances as touch-tone dialing, pagers, and autodialing.

  • Thanks a lot! (Score:4, Funny)

    by toupsie ( 88295 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:54PM (#8547579) Homepage
    "I have wasted an afternoon digging though this website.

    Well, guess what? You posted the damn address on Slashdot now I can't waste an afternoon digging through that website. Now I have to do my job and update a bunch of Windows 2003 servers because M$ can't get its patches right.

    Next time you feel the need to not waste my afternoon, DON'T!

  • Oblig Simpsons (Score:4, Funny)

    by da3dAlus ( 20553 ) <dustin.grau@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Friday March 12, 2004 @04:55PM (#8547590) Homepage Journal
    "We're sorry, but your fingers are too fat to dial."
    "If you require a special dialing wand, please mash the keypad with your hand, now."
  • i have always found the history behind telephone technology facinating... i dont know why, maybe its the phreaker in me coming out, but it is just interesting stuff.

    it seems to me that telephones were really ahead of there time technologically.

    the thing that gets me though, is considering todays available technology, why is the sound quality of phones still so bad? you would think by now they would have done something about this. it really shows when you listen to a recorded phone call or the sound diff

    • It has to do with how much the voice call will use on the loop combined with how much the phone company can combine and compress it in the C.O.(Central Office for the non Phreakers). They do this to help manange growth and costs. Just a question....why does it matter. Do you need that voice in stereo also.
    • the thing that gets me though, is considering todays available technology, why is the sound quality of phones still so bad?

      Cost is why.

      Instead of getting more hardware, they started using more compression. From a business standpoint it's a no brainer.
    • "why is the sound quality of phones still so bad"

      Mostly because it's Good Enough(tm).

      They give the phones enough bandwidth to carry the important frequencies for speech. If they gave more bandwidth to phones, they would lose total carrying capacity.

    • Re:phone technology history is facinating (Score:4, Informative)

      by rishistar ( 662278 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @05:25PM (#8547861) Homepage

      Well the biggest hidden secret fact is that Alexander Graham Bell did not actually invent the telephone. As was finally recognised by the US Congress in 2002 [guardian.co.uk], the inventor was a poor Italian immigrant Antonio Meucci.

      Meucci had taken a 'one year renewable intent to patent' out on the invention as he couldn't afford the full patent, and a few years later Bell, who had access to Meucci's materials got hold of the stuff and claimed it as his own.

      from the article:

      He sent a model and technical details to the Western Union telegraph company but failed to win a meeting with executives. When he asked for his materials to be returned, in 1874, he was told they had been lost. Two years later Bell, who shared a laboratory with Meucci, filed a patent for a telephone, became a celebrity and made a lucrative deal with Western Union.

      Meucci sued and was nearing victory - the supreme court agreed to hear the case and fraud charges were initiated against Bell - when the Florentine died in 1889. The legal action died with him.

    • It sound "telephonic" because the voiceband frequencies are restricted to only 3200 cycles. This frequency bandpass has been in existence since a technology called t-carrier (DS1)evolved in the late 60's. This was needed at the time because the conversion from analog to digital used a frequency rate of 8000 cycles. Nyquists theorem required at least two samples of the analog sine wave to be able reconstruct it at the receiving end. Restricting the bandwidth facilitated this process with the technology they

  • Re: Interesting... (Score:2, Informative)

    by SirASCII ( 694759 )
    Now [bellsystemmemorial.com] that is a funny 403 message...

  • slashdotted... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    it's too bad this bell page couldn't take the slashdotting. that site seems to be hosted on acoustic couplers, upstream both ways [userfriendly.org]!

  • not Systems. There was only one (until divestiture of course).

    Reach out and touch someone! [80stvthemes.com]

  • For a fee, you can order the Web site and additional content on CD's. I worked for Ma Bell until the breakup. Good stuff on the site!

  • Another Telephone system archive (Score:3, Informative)

    by stox ( 131684 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @05:17PM (#8547807) Homepage
    http://mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/ [mit.edu]which contains a great deal of interesting material collected over the years from the comp.dcom.telecom newsgroup on USENET.
  • I have wasted an afternoon digging though this website...

    yeee-ha ! free light for a month !


    sorry. Couldn't resist :-)
  • Text extracted from the comic strip 75% of the way down on this page [bellsystemmemorial.com]:

    Pierce (with nosering/earrings/cell): Great my phone battery is dead!
    Dude1: Dude! Do you want to call from my house Pierce?
    Pierce: Yeah, okay. Dude1: It's too bad technology today is so limited.
    Pierce: I know. There should be some kind of system in place which wouldn't require people to carry phones around wherever they go. Dude1: Yeah! Like communication centers placed in areas where people congregate.
    Dude2: And there would be indiv

  • Service Temporarily Unavailable
    The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

    maintenance downtime = servers are smoking

    capacity problems = /.ed

  • Nice, but... (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Nice, but:

    1. Ken Thompson had Unix running by 1983.
    2. Dennis Ritchie had invented C by 1983.
    3. Bjarne Stroustrup was almost in Murray Hill by 1983.

