TheBellSystem.net: a place for those that love the equipment of the pre-breakup days.

The focus of this blog will be old Bell System and Motorola equipment.  Sometimes I may get into other classics of the era like GTE, RCA and GE.  I'm a child of the 70s so this isn't so much about the Bakelite stuff but think more the era of the classic WeCo model 500 dial telephone through to the breakup.  Of course if I find a nice oddity I'm going to talk about it.  Let's start with one of those.

This little station is an Automated Electric GTE branded unit stamped with May 1976.  Was this for when they didn't accept DTMF at the CO but you may still need to send tones for some "Touch-Tone voice answer back" system?  That's the only use I can think of.  Still, it speaks of an era when DTMF was just getting rolled out to offices.  I remember that one office in Selah, WA (509-697) run by the Ellensburg Telephone Company would translate DTMF to pulse for their switch.  When making a call you could hear the translator in the CO pulse dialing (about 20pps) to the switch after the caller sent a DTMF signal.   Maybe not so strange, a lot of phones sold right after the breakup had obvious "Tone/Pulse" switches to swap between setting up the call and then using tones to talk to a banking system.  Anyway, it's a nice little station and I'm sure the top bidder will be very happy with it.