Seattle Telecommunications History Museum
telcomhistory.org
telcomhistory.org
I'm still mourning the loss of our Living Computers Museum, maybe this can fill that hole in my life at least a little bit.
No kidding :(
Fortunately, there's a chance it'll reopen in the future. They've softened their language since the first announcement in 2020.
I have to wonder what Paul would think about all his cool legacy projects being shuttered like this. Add the Cinerama to the list of things that I used to go to all the time, and miss bitterly.
It is my understanding that it was 100% dependent on periodic injections of funding authorized by Allen himself, and this was cut off after his sister took control of the finances.
Same for Cinerama.
Is the situation for the airplane museum based in Everett still similar? I haven't heard anything about it in several years.
And then south of Seattle at the Boeing Air Field is the Museum of Flight. I don't believe it's associated with Allen? Museum of Flight is alive and well, and I highly recommend anyone visiting Seattle swing by and spend a few hours there!
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=flying+...
It says " MUSEUM CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE "
I went here a few years ago while on a trip from Portland expecting to spend an hour or two glancing at out old, dead vintage telecom equipment, but... most of the equipment they have there is not only working, but actually wired-up and usable. They have several working vintage telecom exchanges, even, and the volunteers there will not only explain how these antiques work, but in some cases let you use them.
If you have any interest at all in vintage electronics, this place will blow your mind.
Possibly the best museum I ever visited.
That machine crashed hard one day, and it took a great deal of effort to get it even partially running again.
The higher the tech, the shorter the horizon as a working exhibit. Something like this depends on semiconductors that will never be made again, not to mention relays that require exotic materials and advanced manufacturing capabilities. Also, the 3E had few takers, to the point that spares are unobtainium.
The largest issue was replacing the pinch roller in the tape drives (last time I was there). That same drive was also used in the Dimension PBX, and some other gear. Also the rubber bands in the cartridges too.
The museum has a huge amount of spares in Parkway, and most semiconductors, even the weird shit AT&T used, are mostly replaceable.
But there is something true here - the SxS switch - everything can be made in a machine shop, same with the panel switch.
It gets harder when it gets newer.
Consider this, I have a 1989 Plymouth Acclaim, it has all of its original electronics, all of which more or less work - not only that, I can keep going out and buying spares for it, its a 33 year old car.
I think the restorability of old cars will be somewhat better than it might appear, because the supply chains exist to keep them alive in the long run.
Old computers are another issue, because the supply chains for long term maintainability just.. dont exist - so you're left looking for gray market spares in weird places, hoping you can find oddball parts that were often used in one off designs.
A few really fun examples of swap out projects I worked on (usually the first office applications).
1. One really fun one was swapping out what they called MECOBS (I wish I remember what the acronym stood for) but it was an old timey Cord Board system where there were a bunch of operators sitting in front of cord boards (think Lilly Tomlin playing an operator, younger folks can google that). They had a clock printer in front of them and it would punch a Hollerith card with the start time, attach it to a cord plugged and then punch it again at the end. There was a conveyor belt that would carry it to the end of the room where someone would load all the cards into a reader attached to and old IBM computer. Of course, we changed it to a new "electronic digital version". Fun stuff. I grabbed a bunch of the cord and jack combos.
2. There was a system for counting "pegs" on a cross bar switch. A cross bar switch was an old fashioned elecro-mechanical switch, it was noisier than heck. They had a counter, a mechanical counter that attached to a trunk and every time a call was picked up on it, a small lever would click the mechanical counter over. It was a peg counter they called it, it counted up the number of calls. Once a week a woman (always was back then they got the crummy jobs back then) would come out and take a picture of it, there was a little sign above it with the trunk group number above it, they would take the picture with a polaroid camera. Then all those would go to other women who would carefully enter the values in a big pager ledger which then went to engineers who would draw a graph to do the forecast. My job was to replace it. We put in a microprocessor that replaced the mechanical counters and you could dial into it with a modem. I wrote a shell script on a pdp 11/70 running Unix that replaced all that including making the graphs with a plotter. No code required, just all shell crons etc. Unix was a work horse and an amazing advancement at the time.
3. I was called to Seattle as it happens, to swap out a telegraph office to the new X.25 based Digipac system. I went to the office and met the guy who had been maintaining it for the last 50 years or whatever. He had a long grey beard and it looks like the PCB's from all the high voltage coils had mumified him. But he was a nice guy and when I said sort of "hi i am here from HQ to swap out the old High voltage stuff (10 baud !!) to new stuff he said, oh good I can finally retire. That was the most amazing stuff, all of it looked like something that Tesla himself hand wound.
There are a bunch of other fantastic ones like the panel office (a robotic like electromechanical office that had a giant screw etc.) and this new fancy High Capacity Mobile Telephone System HCMTS (later called Cellular) that replaced the old timey MTS (see old timey car phones with a giant box in the trunk). I also worked on a bunch of other cool automated circuit testing systems and eventually worked for a couple of startups that did similar stuff.
Definitely check out the museum, or just that old stuff, it is really interesting the ingenuity those old timers had, so amazing.
How is it that these types of museums are so rare when computers and telecommunications are so important?
Looking at street view, there's a sign on the south side, but walking on that street is terrible so I always crossed the north side, which is completely featureless.
I live in Victoria now but once things at the border lighten up I'll be visiting Seattle again often. Can't wait to see this.
Recommended.
Do not miss.