    Why no mention of them?

  • Memories (Score:5, Interesting)

    by brain1 ( 699194 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @05:35PM (#8547966)
    I particularly remember the Motorola Pulsar and Pulsar II mobile phones. Personally I had one of the General Electric MASTR-II ones with a local common carrier. Also I refurbished quite a few of them for use on privately owned systems as Ma Bell surplused them. They cost about $3500 apiece new, so they were the tools/toys of the rich lawyers, business execs and doctors, and not the local teenager walking around a mall.

    What you take for granted clipped to your belt or in your pocket used to take up a chunk of your car's trunk with thick control cables and a control head mounted on the transmission hump of your car. The things transmitted 25 watts of RF over 152 / 158 MHz full-duplex and could kill a car battery in no time flat. Coverage was spotty over about 12 miles and it had no privacy as anyone with a scanner could listen in. (and you panic about 100 milliwats out of a typical cell phone, heh heh...)

    Now they run for days on a lithium ion battery and you dont fix them - you just throw them away.

    • Re:Memories (Score:2, Interesting)

      by dave3138 ( 528919 )
      Out here in rural Minnesota, you can still pick these systems up with a scanner. The base puts out a constant tone which periodically IDs itself in morse. I haven't actually heard any conversations on them though....

  • slashdotted real good (Score:4, Funny)

    by Wansu ( 846 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @05:44PM (#8548038)

    I have wasted an afternoon digging though this website.

    Well, we won't. It has been slashdotted. Bummer. I like old phone stuff.

  • The new bell system (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    At the bottom of the page there's this:

    Charlie Stanley, an AT&T employee who was born in the year the Bell System died, created a hoax web page of what he envisions as a new Bell System.
    leading to...

    Service Temporarily Unavailable
    The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
    I didn't know if it was the actual page or the result of slashdotting :)
  • On the site I saw those [nord-com.net]in this picture [bellsystemmemorial.com]. Anyone here has a clue what kind of phone that is and who made it? Those or very similar ones are often seen as decoration in the IKEA catalogue and I always wondered where to get it.

    • Re:Anybody knows this kind of phone? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That is the swedish 'kobratelefon' - "the cobra phone".
      They were the property of the public phone company of
      older days in Sweden. Ericsson built them.

      Here you can see the rotary dial and the red button "hook"
      in the bottom of the phone:
      http://www.antika.nu/Diverse/Diversebild2/ kobratel efon.html

      It seems that they can be bought for less than 100 USD:
      http://www.tradera.com/auction/aid_5004226
  • I'm showing this site to my dad now. He works for Bellsouth (has been since '79) so he was there when Ma Bell was split up. Interesting stuff!
  • Look. My acustic coupler works just fine, as well as the day I stole it from the computer center at school. Why should I upgrade?

  • Here's *my* blast from the past.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @07:00PM (#8548628)
    I personally own a Rolm CBX II 9000 w/PhoneMail system and buttloads of RolmPhones.. Plenty of pix, http://www.systemrecycler.com/rolm [systemrecycler.com]

    Yes, it's my personal property..

  • If you liked this site.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You'll love this one: Phone Trips [wideweb.com] . Even has some recordings of Capt'n Crunch.
    • Yep. Love that site... especially the Evan Doorbell recordings!
      It's amazing how organic and cool the old analog phone network used to sound. The digital network is very boring now. I was a kid in the 70's when the network was still analog, and I wasn't a phreak in the true sense. But I do remember playing around with the phone a bit just to hear the sound of the switching equipment, etc.
      An interesting thing... My grandparents lived in a small town in Virginia (until my grandfather died in 2000). The

  • The good old days (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lofter59 ( 194522 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @07:11PM (#8548693)
    Boy does that site bring back memories. My best buddy in junior high and I were obsessed with Bell, Western Electric and everything telephonic. Spent many a day chasing after phone trucks to bug the guys, they were our heroes (blushes). Dumpster diving behind the exchange to find great racks of relays and stuff full of mercury and other fun things. Some of our highlights:
    -Made the TV news for building an exchange in my buddies basement from salvaged parts that connected houses on our block (pretty much his doing)
    -Learned how to draw that modern bell logo by heart- put it on everything.
    -My delight at finding a '604b' tool at the base of a phone pole (it was a dual ended nut driver)
    -6 button business phones and 50 conductor cable with funky wide plugs.
    -We could tell whether an exchange used regular relays or rotary step-switches by the sound on the line.
    -Many odd admin type phone numbers that did fun things- can't remember what all now.

