[GreenKeys] Re: Bell System History

[Don Robert House]

Thanks Ben,

Did you have any experience with the 205B dataset for secure voice or 
maybe it was secure data.  What was AUTODIN?

Don

>More trivia from Autovon.   You are correct in that the extra four 
>buttons were FO, F, I, P.  However, this was a later version.    The 
>four buttons were as follows:
>
>                                    Early     Meaning        Later    Meaning
>                 Top:            SF        Super Flash     FO 
>Flash Override
>                                      F          Flash 
> F        Flash
>                                      I           Immediate        I 
>Immediate
>                Bottom:        P         Priority                P 
>Priority
>
>There were five levels of precedence.  If you just picked up the 
>handset and dialed a call, the precedence level was routine.  If 
>things were OK, your call would go through.   However, if we were in 
>a nuclear war, and some of the network had been bombed out, you 
>might not get dial tone.  Or maybe you would get dial tone, but then 
>a fast busy after dialing.  In this case, you punched P before the 
>call, which bumped you up to Priority.   And so forth on up to the 
>highest of the five levels, originally called Super Flash, and later 
>Flash Override.  It was felt that the term "Super Flash" had too 
>much Buck Rogers in it.
>
>If the network was congested, and you came in at a higher level of 
>precedence, you might cause a lower level call to be disconnected. 
>At the time of disconnection, a tone was injected to the original 
>call so they would know why they had been dumped.
>
>The original network had four each 4-wire switching centers, and 
>each telephone homed on two offices, which was a neat trick. 
>Equipment at your base would decide, when you went off hook, which 
>CO your call would be routed to, and the other CO got a data message 
>telling it that you were busy off-hook.   This was probably an early 
>form of CCIS or SS7.  The whole idea was that one of the four 
>switches could get nuked out, and all of the stations on Autovon 
>could still talk with each other, although with reduced trunk 
>capacity.
>
>The locations of the four CO's were, and probably still are, secret. 
>The trunks went on coaxial cable buried at least four feet down, 
>over routes which were also secret.  The story was that the CO 
>machine were at least two stories underground, making them 
>impervious to all but a direct hit from a nuke.
>
>Ben Stephens=
>


--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts ---
multipart/alternative
  text/plain (text body -- kept)
  text/html
The reason this message is shown is because the post was in HTML
or had an attachment.  Attachments are not allowed.  To learn how
to post in Plain-Text go to: http://www.expita.com/nomime.html  ---