And in 2018, my phone line was cut and removed from the property, as the copper wire network was to be decommissioned, and on a day the copper was removed, fibre optic installed and never again will dial tone be heard, 2 sounds never to be heard again, dial tone and dial up on a 56k modem, RIP telephones, thank you for your service..

Came for the telephony equipment, stayed for the groovy AF sixties music

Last time i saw this it was on roll of film being transferred to video on a telecine unit i ran for BTHeritage

Back then it was a pleasure to go to work. I'm overcome with nostalgia for those days...

@johngellard1187

4 ай бұрын

Yes but then "work manager" was introduced and it all went downhill from there....

@msimms-lp5qw

3 ай бұрын

@@johngellard1187 Bound to happen once all the other service providers came into the market

@johnrauner2515

3 ай бұрын

That's because back then people mattered so there was a thing called civility which we have lost today. Today money and profits come first. People are just a necessary evil, to be treated as disposable items like all those fuses they pull with no regard to them. Corporate ethics back then were not damaged by the single minded profiteering matra installed by Thatcher who believed things would be much better if profits came before people.

@monteceitomoocher

3 ай бұрын

If anyone invents a time machine dial in 1960 and I'm off out of this dystopia that apparently is called Britain, i no longer recognise it as such.

@barbarajacob

3 ай бұрын

May I suggest that maybe the fact that you were younger might have something to do with it?

The jumps in sound make the music sound like it’s in all sorts of avant garde time signatures.

Astonishing to see the rope based commission/decommission methods!

This exchange had a maximum of 10,000 phones connected to it. You can tell it by looking at the size of the new permutation racks, or more precisely, by looking at the power supply current meter, which shows 180 Ampere of current. Our analogue phone lines are powered by -48 V DC, with a line current of 20 mA, or 0.02 A each. So, with 180 Amps, 9000 phones are connected concurrently. In many places, the limit of 10K phone terminals max has been a lingering problem until electromechanical exchanges have been replaced with the actual computerised types, which uses in-band DMTF (multi-tone) for dialing, and are capable of carrying caller ID information and later, ADSL for data and Internet. Very slowly the PSTN are being replaced by their fully digital counterparts. This change impacts the customers negatively, as all telephone terminals in homes must be replaced. In certain cases, the terminal needs electrical power. The wisdom, at this point, should be to replace this "last mile" directly with a fiber optic.

@MrCobo04

3 ай бұрын

I worked on a 20,000 SXS unit when first started with the company

@keithammleter3824

3 ай бұрын

Rayo, your calculation is clearly nonsense. not everybody will be calling at once - in fact they can't, because phone companies limit the number of trunks to what's actually needed. A general rule of thumb valid in western counties is that telephone usage peaks at 1/10th - so a drain of 180 amps means a total of 100,000 phones, not 10,000, assuming your 20 mA per phone is valid.. However, other equipment usually found in telephone exchanges adds to the current.

9:50 If my last name was "Lillicrap", I would change it. 15:00 E II R, 1968. That is a beautiful touch, one we will never see again. Farewell to the Queen!

Brings back memories! I worked on a manual exchange and then worked on a modern one until I started Nurse Training.

Theme music is class

The company i worked for disassembled most of the BT exchanges back in the 90's , the amount of money they made from scrapping was astronomical.

@Beatlefan67

Жыл бұрын

Yeah, and it went to shareholders and a big rise for the CEO rather than back to the country where our fathers and forefathers paid for it from their taxes.

@rockypupoxo

Жыл бұрын

@@Beatlefan67 Always the way mate , thats why everything is so expensive here is because the greedy bastards like the shareholders want bigger dividend payouts and everyone else can go fxxk themselves.

@glpilpi6209

Жыл бұрын

And in some cases with blood , WW2.

@EE12CSVT

3 ай бұрын

​@@Beatlefan67I just love anticapitalists when they emerge from beneath their rock. Cough, pension funds, cough.

Happy memories of commissioning STC TXK3 and TXK4 switches around Glasgow and Leeds in late 70s. Converted to TXE4 and then TXE4a early 80s then off to Saudi Arabia to commission PRX-A 205 and 5ESS-PRX #goodolddays

I didn't realise manual exchanges lasted that long!

@roachtoasties

4 ай бұрын

Catalina Island still had a manual exchange up until 1978. There were still some remote areas after that where an operator had to manually reach the number.

@geoff1201

2 ай бұрын

We moved to Upminster in the summer of 1969. The phone at our previous house had a dial, the Upminster one did not. To make a call we had to lift the handset and wait for the operator to ask for the number we wanted.

