The technology was Western Electric's 1ESS (#1 Electronic Switching System), and all 4-wire out to the handsets, so that conference calls would work clearly without feedback. 1ESS was a very bulky system. It was basically a pair of large mainframe computers running a big dumb switch fabric. The switch fabric is analog and electromechanical, using reed switches with a ferrite element so they stay in the last state to which they were set. That's why these were such big installations, even though they didn't have a huge number of lines.
Switching of copper end lines would often happen closer to the user, i.e. on base although some sites did have switching due to favorable proximity (i.e. Soccoro, N.M) or presumably function like a tandem (maybe this site?). You can see a little of a 1A ESS in this video (https://www.facebook.com/CheshireVolFireDept/videos/a-brief-...) and maybe some 5ESS in the background as well although it is too brief for me to tell.
Some undergrounds were dual purposed for Microwave pathing and cross connect (like this linked one), but most microwave was instead in above ground hardened facilities elsewhere for path diversity.
Some undergrounds had Echo Fox transceivers and switching http://www.coldwar-c4i.net/Echo-Fox/index.html.
Project Offices are an interesting related rabbit hole to pursue http://www.coldwar-c4i.net/ATT_Project/index.html.
Source: I own an L-3 regen bunker and have done a lot of research on them.
The frame at 2:22 looks to me like it has a 5E in view.
Were they run full depth from point to point?
http://autovon.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/BELL-LAB-RECOR...
Crossbar switches were indeed in use in the AUTOVON network for simple scheduling reasons, a number of AUTOVON switches were installed before the 1ESS was ready. Eventually all of the 5XBs were replaced by 1ESS. Some Automatic Electric switches were used at AUTOVON sites outside of Bell territory, these were at least semi-custom (AE just called them "the AUTOVON switch") electromechanical machines.
https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/da3386ad-a465-4e41-834e-354...
Also, Cheshire is a county in the north of England so the whole article was very confusing from the get go as to where this station was located. Here it is on Google Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/aEWT2L6QYqntYDDz5
Bolton, Kensington, Oxford, Coventry, and—slightly left field—Berlin are also nearby.
It’s a map of Connecticut, USA.
People just liked it better that way
… Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, oh Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks
https://youtu.be/0XlO39kCQ-8?si=SPHrV99reR579yPn
Very catchy, it was re popularized by a netflix series a few years ago, j don't remember the name lf the series tho
It's a Thracian settlement, and it had probably once been called Lygos too.
There were probably humans living here, although perhaps not in a large settlement, much earlier, it's a pretty nice place for humans to live.
Also Wallingford. I bet thats nothing like the Wallingford I know of (Oxfordshire Town)
This sign is just for the singular state of Maine. Notice the two distinct "Sweden"s, and that ignores "New Sweden" we have way up north.
The colonists were not creative with names.
Anyone an idea?
And that's just the stuff we now can openly read about. I can't imagine all the systems and redundancies in place right now... but probably a lot more digital with analog backup only.
Russia has a nuclear triad the same as the US.
1. Russia's submarine forces have been gutted since the Cold War. Poor training and maintenance has led to a slew of launch failures in recent years and analysis of their deployment tempo seems to indicate only a minimum number of submarines are deployed at any given time.
2. The long range strategic bomber forces of the Russian Aerospace Force are so outdated and vulnerable to western air defense systems that they rarely if ever enter the airspace of Ukraine, with the Tu-160 supersonic bomber lobbing cruise missiles from well outside Ukraine's air defense zone, the Tu-95 doing the same, and the Tu-22 only targeting areas not protected by Patriot missiles.
3. Aging systems, poor maintenance, and a lack of adequate funding has severely hampered Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces. They lack the precision to ensure a favorable outcome in the event of a nuclear war because they were designed for scenarios where dozens if not hundreds of warhead were used on individual area targets in an age where there were tens of thousands of warheads available for use.
All of Russia's "superhypersonic killer nuclear-powered unstoppable death machine weapons test" rhetoric is an attempt to fool the US into believing that they have something up their sleeve because they know that the US knows that each of the three spokes of their triad have been degraded so much. Russia also knows they can't afford to rebuild their forces, so wonderweapons it is.
They can't even build enough radios to equip all of their ground forces in Ukraine with communications gear and their megaweapons programs are hollow vanity projects.
