No, panel didn't make there. Los Angeles was a special case,
> apparently from a mixture of companies, and was step-by-step. I don't
> know the history, but I believe some efforts at a 'poor man's common
> control' was applied to their SxS.
The Los Angeles area had a variety of telephone companies. Two which come to mind, besides the Bell company, were the Sunjand-Tujunga Telephone Company and the California Water and Telephone Company. There were so mamy companies that it was common to see want ads seeking such things as an experienced telephone switchman or an experioenced installer or repairman.
The entire area was SxS into the 1930s and mostly in the 1940s.
They developed senders to put in front of the switches to do translations and other functions since the limitations of SxS surpassed the ability of SxS to route calls in the complex and growing area.
London, England, was all step with senders, too, even later than Los Angeles.
Oddly, LA SxS was an early applicator of ANI and call recording. Back
> in the 1940s they had printing tapes automatically tracking short-
> distance dialed toll calls. But I think the ANI they used was
> cumbersome and expensive.
The L.A. area had operator toll dialing in the 1920. The senders made it fairly easy to add other features.
DDD was later added to many all or predominantly step offices, not just in Los Angeles but all over the country. Oklahoma City and Tulsa both got DDD th9s way; I think Dallas, too. It was called Centralized Automatic Message Accounting (CAMA). The Dial 1 for DDD rule fit this application exactly, since on the "1" dial pull the call was trunked directly to the CAMA equipment which handled all subscequent digits.
Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com snipped-for-privacy@aol.com