Ballard's stance is that it takes humans to connect humans, not machines

January 15, 2015 9:37 AM

The Hello Machine is a corporate documentary from AT&T that documents the construction of the 1ESS automatic telephone switching system.
posted by boo_radley (21 comments total)

Thanks for posting!
posted by phrontist at 9:45 AM on January 15, 2015

On a related subject, but it's interesting to note that a lot of terms we use to apply to the physical network that makes the modern Internet run (routers, switches, repeaters, etc) all originate from the terminology that applied to the original telephone networks, and going back even further the telegraph. For example, a "router" used to be a job description filled by an living breathing human rather than a piece of hardware.
posted by surazal at 9:56 AM on January 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

An ESS post on my Blue - Huzzah! My Dad was on the 5ESS team at Bell Labs and the amount of R&D and effort that went into these systems was absolutely staggering. If you weren't on a pure research team and had to dirty yourself with the commercial side of the lab, ESS was THE program to be assigned to.

So around the time 5ESS was under development the very first hints of the coming battle between packet switching/centralized switches and open TCP/IP/UDP were starting to come into focus. It's always been my contention that the enormous investments made in the ESS programs gave Bell Labs a myopic view of what networks would look like in the future, causing them to cede an entire generation to the likes of Cisco and others.

My Dad recalls various camps of argument within the organization as it grappled with concepts of QOS and edge routing and centralized control and could just never force itself to see beyond the horizon. Fascinating stuff.
posted by SoFlo1 at 10:16 AM on January 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

Seems like parts of THX-1138 were filmed in one of these.
posted by rlk at 10:32 AM on January 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Worth noting that the land line telephone network is still primarily comprised of machines of this era today. If you call grandma at her home, your call is probably routed through a similar system.
posted by j03 at 10:33 AM on January 15, 2015

Well, the "standard" story of how Nortel was so successful with its digital switches is that Bell Labs was too busy with 5ESS to do a fully digital switch.

Ericsson also built a fully digital switch; the original switch was programmed in assembler. The difficulty of programming the new generation of switches led to the creation of Erlang and the making of a another landmark industrial video, Erlang: the Movie.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 10:49 AM on January 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

All those components, hard physical actual components.
posted by benito.strauss at 10:59 AM on January 15, 2015

The telephone switching system was a wonder of the world when I was a kid, and now it's junk that really ought to be replaced. That'll make you feel old. Time to get out the old 2600 magazines and reminisce I guess.

Thanks for posting this, boo_radley.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:15 AM on January 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

One of my favorite things to do when I was feeling down during my time at Lucent was to go into the basement and watch the 3ESS that was running down there. There was also a massive 5ESS install, but that was all tediously solid sate. The 3ESS had relays, and it gave me much joy to listen to them clatter.
posted by wotsac at 11:16 AM on January 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

Immediately reminded me of "Dial F for Frankenstein" by Arthur C. Clarke. The world's phones all ring at once as the phone system starts to wake up.

It's been at least 30 years since I read that story, so I guess it struck a nerve.
posted by rock swoon has no past at 11:34 AM on January 15, 2015

And the film is beautiful. I could watch stuff like that all day.
posted by rock swoon has no past at 11:44 AM on January 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

They used O for zero and Ø for o! As in MØDULE 7O ERRØR 1O24.

Truly the past is a føreign cøuntry.
posted by moonmilk at 12:02 PM on January 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

I was really hoping it was J. G. Ballard the headline was referencing.

I'm kinda sad now, not gonna lie.
posted by ethansr at 12:11 PM on January 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Century 21 Calling.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:21 PM on January 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I was just commenting the other day that the Bell System was a technological accomplishment on par with Apollo and it's now basically forgotten about.

The ongoing replacement of circuit switching by packet switching in the telephone network is only hastening that process of forgetting. I assume the AT&T 4ESS's are still running, but there must be plans to replace/eliminate them, and with them the circuit switched trunks. That will be a huge change, and it may well go unnoticed outside the telcos.

My Dad recalls various camps of argument within the organization as it grappled with concepts of QOS and edge routing and centralized control and could just never force itself to see beyond the horizon.

