THe winner with the fewest dropped calls is.....

Don Udel (ETC) wrote:

> BellSouth and AT&T for two. Of course those may be "tiny locals" in your
> world.

GTE used to do it as well. I presume that now that Verizon has the GTE
locals that they do the same thing.

I remember when I worked for GTE, one of the employees, very dedicated
apparently, came in with his vacation pictures. He had driven across the
U.S. and Canada in his RV, and had taken pictures of the outdoor mounted
GTE Lenkurt transmission equipment along the route. I worked for the
division that made digital switches, transmission equipment and digital
radios. It was quite an operation in San Carlos, we even made our own
transformers, inductors, and capacitors. Alas, with deregulation we lost
our captive GTE operating company customers, and that was the end of that.

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› See More: THe winner with the fewest dropped calls is.....

DTC wrote:
> John Navas wrote:
>> We'll just have to agree to disagree.
>
> Translation: "I can't Google for any citations to back up my statement"

LOL. It goes get amusing to see people, not just Navas, base their
entire knowledge of a subject on what little information they are able
to Google. When confronted with the facts, they back down with the
"agree to disagree" schtick.

DTC wrote:
> DTC wrote:
>> Am I going to have to look for my prized "Notes on the Network" and scan
>> the pages that say that?
>>
>> You have heard of that book, right?
>
> Hint...it was a baby blue one and a half inch thick book with AT&T on
> the cover.
>
> Considered by hackers twenty plus years ago to be a very valuable resource.

Are you talking about the Blue Book, aka as the Bell System Technical
Journal from Bell Labs? It was where the MF signaling tones were first
disclosed, which led to all the phreaking with the Blue Boxes. An
Esquire article on phreaking revealed this little secret, and Oui
magazine also had them.

Ramparts (now Mother Jones), had an article on building a Black Box,
which was very simple, it was just a resistor, a capacitor, and a
pushbutton switch. It let you receive long distance calls at no cost to
the caller because it made it seem as if the called party never picked up.

Good article at
"http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/the_merry_pranksters_of_microcomputing.php"
with a great picture of Jobs and Wozniak.