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What to do with late model and spare phones

Started by bushman, May 10, 2014, 02:41:02 PM

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Dan/Panther

#30
Personally I have one 2500, that's on my desk for the darn push buttons. I also have 2 early 10 button. I do have a handheld push button tone dialer but sometimes it doesn't work.
I stay away from any 500 style with modular connections, regardless of what it is.
JMO

D/P

The More People I meet, The More I Love, and MISS My Dog.  Dan Robinson

bushman

Thank you for the ideas. I at least feel a little better about having all of these. Now I have an some ideas on what to do with some of them. By the way, I rewired my whole house and shop and other outbuildings last summer and am using a 616 for my phone system and intercom system. It gets used daily. The wife actually requested a 354 for the wall phone in the kitchen. I even ran a telephone extension and a computer network port in the bathroom. It was supposed to be a joke on the wife. But she actually had me mount a 554 in there.

Bushman

Phonesrfun

Quote from: Matilo Telephones on May 13, 2014, 04:48:46 PM
Here is the device I was talking about. You can program the destination number in it by connecting wires.

The programming by wires reminds me of the old IBM "unit record" computers of the past (way past)  Does anyone remember seeing these things in operation?

-Bill G

zaphod01

I'm a COBOL programmer (yes, the language and some of us are still alive) and my boss had a 'unit record' panel sitting in his office for years. I still have a bunch of IBM punch cards in my desk. I wish I could have talked him out of that panel but he would not sell it.

We used to code on paper (I still have some coding sheets somewhere) and the keypunch girl would key our code onto cards. Then the computer operator would read the cards through a card reader and you would see if your program compiled without errors. It's so much easier to code now but the auditors have turned the process into a pain. They don't care if you write a crummy program so long as the paperwork is correct.

I still have nightmares about 'wire wrapping' on the back of Data General equipment.
"Things are never so bad they can't be made worse." - Humphrey Bogart

paul-f

Wow!  It's not often you see Data General and Cobol in the same post.  I spent a year of my tenure at DG as the corporate Systems Engineer for languages, including Cobol and RPG.

Bill, That photo reminded me of an IBM 407 my high school class visited.  While looking for photos, I may have found where you got the photo:
 
  http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/plugboard.html
  http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/407.html

When in college, I took several analog computer courses. They also relied heavily on patch panels for programming:

  http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/analog-computers/3/intro
Visit: paul-f.com         WE  500  Design_Line

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Phonesrfun

Quote from: paul-f
While looking for photos, I may have found where you got the photo:
 
All I did was to google "Unit Record Computers" for images.  It was in there somwhere.  :)
-Bill G

Phonesrfun

I have never had direct experience with the wire panels.  However, I have done many, many programs, mostly in high school and college where we wrote out programs on coding forms and then either turned them in to be key-punced or did it ourselves on an 029 keypunch. Turned in the deck and had to edit out any errors the compiler found (FORTRAN).  Then cross fingers and see if the program iteself runs after a successful compilation. 

My first accounting job was in a company that had unit record equipment for billing customers.  That's basically all it did.  Big set of machines, that took up a pretty big room in an ofice.  When I got there, I was part of a new crew of people and we got to see the old stuff phased out.  In its place, the home office had just invested in an IBM 360 and all the satellite offices had TTY machines with mag tape readers.  No paper tapes for us, we were modern.  A clerk would sit at the TTY all day long and type in very carefully spaced and formatted infrmation for sales invoices.  One after another, from hand-written sales orders.  A tape was built all day long of these and the same sort of input for customer payments.

Every night the computer would call th tape machine and pull the data.  What an ordeal!  Computing has come a long way.  (And maybe I have taken this thread of topic)
-Bill G