    Yes, we were obsessed.
  • Is this the same site as the AT&T Long Lines site posted to Slashdot awhile back?
  • Hey,


    I'm still amazed, having worked in the telecom industry for 12 years, that every time I pick up the 'phone, I get a dial tone...

    Amazing...

  • The real history of the transistor (Score:3, Informative)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Friday March 12, 2004 @10:34PM (#8549664) Homepage Journal
    The Bell Labs version [bellsystemmemorial.com] of the history of the transistor differs significantly from John Bardeen's version as heard by Sherwin Gooch [geocities.com]:

    Sherwin Gooch's Account of John Bardeen's Lecture (Score:1)
    by Baldrson [mailto] (jabowery@netcom.com) on Tuesday December 28, @08:58AM EST
    (User Info [slashdot.org]) http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery [geocities.com]

    In any case, I'll check with Sherwin Gooch to see if he has any more direct evidence from Bardeen himself to support the controversial account of the hide-away experimental stand.

    I did, and here is Sherwin's response:

    Jim,

    Thank you for alerting me to your discussion.

    To provide a more solid foundation, one should be aware that I heard this story from the horse's mouth.

    John Bardeen himself gave a talk one evening at Altgeld Hall on the University of Illinois campus, circa 1978, in which he related various experiences surrounding his inventing the transistor. At the time, people suspected that the scheduling of this presentation may have been related to Bardeen's health.

    Professor Bardeen showed us the B&W 16mm film BB&S had made at Bell Labs immediately after they got the first transistor to work (and, presumably, before Bardeen's boss got to work the next morning...) I have seen individual frames and out-takes of this film since, but I don't know if the entire film still exists. The "rolly-cart" with their experimental set-up is plainly in evidence on the film.

    It was John Bardeen himself, at Altgeld Hall, who related that his boss had said that the "solid-state amplifying device" which they wanted to develop was "not feasible," and that, "even if it were possible, it would have no practical application." Dr. Bardeen related that sometimes, when his boss stayed at work past 5 p.m., the three of them would become very impatient waiting for him to leave so they could roll their setup out of the coat-closet, and get busy on what they, apparently, thought was the greatest "cool hack" of the day.

    I wonder who Bardeen's boss was. His boss should be immortalized in history next to the NASA manager who advised the last engineer withholding approval of the Challenger launch to "put on your management hat!"

    One of the anecdotes John Bardeen related was how he had left his set of photographic slides in the taxi which took him to the ceremony to collect his Nobel prize, and all the trouble to which he and the Swedish government had gone in trying to recover them. But their efforts were unsuccessful; the slides were never recovered. Professor Bardeen was extremely apologetic that he didn't have them to use in his presentation, and so we would just have to make-do with his relating the incidents to us.

    With my background in computer music, I found one of the pieces of supporting paraphernalia that Dr. Bardeen didn't lose in Sweden quite interesting. He brought along a transparent plexiglas box, approximately the shape of a 6" cube, with randomly distributed 3/4" or so holes (apparently for cooling?) in the sides. On the top were a number (6 or so) of black SPST N.O. push buttons. A small loudspeaker was mounted inside. (There must have also been a battery of some kind, but I don't recall it.) The box contained a collection of electronic components, their leads soldered to one-another ("tacked together"), and hanging in "free space." (He hadn't bothered to use a prototyping board or connecting strip.) There were resistors, capacitors, possibly some coils, and these ~1" long bar things (which were the transistors), of which there were 3. Dr. Bardeen explained that he had had chosen to build this device because it em

  • I am the webmaster of the Bell System Memorial website that was hit so hard today which caused the server to fail to serve the home page to many of you. Many of you have written to me with your comments, corrections, and additional information for the website and I wanted to thank you. As many of you webmasters know, running a website is very time consuming and this site has grown so much in its 7 year history that it is getting harder to keep on top of. I welcome any old Bell System related photos, soun
  • I see a lot from pro-monopolistic people, who reminice about how great it was, and use the lowsyness of current phone companies as "proof" that the monopoly shouldn't have been broken-up.

    Personally, I find this ridiculous. The fact is, in the two decades since the monopoly was broken up, every company in the US has become evil, slimy, and so on. There's no reason to believe that a monopoly would be any different.

    One thing that has changed, is that our government seems to be getting far more corrupt, and

  • VOIP (Score:2)

    by Teancum ( 67324 )
    This site seems to paint Ma Bell in glowing colors. I would have to agree that I considered the breakup of AT&T a huge tragedy, but quite a bit of good has come from it in many ways. My grandfather, father, and an uncle all worked for AT&T (pre-breakup... my dad quit and moved on doing other things with his life when he was in his early 20's), and all of them were of the opinion that AT&T planned on the breakup and deliberately tried to push their least profitable parts of the company onto the

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