Driving across America again for a DMS-10 [video] | Hacker News Reader

Driving across America again for a DMS-10 [video]

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I'm lucky! I get to play with a DMS-10 all day if I want to at work. It's a really cool piece of tech and seeing how little circuitry is on each of the MANY add in cards just reminds me how old it truly is. It has a two CPU system which swaps back and forth between the "cores" every day, and has a really scary "One Bus" error light when there's an error with the CPUs. Luckily I've never seen that lit!

Do you have a copy of the hardware manual for the thing? If so, I believe the Connections Museum would love to borrow it :)

I took a look at our CO and we have a bunch of different Northern Telecom DMS Documentation binders. Stuff like Installation Manual (Module 00 to 18), Volume 3 Power-up Methods, DMS-10 Family OMP/RLCM Book 1, DMS-10 Family Volume 1 Generic: 400 Part 2. We also have a bunch of old CDROMs with documentation on them, as NT started just sending documentation like that instead.

But yeah there are books upon books of stuff here, and Northern Telecom isn't a company anymore from what I understand, so finding documentation is pretty limited if you don't already have an in.

That equipment is still being serviced out there (it was Genband, but I'm not sure who now0, so its not completely lost.

Though the particular manual mentioned in the video may be unobtainium.

Disagree. It’s somebody’s job somewhere to have this data on-hand. You just have to find them.

I've been looking through everything we have (including the CDROMs from 2002-2003) but the main issue is that the publication numbers listed for the physical manual they need (03-4200) is quite different than the publication numbers for all of our stuff. Everything we have uses a publication number like 297-3601-450, so it's possible that installation manual is a separate, special manual you/the company installing the switch would have for the initial physical install and the rest of the publications assume you already have an installed DMS-10.

There's a chance we never even had that manual ourselves, if that's the case! I did find our original installation proposal documents - our DMS-10 was installed in 1989/1990 :)

Yeah, thats the rub, it would have been held by the Nortel Installers.

Do you have a copy of 297-3401-000?

Edit - I think the document we're looking for is IM 03-4200

Assuming the number is correct - the Installation Method documents appear to be NN-NNNN rather than NNN-NNNN-NNN

I did find some IM papers, I can look through them again tomorrow and see what I can turn up.

This is wonderful! I had no idea the museum, nor the Telecommunications History Group, existed. Having worked in Bell Canada for many years I had the pleasure of working on many kinds of switches including DMS-10s and also DMS-100, DMS-200/250, Step-by-step, crossbar, SP1 and PBXs including 701, SL1 etc (not to mention 1A and 6A key systems, Dataroute, T-carrier and many other analog and digital systems). Interesting side note. If, as a telecom technician, you were weened on mechanical switch systems like step-by-step, you really understood call processing at a level that carried well through to hybrid and all digital systems whereas techs who entered the scene at the digital stage didn't have the same (or so it seemed) level of understanding which made a big difference in troubleshooting CO problems.

Collecting large objects is hard. Once things reach the point where you need lifting equipment, value goes down rapidly. Linotypes and locomotives tend to be free.

I love love love the fact the title says Driving across America, and the opening scene is footage of them using air travel to get there.

Of course they had to truck it back, but it's just one of those things

The title didn’t say “driving twice across America”.

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