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Comment by proactivesvcs | Hacker News Reader

I live in a village of similar population in the UK and our telephone exchange looks just like a bungalow, situated on the end of a road dotted with similar houses. It's set back further from the road with tall hedging but I managed to cycle past it for eight years without even realising what it was. Weird, but in an opposing way :-)

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Another example: here is a water pumping station disguised as a home in Raleigh, NC: http://wunc.org/post/video-whats-inside-house-wade-avenue

In the days of Strowger switches, their clacking racket would have blasted you from the bike ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strowger_switch

I doubt it. I walked past a large strowger exchange building as a school kid every day in the UK heard nothing from outside.

Wild stuff, never knew about these old mechanisms. Doesn't seem too loud however. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNNKLuM8yY8

A room full of those, piled up in columns/towers seven or eight feet tall, gets pretty loud.

But yeah, as mentioned, a building with decent insulation can contain the noise. A flimsy cottage, probably not.

Try https://archive.org/details/EastLangtonUax13TelephoneExchang... That's a standard UK rural exchange. Capacity 100 lines! The last few decomissioned went, in full working condition, to museums.

Background noise is the motors for the tone generator, probably the cable compressor too. The louder noises are the call routing and reset. Background noise would normally be a fair bit louder - I'm guessing he had mic right up against the rack for this.

Or a town exchange: https://youtu.be/xUOh9fCSgqw

Towns had much larger exchanges, and they were loud. Probably enough to have hearing loss if you worked there. Only visited one once, decades ago.

Also had a distinctive smell - machine oil, burnt electrics (50v), solvents. Lovely.

What an irony that this was invented to prevent fiddling about with things, considering how fouled up it all got.

People used to enter those and document what was inside. That was stopping at the end of the 1990s, but 9/11 really made it trickier to do.

I think somewhere on textfiles.com there's a file by possibly kelticphr0st about those buildings.

If you've got time, I would be really interested in this ;-)

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