- A No. 101 ESS, the first commercial installation of electronic switching, using stored-program control, went into service in Cocoa Beach, Florida on November 30, 1963. (details below)
- ESS No. 1 was being prepared for its first use. The first commercial installation of No. 1 ESS was a 4,000-line office at Succasunna, New Jersey. The equipment for Succasunna was installed in the summer and fall of 1963, and system program testing began at this location in January 1964.
- Technical trial of custom calling services on No. 5 crossbar (Columbus, Ohio). Whiles the services were popular, it was not cost-effective to offer them on a No. 5 switch.
- First public (non-trial) offering of Touch Tone service.
- TSP service (person-to-person, collect, coin--automated consoles) first offered Forest Hills, NY.
- Federal Telephone System cutover (national internal network).
While most of the above are vital elements of today's telephone service, TSP/TSPS is essentially obsolete due to loss of payphones. Also, inexpensive or unlimited long distance service has virtually eliminated the need for toll classes other than directly dialed station-to-station.
No. 101 ESS, excerpted from the literature:
Over the years, intensive studies made at Bell Laboratories have shown that electronic switching systems are quite feasible and that electronic techniques are readily adaptable to a wide range of new services. Electronic systems also have many other advantages for the customer and the telephone engineer. Electronic switching techniques make it possible to easily change services and accommodate new requirements stemming from a customer's growth.
The system embodies a number of new switching techniques. Among the most characteristic are:
Shared Centralized Control: The switching equipment and the control equipment are separated. The control unit, located in a telephone company office, controls simultaneously a number of customer switch units.
Stored Program Control: Highly versatile control of switching and service features is attained by stored program techniques. Switching instruc- tions are stored in plug-in electronic memories and these are consulted and acted upon as dictated by the service demands and the internal system logic. This technique allows features to be changed or added easily at the control unit. It does not require any action at the customers offices.
Time Division Switching: The time division networks in the switch units keep to a minimum the space requirements on the customer's premises and enable simple and flexible growth capabilities within the limits of the system. Time division switching permits all calls in the switch unit to simultaneously share a common transmission path called a common bus. A cycle of time for the bus is divided into discrete, rapidly recurring time positions called time slots. Each time slot serves as a switched-in link over which a call connection can be established. Thus, when terminal circuits are to be joined in a talking connection, they are assigned the same time slot. Each switch unit has 50 time slots, so that 50 call connections can exist simultaneously.
This system included support for Touch Tone dialing.
Source: Bell Laboratories Record, November 1963; A History of Engineering & Science in the Bell System, Switching, 1925-1975.