Re: "All the President's Men" (Still More Movie Phone Trivial)

>> Washington, DC had quite a few ESS offices when Watergate happened,
>> which is a different environment than "Wrong Number" or "Dial M for >> Murder." ;-) > "Quite a few"? In 1973-74 ESS was still relatively new as a > production item. I dare say that within a city most would be served > by panel or #1 XBAR, maybe a few exchanges with ESS. Anyway, in > 1973-74 I think most subscribers still had plain vanilla dial > telephone service. In affluent neighborhoods, many people might have > Touch Tone.

Yes, quite a few. The first #1 ESS deployment was, as I recall, in

1967. It started off slow, but DC became the first place to experience a major deployment, for obvious reasons. ;-)

The public wouldn't have known about it because calling features weren't promoted much, and not at all in some areas, until 1975, or so. Touchtone was available on No 5 XBAR in most of those areas in the the late 1960s.

The AT&T network policy makers deliberately held back on offering calling features in the POTS environment for a number of reasons. But, Centrex government customers in DC were offered the full array as soon as the cuts were complete.

My impressions of newspaper telephone service and hardware was based > on visits to a major city paper of that time. >> But, typewriters had come a long way, with correcting Selectrics. ;-) > I'm not sure when correcting Selectrics came out, but I think it was > after '74. In any event, they were a premium expensive model, > probably more found with executive secretaries than with junior > reporters. In those years, the secretary to a manager had a nice > electric typewriter, but those using a typewriter for routine work (ie > bank clerk or librarian) had manuals. (Remington and Underwood both > made very nice manuals in that time frame.) By 1980 things would be > very different, but it was a slow transition. Typewriters were rather > expensive.

Here is a ad featuring a Correcting Selectric II in 1973.

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I know, as I bought one then. ;-) The first Selectric came out in 1961.

Reporters may not have had Correcting Selectrics in 1973 but all the bosses secretaries, including the White House I suspect, got them really quick.

> When Watergate happened, the only mobile phones were those giant >> bricks mounted in the car, and which transmitted and received in the >> open on VHF low, where every sharp kid with a scanner could hear the >> conversation with ease. ;-) > There were only a few frequencies available and a huge waiting list > for mobile service despite the high cost. But in those days, when > more people were in a city, payphones were everywhere. Lobbies of > office buildings had banks of them (nice ones with a tiny chair, > table, fan, light, and closed door). Often every floor of a > commercial building had one too, in addition to the lobby bank. > For some reason I don't know, when Bell and Motorola applied to test > new cell service, the FCC sat on it for two years.

I'd have to look through my old BSTJ's but I recall the AMPS tests being conducted in New Jersey in the late 1970s. Chicago was the first launch of AMPS in 1983.

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Do you recall one difference between the way 'call forwarding' was originally set up and later on? People could 'chain call-forward', that is, you forward yours to me; I then forwarded mine to some other party; they forwarded theirs onward, etc. Let's call them parties 'A', 'B', 'C' and 'D'. People realized they could forward infinitly if they had enough co-conspirators to help them, and make a (considerable) long distance call for the price of a local call. The next generic of 'call forwarding' did not allow that. Yes, A could forward to B and B could forward to C, etc, but calls directed to A _stopped_ when they reached B. Calls directed to B _stopped_ when they reached C. Officially the theory was that persons calling A only wanted to talk to A. For A's convenience, his calls could be forwarded to B, but party A did not want to be forwarded onward to C or D. Or, so said telco. And originally, if A forwarded to B and contemporaneously B forwarded to A, it would start an endless loop until eventually all circuits in the CO were tied up. Telco quickly put a stop to that also. But that 'chain forwarding' was foolish anyway; people could rarely -- if ever -- make a series of short distance calls for less expense than a single long distance call. PAT]