Every few hours an old, reliable analogue electromechanical telephone exchange somewhere in the world is scrapped, in favour of new and inferior digital telephony equipment.
[size=8pt]To-day is kind of a sad day, and a surprise to us at FooCorp LLC (a division of Bar, Blart and Quux Industries Incorporated). Well, not really a surprise to some of us. Some of us always knew this day would come: the day the Bell System died. It really happened, folks.
Yesterday morning and afternoon the company cut its phone system over to a new "soft-PBX", completely replacing the crossbar system many of us have become familiar with over the years. Now instead of being greeted with a warm, scratchy analogue dialling tone and voice path at my desk I'll now be greeted with a cold, sterile digital dialling tone and voice path. What once required equipment to occupy an entire room now exists in a couple cabinets of computer equipment occupying the corner of that room. This also means that my Grampa's old Western Electric 500 rotary phone I have at my desk will now be, for the most part, useless (it only supports tone dialling, and only via Ethernet through analogue-digital channel units installed in each department. It bears sort of a vague resemblance to a present-day 5ESS system, such as the one I'm on at home/the flat [ORCHWA01DS0]. Yup, one of *those* systems. Ugly as hell and has sound quality to match.)
So, the plan was to pull out the crossbar equipment and haul it all out for scrap. (Art's probably still spinning round in his grave from the idea.) But I tried to I made sure it wasn't a complete loss. I hired my Dad's F350 and brought home a complete originating register frame (one of the three they had; still usable as far as I know), one of the line-link frames and the mid-60s era Audichron STM machine, with the three message drums (couldn't bring myself to see another example of Jane's work go by the wayside!) I may go back for the tone-generator equipment and the trunk unit later to-night, if they haven't thrown them out already.
Unfortunately that's no-where near enough to build a functioning exchange out of, but at least I helped save another bit of the nation's telephone heritage from becoming a casualty of the scrapyard of history. Perhaps one of these days I may try to restore the Audichron machine and bring it back to life...
So that's all she wrote, folks. As far as regular day-to-day usage is concerned, to the best of my knowledge electromechanical switching in the Vancouver/Portland area is now extinct. Unless there's some other old-fashioned office building somewhere in the Metro area with an electromechanical PBX (doubtful), we witnessed the killing-off of the last known living example of a critically-endangered species.