|
Posted by on September 13, 2008, 8:24 pm
If you were Registered and logged in, you could reply and use other advanced thread options
Arthur Shapiro wrote:
> All the talk about the mid 60s Get Smart phone suddenly jarred my memory with
> respect to something I hadn't thought about in decades. Perhaps someone can
> clarify it.
> In that era, I earned some money as a teenager by working as a delivery boy at
> a local pharmacy. I recall that at the close of business, they needed a way
> of having after-hours calls reach a human. The pharmacist would throw a
> switch on the wall (and for some reason I want to think it was a knife switch,
> but that might be my vivid imagination) and the incoming line to the pharmacy
> would now be directed to his home a mile or so away.
> This was in suburban Philadelphia.
> What sort of technology are we talking about here?
Either subscriber-controlled transfer, where the switch activated a
circuit at the exchange which brought the home extension onto the
line, or a simple external extension where the line was extended out
to the home as an ordinary extension, but in a different location.
Owain
| ![Switched Lines - Literally - In Olden Days [TELECOM]](/images/header.jpg)
Yahoo! 
Google 
Windows Live 
del.icio.us 
digg 
Netscape 
XML site map