wrote
Rod Speed wrote
wrote in message

AT&T certainly had Bell Labs but they were not
interested in giving the customer anything new.

Thats a lie with tone dialling and dialling for yourself alone.

They just wanted to make POTS as profitable as they could.

Thats a lie with Bell Labs alone.

Elliott Ness would recognize the phones we had in 1978 and
the only thing that might surprise him is touch tone and that
the Princess phone had a light in it. It took them 50 years to
give us a phone that wasn't black. The only major change in
all of that time was touch tone and that was for them not us.

Bull**** on that last.

It was really designed for inter trunk switching of long distance
calls and it was just an after thought that it got into the phone
itself.
Again it was mostly to save them money on operators, just like the
dial phone..

But the addition of tone dialling didnt.

Tone dialing was originally invented to allow nation
wide automatic switching of inner city trunks.

Yes.

By extending that to the phone they automated direct dial
long distance and got rid of the long distance operator.

That happened with rotary dialling on the phone. And
thats still supported on the vast bulk of exchanges, long
distance dialling using rotary dialling on the phone.

It was the same way the rotary dial got rid of the regular operators.

Quite different, actually.

It was all about cutting labor cost

Tone dialling wasnt.

and charging you extra for it.

Only AT&T did that. No one else world wide did.

As an added bonus touch dialing shortened the
time you were using the Originating Register in
the switch so they didn't need as many of them.

In fact the entire exchange technology changed,
it wasnt just about the number of registers.

This was about saving money, no more no less.

Bull****.

It was also the main driver for electronic switching.

It was in fact what made that possible.

When Sprint bought the Ft Myers TelCo, got rid of their #5 Crossbar
switch and went to ESS they went from 6-7 guys running around
across 2 floors of a big building cleaning relays and running jumper
wires to 2 computer racks and 1 big wiring hub that never changes.

That was due to the much better technology, not tone dialling.
And its silly to claim that the breakup of AT&T was the only
thing that allowed a move from crossbar exchanges. Bell
Labs was in fact the first to do a proper digital exchange.
So much for your silly claim that they didnt do innovation.

There was one guy sitting at the console drinking coffee and
a bunch of people laid off. The "Frame Hops" (switchmen)
went from 15 to 4 or 5 as fast as the union would let them.

Again, nothing to do with tone dialling.

The 3d floor and half of the 2d floor was
empty and leased out as office space.
It was all about the money,

Its much more complicated than that.