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Comment by merlynkline | Hacker News Reader

Before modern digital electronics, telephone numbers were literal routes - when the turned dial on your phone ran back to zero, a corresponding 10-pole motorised rotary switch at the exchange turned and connected you to one of 10 lines. This connected you to another such rotary switch for the next digit, until eventually you were connected to the final destination. The ingenious Strowger exchange.

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And when there was a bug in that complex and vast routing system somewhere, it was completely unfixable. Not without million-dollar hardware replacements at least.

It's really surprising to me how little uptake 2600 ultimately ended up having.

Also, every phone had its own physical circuit to the exchange, leading to things like this: https://i.redd.it/ugvoc90k4q5a1.jpg

Crazy. There is also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Stockholm_telephone_tower#...

Generally yes and even today, if you've got a twisted pair, it's that down to the exchange. Though party lines were also a thing a very long time ago.

There were also specialist circuits (e.g. EPS) where you had a physical line from end to end (with a couple of amps along the way on longer runs).

That mention of EPS takes me back, we used to use it all over the place to form basic hub-and-spoke networks in areas where we had lots of small sites that would all connect to a single exchange. It would generally bounce along at 2Mbps which wasn't bad in those days.

We also had some large campus type sites where we would sometimes implement EPS to do LAN extension over the onsite twisted pair as it was cheaper than installing fibre and just about fast enough.

Invented by a paranoid undertaker out of business interest, apparently:

"Strowger, an undertaker, was motivated to invent an automatic telephone exchange after becoming convinced that the manual telephone exchange operators were deliberately interfering with his calls, leading to loss of business."

I wonder if the phone company was actually out to get him!

I've heard this story before and it included the detail that his competitor's wife worked as an operator at the exchange, and his worry was she would direct calls for an undertaker to her husband instead of himself.

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