Visiting the Connections Museum in Seattle (Patreon)

I was invited to film at the Connections Museum in Seattle. This amazing museum is hard to find, hidden in a still active telephone exchange building, and only open one day a week.

Inside, amazing technology awaits, with racks and racks of vintage telephone switching equipment, most of it restored and working. You rarely get to see these, much less to have working demos!

This is what it took to make the phones work and the networks scale before the advent of computers and digital everything.

We got to play the switch operator on a manual switch, calling from an old phone with a crank.

Then we followed a rotary phone dialed call through an early automatic electro mechanical switch:

Later, we graduated to matrix switches that can scale further, with walls of sliding switches. The sliders go up and down, reminds me of the Matrix.

It's full of relay computing, here to unit to decode the line number and actuate the slider switches. It can add, subtract and has relay memory registers.

You get to play with the panel that tests the thing. It's up there with the best blinkenlight panels ever.

And it punches cards too! This one punches a  giant trouble ticket.

Then we graduated to the pinnacle of electro-mechanical switching, the crossbar switch. All mechanical, non blocking, scalable, with memory.

And finally we made it to the 3ESS, a 1970's computer controlled switch. When I was at Bell Labs in the 1990's, the 5ESS successor was their pride. There was still one operating in the basement. No wonder Unix originated at Bell Labs. These things can't crash - ever. It takes 30 minutes just to boot. Note the very 1970's paddles, and the redundant everything - there are two identical computers with a sync'ed copy of the memory, so the spare one can take over instantly if needed.

Carrier telco and switching technology, which actually is my trade, is amazing, but you rarely get to see it. It deserves to be better known and preserved. 

You'll get to see how this all works in a future video. The meantime, they have their own YouTube channel, give it a try:

https://www.youtube.com/c/connectionsmuseum

Marc