5ESS Availability and Other News

[G-Man]

I recently spoke with an acquaintance who helped develop the software for the Western Electric* 5ESS. He stated that his employer, WECo's successor, Nokia, et al, is starting to layoff 14K employees and reduce size of their U.S. footprint.
 
He said that he and other coworkers want to help preserve WECo's history but there is no interest at the higher echelons.
 
He said that they are starting to remove three large 5ESS switches from their laboratory along with the computers that configured and diagnosed customer owned switches.

He further stated that they are available, however when I asked about software licenses, he said that while that might be overcome, the big rub was that since the support computers were also being scrapped, those switches could not be configured for hobbyist use and since they use obsolete hardware and software, there is no apparent workaround.
 
He and his other coworkers are also perplexed since there are still a great many 5ESS switches in service, either as traditional switches or as the front end for interfacing with current telecom technologies.
 
Also, I spoke with a director on the board of the Seattle Museum and asked him about the 5ESS in their museum. He chuckled and said that they kinda had one but it is not in their collection; instead, it is located on another floor and is still being used by the telco. Since it is still a working switch, the general public are not allowed view it.
 
*AT&T Technologies, Lucent and now, Alcatel-Lucent, part of the Nokia Group of companies.

[ka1axy]

Also, I spoke with a director on the board of the Seattle Museum and asked him about the 5ESS in their museum. He chuckled and said that they kinda had one but it is not in their collection; instead, it is located on another floor and is still being used by the telco. Since it is still a working switch, the general public are not allowed view it.

Well, at least, when it's retired, they won't have to move it :-)

Sad about Nokia's lack of interest in WECo history. That seems to be the way of the world these days. You get the feeling that profit margins are always shrinking, salaries are stagnant, services and personnel are being cut and when will it all end? Not well, I suspect.

We do what we can.

[leejor]

Just in case anyone didn't hear...the Communications Museum did get a 5ESS donated which has been moved to the new museum in Denver and is awaiting installation. I don't think they'd have room for one in Seattle. There is a video on Youtube if you do a search.

[segaloco]

Fantastic, hopefully I'll be able to pay that one a visit one of these days.  Luckily I did manage to score a 5ESS-2000 central control mainboard, meaning if I can build a proper edge connector breakout, I might be able to jury rig a simple 3B21 CPU debugger.  My ultimate goal with the 3B20/3B21 is to put together a reverse engineering toolkit so that when/if 5ESS software finally gets dumped, I can begin analyzing it ASAP rather than having to start from scratch on tooling.  Luckily, plenty of literature survives too, including tons of schematics, so between the physical board and diagrams, it shouldn't be too hard to tap into its pinout and finagle some simple debugging.