Broadband ISP Photos → Old Western Electric Video

It's been storming here tonight and a combination of my DirecTv going out and nothing worth a crap to watch has lead to me surfing YouTube looking for neat stuff. I came across this video...

»www.youtube.com/watch?v= ··· ture=fvw

that was probably the most informative 9 minutes i've ever spent watching a video from youtube.



q.

Agreed!

There are actually some nice Youtube vids posted of vintage telephone related stuff.

I used to work for Lucent/Avaya here in Omaha which was AT&T and Western Electric before that. From the point about 4:00 minutes in with the copper core, we used to take over from there. The core would come in on rail stacked on carts about 6 feet high. We would take it and pull it down to the gauge we needed. From there we would tin it if needed, insulate it, twist the pairs together, jacket it, and then test and package it. We used to run millions of feet of cable out of our plant a week. A lot of the equipment we used was from the 50's. And most of that came from a plant they closed in Buffalo, NY in the 50's.

Archive.org also has a number of Bell System training films.

Cool link, I liked the "21st Century Calling" because it was almost the 21st century before we had call forwarding, call waiting, and three way calling here.

Yeah, that's a gem. I love the music -- doesn't the Phone Company write the greatest songs?

It looks like most of the other tourists weren't aware of the filming; look at the angry woman when the couple muscles in front of her to watch the band.

MST3K also did a number on it.

Nobody every really thought about a portable radiotelephone, though there's an amusing example in "Once Upon a Honeymoon" (also MST3K-ized). The angel has a rotory-dial cell phone.