When i started work in 73 we ìnstalled new floors of strowger in various exchages

As a 40 year old, obviously I've never experienced this, but my goodness we came a long way and I must say it's refreshing to see this even though I wasn't around then. The changeover from manual to automatic exchange was really a very big project, no margin for error, even though there must have been a fallback. But credit to those who were involved in this. I wonder those telephone operators, the changeover to be honest meant job losses, I wonder how they transitioned to another job or changed careers.

@MJK1965

9 ай бұрын

No, they were transferred to other offices. They handled local 100 traffic, and 999 calls.

@roachtoasties

8 ай бұрын

I'm unsure of any fallback, if the new crossbar switches failed. They pulled out thousands of fuses. To put them all back in place I think would have taken days. :/

Nice video. Thanks for posting it.

I’m 56 now and I was trained on plug boards Plessy and monarch switchboards when I was working for HSBC few months I used to press system

The Party at the end looked good !

And by the end of 2025 that new automatic telephone exchange will be replaced by VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) system.

very interesting...

06:00 Cranbourne Gardens Upminster - windmill is Grade II listed.

Only a few years ago AT&T abandoned the buried copper lines in my rear yard and installed fiber optic lines in the front, & into my living room. Never thought I would see a fiber optic line into my single family home. That is amazing. I think by 1970 only a few long distance calls still used an operator in the USA. Now, nearly all that mechanical equipment is history. I worked with a man who had been employed as a telephone operator. We were just starting off at a rather low paying government job. I asked him why he quit a job paying substantially more, and was surprised to hear him say that he couldn't take all the verbal abuse from customers. He said it gradually got to him, so he quit.

Sad how the job went to the dogs - I finished up as a C3 (TO) riding round chaining stepladders up so that contractors couldn't use them! BT were never any good at utilising the skills that employees were trained to do - it pretty well all went to contract.

@David-uf8ex

2 ай бұрын

The whole country has sadly gone to the dogs now

Love the moggie 1000s. The rope disconnect method too, hi tech😂.

The narrator managed to say "Mr. Lillicrap" WITHOUT laughing! ... I certainly couldn't! 🤣

@john07973

2 ай бұрын

Mr Lillicrap top man, not a woke bone in his body and I bet he didn't earn an obscene salary

@sarajoolae8197

2 ай бұрын

YES MR LILLYCRAP - 100% ROCKSTAR!!

@sarajoolae8197

2 ай бұрын

DO FORGIVE ME MR LILLICRAP I MIS-SPELT YOUR NAME. - A TRUE GENTLEMAN AND LEGEND.

Nice!

11:54 It's interesting that they play dramatic music for the engineers to listen to while they perform the changeover to the new system.

I worked at st Botolphs telex exchange.. I use the term “worked” loosely bc most of our time was spent in city pubs

I'm legally changing my name to H.G. Lillicrap

@sarajoolae8197

2 ай бұрын

WHAT A LEGEND 👍

Soon the new building will be gone. The Exchange equipment went during the 1980/90. The lines where transferred to the system X at Romford.

@misterteaification

3 ай бұрын

So if the exchange equipment is no longer there, what has been happening there since the 1980s/90s?

"If only Post Office engineers were so attractive..."

@Beatlefan67

Жыл бұрын

We were! (In a manly way)

@nicholasm5465

11 ай бұрын

the out of sync soundtrack makes this ridiculously (hetero)sexist remark combine with shots of the male ('non-attractive') workers - but this was the era of everything being viewed through a male and straight prism - therefore 'attractive' can ONLY mean young 'dolly birds'. So limited, so fucking sad - such a relief to realise how far we have come from those bleak, dingy, blinkered and male-outlook dominated days - where a factual information film about telecommunications has to fall back to the trope of saying how sexually attractive are the (only) women who appear in it.

@gavc6442

10 ай бұрын

Lol 😂

@keithrose6931

3 ай бұрын

I prefer a transgender engineer everytime ! 😂You know where you are with them 😂😂😂

AT&T started implementing crossbar switching in the late 1930s & was already moving in the direction of replacing it with electronic switching at the time this film was made. It would be interesting to know why the UK held back for so long.

@dingo137

5 ай бұрын

They'd already standardised on Strowger and we're hoping to go straight to electronic, but the electronic took longer than expected. At least, that's the story that's usually reported - I don't have personal knowledge.

@hoofie2002

3 ай бұрын

Telephone take up was a lot slower in the UK. It only really accelerated in the late 50s onwards

15:32 crossbar equipment and racks looks the same as installed at Plessey Kingsthorpe Northampton summer 1973

@bobtuck5820

2 жыл бұрын

worked at Kingsthorpe in 74/75

@nickhubbard3671

2 жыл бұрын

@@bobtuck5820 I worked at Wellingborough as well. Learning cable colour code and Urdu slang.

