Vintage Documentaries from AT&T

[tooki]

I've been meaning to post some of these for a while. First, The Hello Machine. It's a gorgeous piece of filmmaking, now in the AT&T Archives, showing the manufacturing process of the first all-digital switches in 1974 (I assume this means digital control, since it was clearly still switching analog audio).

Some notable things:
- a soldering iron that glows white hot (what's up with that? is it a welder?)
- various steps of weaving core memory by hand
- wire-wrapping
- pick and place machine
- awesome synthesized background music ("bwaaa-bwaa-bwaa-bwaaa-bwaaa!")

Also, does anyone know what type of display is shown at 8:45-46?

[timb]

At the end, the music with all the dialing reminds me of that Kraftwerk song, The Telephone:

There's a few other videos on the AT&T channel about the implementation of that switch as well. It was a marvel of engineering in the day.

[SeanB]

Down the rabbit hole again with the suggested choices on the sidebar......

[Moshly]

Interesting stuff, Not sure about the display (you mean the numeric display with large rounded digits ?)

I like this one ->


I found this one rather disturbing ->

[joeqsmith]

I've been meaning to post some of these for a while. First, The Hello Machine. It's a gorgeous piece of filmmaking, now in the AT&T Archives, showing the manufacturing process of the first all-digital switches in 1974 (I assume this means digital control, since it was clearly still switching analog audio).

Some notable things:
- a soldering iron that glows white hot (what's up with that? is it a welder?)
- various steps of weaving core memory by hand
- wire-wrapping
- pick and place machine
- awesome synthesized background music ("bwaaa-bwaa-bwaa-bwaaa-bwaaa!")

Thanks for the post. 

Before Lucent, before heightened security, when Western Electric and Bell Labs were still separate,  I had friends who took me on a few tours in the late 70s early 80s.   Sad to see it all now.

[Richard Crowley]

Also, does anyone know what type of display is shown at 8:45-46?

It is a rear-projection display many from IEE  http://www.decadecounter.com/vta/articleview.php?item=989
Quite an ingenious design. Eleven or twelve lamps in the back, each with its own little lens and shining light through a portion of the 3x4 "negative slide" of the images.
The ten numerals along with decimal and minus sign.

[joeqsmith]

Went through many of their videos and there are a few topics I would have liked to have seen.   They were working on a speaker independent recognition system for hands free calling.   I think they used this system at one time to automate some of the college registrations.