AT&T Archives: The Step-By-Step Switch
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN uses it as a favorite old explainer for mechanical telephone switching.
What it is
A 1951 Bell System training film showing how telephone calls are routed through a step-by-step (Strowger) switching office.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2020 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec jetrink · 2023-07 · on “Hydraulic Steering – Principles of Operation (1956) [video]”
My favorite old explainer video, telephone switching (1951): [this video] About the Strowager Switch, which was invented by an undertaker who was fed up with the local telephone operators whom he suspected of diverting phone calls to his competitor.
Cites skrtskrt · 2020-05 · on “The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018)”
Worked at a telecom API provider and we were told AT&T still has a handful of these in service in the US. [this video]
Cites kristopolous · 2022-07 · on “The History of User Interfaces”
I was honestly expecting it to start with things like arithmometers ( [LINK] ), Cooke and Wheatstone 5-needle telegraphs ( [LINK] ), or perhaps a dictaphone ( [LINK] ) and what about the rich history of fax machines such as the Pantelegraph ( [LINK] ). Here's a newspaper being printed by radiofax in the 1930s for instance ( [LINK] ) Speaking of communications, there's things like Strowger switches ( [this video] ) which I think count because that's what people were interfacing whilst using the phone (this became crossbars and relays in the 1910s and 20s respectively) Relays and telephone tech btw is how Electro the smoking robot from the 1939 world's fair worked ( [LINK] ) Even if we want to limi
Cites kkielhofner · 2022-08 · on “DigitalOcean Region Information”
In terms of the cloud providers other than the big three/four (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle) most of your Digital Oceans, Linodes (perhaps pre-Akamai?), etc of the world are almost all certainly colocated. As others have noted the "big ones" typically operate with a blend - green field physical construction for the big and dense facilities combined with floors/cages/etc in colocation facilities for areas around the world with lower hardware requirements. Colocation facilities are interesting (I've been in a lot of them) and they generally (physically) fall in two buckets: 1) Repurposing of old telecom (and even telegraph!) buildings. CoreSite (a colocation provider) has a few floors (last I looke