Do not mistake any of this for hubris. Russia can still launch nuclear weapons and any such usage would be disastrous.
The doomsday scenarios at the height of the Cold War where 40,000 Soviet warheads could be mustered for deployment by a variety of difficult to stop systems to be met with a response of 20,000 US warheads thus irradiating the entire northern hemisphere and dooming humanity to extinction is all but impossible.
So unless the definition of "doomsday" has changed from "the extinction of all of humanity" to "a really shitty time where hundreds of thousands die in an instant" the doomsday risk level has indeed decreased.
Truly astonishing amount of money for defense against airplane.
Obsoleted soon after by the advent of ICBMs.
I was just having a conversation the other day about the demise of niche websites. There really are only about 20 websites on the internet anyway, rather than the millions and millions of vertical sites maintained by people passionate about their subject matter.
http://personal.garrettfuller.org/blog/2018/01/19/att-long-l...
Why would the workers be contaminated?
Struggling to understand the purpose of this station, at the top it says coax but why all the fancy cooling and contamination protection?
Cheshire, CT, also happened to be an AUTOVON site, which carried with it military and national security significance. This is why it was hardened against nuclear attack, including the air handling augmentations, decontamination shower, gamma ray detection equipment, and so on.
> The Cheshire ATT facility is an underground complex originally built in 1966. It was an underground terminal and repeater station for the hardened analog L4 carrier cable (coax) that went from Miami to New England carrying general toll circuits and critical military communication circuits
Critical military communication circuits implies it was meant to survive a nuclear attack.
Well, all I can say is thank goodness we're not in that situation today so that people don't understand the "why"s.
Aren't we?
There are a lot of issues to deal with going 2 wire to 4 wire to some kind of carrier and back again in an all analog network, and once you introduce some kind of hybrid network like PCM carrier and TDM switching any remaining analog links are only a liability.
Modern codecs can pack a lot more quality into less bits and with FEC.. so an HD Voice VoLTE or Opus VoIP call are technically "better" than anything used for baseband voice on circuit switched networks in the past. You could easily recreate circuits with dedicated fiber wavelengths these days and have the best of all worlds.
There were a lot of places in the world (and still are many places in the world) where the copper phone lines are anything but crisp and clear - lots of noise and hums and clicks and static. That's the rule more than the exception in some places. Now these intrusions are typically not enough to disrupt a voice call, but they were a major issue using modems and DSL.
Wow! New-in-box 1968 Converse sneakers must be worth a fortune. AT&T (or whoever owns the site now days) is sitting on a gold mine here!
Also, they run escape rooms where you're caught in the bunker during a nuclear event, which would be kind of cool.
Not that it wasn't sadly necessary... but it seems a waste of human endeavour
https://infocondb.org/presenter/richard-cheshire-the-cheshir...
>*The Cheshire Catalyst (@Cheshire2600)* (Richard Cheshire) was the last editor of the notorious TAP Newsletter of the 1970s and 1980s. (TAP was a predecessor of 2600 Magazine.) In his "share the knowledge" spirit, he has volunteered at every HOPE conference since the first one in 1994. His PHonePHriendly.Com sets up web pages meant to be read on mobile phone web browsers, and allows him to delude himself that he's still into phones as a phreak.
Project "Faultless": <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9R2Ok4_Ze3g>.
A surface structure mounted on springs was directly above the 1 MT shot, which was 3,000 ft (~900m) below the surface.
“Most sites included Gamma detectors that were designed to detect the radiation wave as well. They were redundant systems, any detection, overpressure or Gamma would button-up the site at which point signals were sent to all Continental U.S. sites that a blast was detected, where it was, the size of the blast and wind speed and direction. Sites within 250 miles of any detection would go to Auto-Lock down.”
Bunkers have different grading in terms of blast resistance and most of the AT&T bunkers were engineered for something like 5, 10, 15, or 20 mile air burst strikes of certain warhead yield.
The AT&T bunkers are mostly far removed from population centers such that a direct nuclear strike would be a waste of a perfectly good nuke. In reality, a directly targeted conventional warhead or sabotage would be plenty effective in causing major service disruption so I think a lot of the realities for survivability would be aftermath repair capabilities.
These facilities were not cheap to design and build. Obsolete now.