My suspicion is that the Bell System's obsession with reliability above all other concerns likely contributed to valuing circuit switching/TDM over packet switching in the 5ESS era.
posted by kiltedtaco at 3:57 PM on January 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Latency and jitter tend to be a bigger problem with packet switched networks, and also tend to get worse with slower data rates like they would have been using back in the day. Routers capable of handling the traffic for a large telephone exchange might be problematic as well. The multi-stage time and space division multiplexing switches are pretty remarkable things for their time.
posted by FishBike at 4:06 PM on January 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Central Office that hosted our Junior Achievement club in the 80's had all that space from where they were pulling out the old frames for us to use, and a shiny new unix box in the basement doing all the heavy lifting.

Misty watercolor memories...
posted by mikelieman at 5:33 PM on January 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

i worked on the 5ESS at bell labs back in the day. it was my first job out of college in the mid-80s.

i remember the circuit vs packet debate quite clearly. a typical lunch conversation... new guy: "you could break up voice into packets." old guy: "just be sure to put them back in the RIGHT ORDER! HAR HAR HAR" (as if that was impossible).

my first group was a bunch of grizzled 1ESS programmers, who had reluctantly been moved to 5ESS development. on day one, i had more unix experience (from college) than my entire group combined; the 1ESS dev system was custom and unrelated to unix.

all my coworkers consdered the (all digital/unix dev system) 5ESS with deep suspicion. the entire US phone system was running fine on the 1, so why change anything?

the internal PBX phone system was incredible. camp-on, caller-id, you name it. several times i had other people say "why are you using email? call me instead."

everyone inside at&t was convinced that the digital future was via ISDN as a replacement for modems. the joke was that it stood for "I Smell Dollars Now".

this was just after the breakup, which most inside bell saw as a crime against humanity and/or engineering ("why was IBM spared?"). there was a giant building next to mine that had several thousand folks without any work to do. they used to be middlemen to the regional offices, but the breakup left them with no duties. i heard of vice presidents walking around enforcing clean desk policies.

posted by bruceo at 5:54 PM on January 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

Here in the UK, ISDN ("It Still Does Nothing") was universally available but was crippled by BT's Kilostream division, who were making a packet (ho ho) from hugely expensive point to point data lines and didn't fancy that changing. The company had even worked out that the control channel could be used as an always-on 16Kbps service, but never marketed it because of internal squabbles over how to charge for it (per-minute was The Way for PSTN, but how do you do that with no call set-up and teardown? But if you go flat rate, people will just use the hell out of it, so how can we charge extra?). DSL, which BT helped develop, was delayed similarly while they tried to see how to make people consume BT services through it rather than use it for access..."The Internet? It'll be like CB. It's a fad" said the CEO. This was the time that an internal presentation in BT showed that a single, Europe-wide, penny-a-minute tariff for all calls would be more profitable for everyone than the complex and far more expensive to the subscriber tiered by time/distance/stateline system in place, because of the cost of that system, but that got nowhere. (A friend who worked in BT told me that the 0800 freephone billing system went down over one entire Christmas holiday period, costing the company a million because they couldn't then bill the number owners, and that billing errors in general were a massive hole. But... too complex to fix You cannot overestimate the corporate madness of telcos.)

As for the film - oh man. Core store, Moog and banjo! Greybeard at the teletype! A big light that says MULTIPLE TROUBLE (I need one of those). Hand layout PCBs (sigh). Despite everything the telcos coiuld try to do to mess it up, the global PSTN was one hell of a thing of engineering. Still is.
posted by Devonian at 6:54 PM on January 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh Billing! I ended up in a related gig outside Lucent, that had a little side line in telecom services. One day I was asked to match our records for incoming and outgoing calls with the bills we got from some phone company. The sad fact that I found was that we couldn't match more than 80% of the calls, no matter how hard we massaged the data. Records frequently were offset by several minutes, and in a few cases - weeks. Some of our calls never showed up. Some of their records didn't match anything we saw (even if we only searched by source number and destination number). Of all the nightmares that job held (many) this was the most impenetrable.
posted by wotsac at 9:19 PM on January 15, 2015

Here in Canada, you can hire companies to go through your phone bills, find all the billing errors, and negotiate appropriate refunds on your behalf. I'm both amused and horrified that phone company billing is so inaccurate that an entire industry has sprung up to deal with it. But they don't have much incentive to fix it, and I imagine billing records get consolidated from a hundred disparate systems and can just picture the nightmare involved for whoever gets to try to make that work properly.
posted by FishBike at 5:56 AM on January 16, 2015