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Northern Telecom SG1 "Pulse" PABX

Started by ....., March 27, 2016, 09:04:04 AM

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I have found many Northern Electric items on my runs. Last week I picked up a framed picture of some Northern Electric employees standing along side of a large metal cabinet with Pulse written on it. It was from the late 60', early 70's for $2.00 A lady I know who had worked there knew some of the people. I gave it to her. She was happy to get it.

AE_Collector

Was the cabinet with PULSE on it a medium dark blue colour by any chance? NE SG1 PABX system. Not certain when it was launched but when I started in PBX installation in April 1978 we (BC Tel) were installing them like crazy. Our first electronic PABX.

Terry

DavePEI

A couple of photos of the Pulse System from NE T-9
The Telephone Museum of Prince Edward Island:
http://www.islandregister.com/phones/museum.html
Free Admission - Call (902) 651-2762 to arrange a visit!
C*NET 1-651-0001

AE_Collector

#3
CRPF member "Keelan" has one or more SG1 PABX's. I sold him a console for one. I have two SG1's but not in my possesion. They are hiding in Phone Rooms in downtown Vancouver waiting for me to figure out what to do with them.

Terry

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Quote from: AE_Collector on April 02, 2016, 11:48:39 AM
Was the cabinet with PULSE on it a medium dark blue colour by any chance? NE SG1 PABX system. Not certain when it was launched but when I started in PBX installation in April 1978 we (BC Tel) were installing them like crazy. Our first electronic PABX.

Terry

Terry

Sorry, I couldn't tell you what colour is was. The picture was in black and white. I'll get a hold of my friend and take a picture of the picture.

compubit

Quote from: DavePEI on April 02, 2016, 12:00:33 PM
A couple of photos of the Pulse System from NE T-9
That first picture makes me think "Secretary in a nightgown"...

Jim
A phone phanatic since I was less than 2 (thanks to Fisher Price); collector since a teenager; now able to afford to play!
Favorite Phone: Western Electric Trimline - it just feels right holding it up to my face!

AE_Collector

#6
Quote from: compubit on April 02, 2016, 08:19:06 PM
That first picture makes me think "Secretary in a nightgown"...

Jim

Yeah, weren't the late 60's and 70's GREAT!

Here are some pictures of one of "my" NT SG1's in hiding...

These were electronic but supported no digital phones at all, just POTS Analog phones. There were 80 line and 120 line versions. This one is an 80 line SG1 model though only equipped with one line and one trunk shelf so only able to be expanded to 40 lines and 15 trunks. (I think) There were 120 line models known as SG1A's as well. Initially they had a taller cabinet but later versions compacted the power supply (again, I think) to wedge a third line shelf into the regular size cabinet making them 120 line SG1A's

Terry

AE_Collector

#7
And more of the PABX itself. There were two "gates" in each cabinet. One could be pulled out at a time to make accessing the cards easy with little space needing to be left between cabinets. In the late 70's I remember gong into the basement "Phone Room" of a very newly occupied high rise tower in Vancouver and it was a "sea" of blue NT SG1 cabinets. There was a single Leich 40 board in the room as well and someone had pried the Pulse logo off of one of the SG1's and stuck it onto the Leich cabinet.

Blue Cards/Shelf are Power related circuits
Red Cards/Shelf are Control circuits
Oronge Cards/Shelf are Console related circuits
Brown Cards/Shelf are Trunk & related circuits (1 trunk per card)
Yellow Cards are Line (Stations) & related circuits (2 stations per card)

Terry

Dominic_ContempraPhones

This was a stepping stone to SL-1.  It was an analog time division switch.  24 time slots per second vs 8000 in time compression and time division multiplexing that came with SL-1 once the BORSCHT chip was perfected.

Dominic_ContempraPhones

Quote from: AE_Collector on April 02, 2016, 12:10:24 PM
CRPF member "Keelan" has one or more SG1 PABX's. I sold him a console for one. I have two SG1's but not in my possesion. They are hiding in Phone Rooms in downtown Vancouver waiting for me to figure out what to do with them.

Terry

They're too heavy -- 1000 lbs when fully loaded.

Dominic_ContempraPhones

Quote from: Autonut on April 02, 2016, 01:28:52 PM
Terry

Sorry, I couldn't tell you what colour is was. The picture was in black and white. I'll get a hold of my friend and take a picture of the picture.

They were blue, as were the SL-1s, which shipped with two blue Contempras to match (not making this up).

AE_Collector

Quote from: Dominic_ContempraPhones on April 18, 2016, 07:51:47 AM
They were blue, as were the SL-1s, which shipped with two blue Contempras to match (not making this up).

I always heard that the two blue Contempras were shipped with SG-1's but not SL-1's. I have two of the blue Contempras that came with an SG-1. We didn't use Contempras in BC at all so guys usually took them as a novelty rather than them ever being installed anywhere.

Terry

Dominic_ContempraPhones

Quote from: AE_Collector on April 18, 2016, 11:39:15 AM
I always heard that the two blue Contempras were shipped with SG-1's but not SL-1's. I have two of the blue Contempras that came with an SG-1. We didn't use Contempras in BC at all so guys usually took them as a novelty rather than them ever being installed anywhere.

Terry

Rotary or Digitony?  One guy had an SG-1 and didn't know how to make it touch-tone.  See that shelf above all the 2-line yellow line cards? You ram a digitone card in there.  SG-1 was just to keep the money rolling in while SL-1 development was underway.  WE had the original concept for analog time division but never went with it.  Space division switching was all they understood.  A bunch of these were sold to GTE in Californie, only for them to become obsolete in 3 years.  NE owned a semi-conductor company and that's how they were able to beat everyone else to the finish line.

The call control multiplexing and quantization/digitization was tantamount to witchcraft back then.  14-bit samples compressed to 8 using an algorithm biased towards lower frequencies, with a leading call control bit and a trailing parity bit -- 10 bit frame, 8000 samples per second.  And the clock synchronization ... much more complex than VOIP.

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The picture of the pulse group finely arrived, I can just make out the Bell Canada logo on the front at the bottom right. Picture was taken around the late 70's give or take a few years.

DavePEI

The Telephone Museum of Prince Edward Island:
http://www.islandregister.com/phones/museum.html
Free Admission - Call (902) 651-2762 to arrange a visit!
C*NET 1-651-0001