A poorly trained operator shown at 9:18 - she pushed a plug home by the cord, not the plug. This causes cord faults - often frustratingly intermittent.

@geoff1201

2 ай бұрын

Some women just can't be trained 😂

this too will happen too when the GB/UK goes to fibre service in 2025....

This film is dated 1970. It says the exchange is the first to get crossbar. But the relays shown are the old fashioned BPO 3000-type that date back to 1950 or earlier that require periodic adjustment, not the maintenance free relays that other administrations used with crossbar. Bad film editing or was the BPO a really old fashioned government department? The second, actually - In Australia our then old fashioned government department phone company APO started installing crossbar (with "modern" maintenance free relays) back in 1960 - which was years and years after the Americans. they showed ceramic formed wire wound resistors of a design introduced about 1900 too.

Would Mr. Lillicrap have crapped in his pants if after pulling out all the connections to the old exchange, the new exchange didn't work?

Pity the soundtrack is out of sync..

There was a windmill in Upminster?! Phone training too 😂

@ukar69

2 ай бұрын

It’s still there!

@geoff1201

2 ай бұрын

There still is, and it works 🙂 kzread.info/dash/bejne/hGqtqtOspdbSn7g.html

The operators at the Upminster Exchange must have been lactose intolerant, since they only needed five pints of milk delivered each day. ;)

Amazed they were fitting crossbar in 1970 ?

@gregodianne

2 жыл бұрын

Crossbar was being installed in Westhoughton, Orrell (wigan) in 1975 /6

@cjmillsnun

Жыл бұрын

Why? TXE4 wasn't until 1976 and System X not until 1980. So Strowger or Crossbar were the choices.

I'm confused was there not a mechanical exchange before this type. A massif room with banks of spinning carousels. I thought it went manual to mechanical to automatic.

@intercity125

8 ай бұрын

That's the step-by-step they refer to - this is the later crossbar type

That system would recover more quickly from a solar incident or an EM pulse. Digital is not as robust.

@greenpedal370

3 ай бұрын

Rubbish. I've seen exchange buildings and overhead carrier systems hit by lightning which was all dissipated to ground with only the odd line card burnt out. The trunk network. processor, memory and billing systems are all very well protected.

I mourn the loss of this once fantastic country

@SoiBuakhaoRoutemasterbus

2 ай бұрын

Yes, i remember it well...... it was called England.... it has gone now, thrown away by our own hateful elites!

04.06: is that Jimmy Hill?

The commentary says "for forty years all calls including local ones had to be connected by an operator". Surely most/all exchanges would have been automated with Strowger in the 20s for local calls, with operators being used for trunk calls until STD. According to a Wikipedia article the UK started STD on 5 December 1958 but doesn't say when the roll-out was completed but 1970 when this film was made seems reasonable.

@daviemac9925

Жыл бұрын

1976 Portree Isle of Skye the last manual unit was disconnected.

Why not a TXE4 instead?

@seamusellis1450

Жыл бұрын

Because the TXE4 wasn't introduced until 1976...

"laying cable 😂 is an expensive business" -

No one talked about the women being made redundant

@ronaldmcmurray6274

3 ай бұрын

Who cares

@KarlHamilton

3 ай бұрын

They did, actually. Watch it again.

@anythingbootneck

3 ай бұрын

Don’t forget the men who worked the night shifts.

@Feakre

3 ай бұрын

You mean the women who they mentioned were going to jobs in other exchanges?

back when people would call random numbers and do heavy breathing down the phone. they were great days,

@mbak7801

3 ай бұрын

Not a good time to have asthma though.

Tell me what sat o lights do ???? And what happens if you stand in 1 over time in the center of it

@KarlHamilton

3 ай бұрын

Yes

People laugh, but I can definitely see someone from today-times wanting to call their kid Lillicrap. I mean, why not? But if you don't buy that I'm sure I can sell you on the law firm Weaver, Clark and Lillicrap.

New travel possible photos and EEG

It continues to boggle the mind how the Brits can be proud of so many things like being decades behind in their telecomminications network compared to the United States and many parts of Western Europe. Crying out loud, crowing about replacing a manual switch with a 1950s crossbar switch in greater London in bloody 1970??? For goodness sakes, U.S. cities were replacing crossbar switches with 1ESS switches by the mid-1960s and the only place you would see a manual exchange in 1970 U.S. was in a museum.

@tomw86

2 ай бұрын

You have to remember the UK was bombed, and had a much harder time of things post WWII than America.

Fantastic bygone era no DEI then but the influence of the nanny state was starting - totally unnecessary hard hats and safety glasses

You know the London economy they say exists some were they don't know we're they just know exists well so do I

@thecorbies

Жыл бұрын

Pardon?

Scrapping lockdown me any one ask no did that BOLLOX

Think it's happening again no