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Working in IT, the vast majority of engineers and IT adjacent people have little care or desire to learn about phone or communications systems. Especially nowad
by glasss 6y ago
Working in IT, the vast majority of engineers and IT adjacent people have little care or desire to learn about phone or communications systems. Especially nowadays when Teams and Zoom take care of your VoIP woes on the backend, and AWS or Azure are always doing something way cooler than a PBX can.
I was lucky to work alongside an enterprise PBX architect and not only learn about phone systems, but come to appreciate the history of them as well. One of the more interesting things to me has always been the amount of accessibility that gets designed into phone systems. TTY, translation services, different languages, etc. It's something that always reminds me we're designing and dealing with a wide variety of humans that I don't get when designing a network.
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoI built PBX software as VoIP took over. Parallelizing virtual telephony timing with CPU virtualization was a fun and challenging project. It is amazing to me how few people understand the transition from phreaking to hacking culture... 2600 at least should be taught in every CS degree program as a footnote of the industry...
- rootsudo 6y agoFor the tone: No one cares about blue boxing, beige boxing or the old tales of cap'n crunch unless you bring up how he was banned/potential pedo. For the culture: 2600 magazines are also considered contraband in many parts of the world, and also stopped distribution, turns out if many fans of your work are pirates, it may be hard to have circulation.
- EvanAnderson 6y agoThe lesson about in-band vs. out-of-band signaling is a good one, even if the specifics of blue boxing aren't discussed. The evolution of panel-pulsing to MF to SS7 is interesting, and knowing some of that history provides context to why some things are the way they are today in voice telephony.
- drewzero1 6y agoA couple of years ago I converted a telephone handset into a lineman's handset to troubleshoot the PBX system at work. As a kid I'd always marveled at how two-way voice (and data!) communication and numbers could be transmitted over four wires, and it really blew my mind when I learned that just two are being used per line. We had pulse-tone rotary phones which were simple enough to understand - just count the pulses. I'm still working on completely grasping the combined tones used in touch-tone dialing, specifically the way they would have been interpreted at the switchboard before the introduction of digital PBX systems.
- mark-r 6y agoI loved being able to dial a number just by clicking the hang-up button fast enough and counting. Unfortunately pulse dialing is obsolete enough that you'd have a hard time finding a system where that still works.