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Phone Diatribe (Patreon)

Published:
2024-12-08 02:27:08
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

I spent two hours talking about phones. I hope everyone enjoys that.

Files

Phone Diatribe RC2

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cathoderaydude Tip me: https://ko-fi.com/cathoderaydude

Comments

Jacob Alexander Tice

Gravis, your channel is amazing because you seem to make hours long video about the most random subjects and it's the best.

Freya Fractal

Honey, no shit, we would absolutely watch the unedited, rough cut of the Microsoft PBX, that sounds like our kinda jam

Funkmon

Make it the title of the video and see what the algorithm do. I will watch this while I clean my basement tonight so you may answer it but what's the silver lens on the camera?

Anonymous Freak

Well, shit. Now I'm wondering if our dads knew each other… Was your dad in the Pacific Northwest baby-Bell area? Mine did his 40 years there, retiring about a decade ago. (About the time of the company's fifth identity change during his tenure.) (My first job was at "the phone company" copying floppy disks for the rollout of Macintosh System 7 over a summer during high school. Yes, my dad got me the job.) Edit: Ah, less than a minute later you discuss California, so no, almost certainly not the same Baby Bell, so very unlikely they knew each other.

c

Talk about phoning it in.

itisamystery

very relevant, thanks Gravis! I've been in telecommunications about twelve years now and have supported dsl/pots/cellular but have been solely IP Voice focused for the past ten, TDM still comes into play occasionally with inter-carrier work but that's going the way of the dodo too now

Anonymous Freak

Well, GDI… I'd been looking at phone line simulators for a couple months now but hadn't pulled the trigger yet. There is (was) a Teltone TLS-5 on ePay for $135. As soon as you said "for less than $400" I immediately snapped it up to make sure I got it before this video goes live on YouTube and someone else snagged it. They also have a Teltone T-311 "Telephone Access Unit" that lets you connect a computer (RS-232 serial), to control phone line connections, including sending *and receiving/transmitting to the computer* DTMF, and even linking in an audio in/out source. So now I'm tempted to get that and build my own touch-tone menuing system. (Side note, I first typed "menuing system" and autocarrot turned it into "meaning system". That works to. Any time I call in to one of those, I do indeed get mean.

Mick's Lil Bits

How many outtakes where you didn't quite manage to say "butt sets" correctly?

Funkmon

Okay I watched it. I enjoyed it. Talk more about flash

E.J. Bevenour

2hr of Gravis talking about phones. Excited to sit down and watch this on the big screen

Allison F.

Seeing that TA924 gave me like ptsd flashbacks of my own time working for an ISP/Phone company. I've programmed WAY too many of those things lol

Jason Weathered

I knew about most of this stuff already but still found it interesting. Would definitely watch another 2 hours about all the unexplored asides you referenced. Loving the new video format.

adorfer

we have to get you some AVM fritzboxes like the good ISDN ones eg 7170, perhaps an Auerswald AS40.

Richard Thompson

I cut my teeth on the AT&T Merlin system (shivers) - then the exact same Lucent Partner system (double shivers)... I really enjoyed the troubleshooting aspect of phones - tracing down the right pair with a toner/wand... 66/110/Krone punchdown blocks... Those were the days.

omixann

Hello! I watched it, I liked it, if there were 2 more hours I would have liked it too.

HotKey

My ISDN line finally got disabled last year. Worked great since 1996 or so. It even worked during most power outages. Great video! it can never be "too involved". That's why we came here in the first place, didn't we? :-D

Fabrizio Oldrini

In 1997, here in Milan, Italy, I worked for a forniture shop. The owner was a computer enthusiastic person and he had ISDN installed in all the 3 shops he had in Lombardy, Milan, Bergamo and Brescia and they were able to do video calls between two shops, an of course send sales data to and from.

Michaela Pereckas

This was a great one! The perfect attitude for this interesting and complicated but also tedious and confusing subject, the 'resigned I'm gonna explain this anyway' approach!

Kerne

Phone nerds assemble. I've had a Teltone TLS-5 for years and will never sell it. (I did get rid of 4 Grandstream HT-502s tho.) I've been able to limit my phone collection to the most popular home phones, an army phone with built-in dynamo, a pair of lineman handsets and a refurbished 1950s payphone. Who here also has a lifetime subscription to 2600?

cathoderaydude

the teltone is just indispensable! jealous of the army phone, I've been thinking of getting field phones but it's a daunting field (ha) to get into

Alexei Wolf

Very informative! I love listening to you talk about anything really, you're really good at delivering information in a very captivating way! ISDN is just, yeah.. I totally get that feel. Way too complicated. I would like to simulate a line someday since I do have a bunch of Japanese ISDN equipment relating to PHS specifically since my phone collecting woes have been with early cellular stuff for the most part. I live in Norway and have a cell simulator for the old Scandinavian analog standard but it's kinda the same deal as the line test set you mentioned. It does work but in practice I cannot use it for anything other then testing the transmitters in the phones.

wathunex

Your video about the Microsoft PBX is absolutely not boring in my opinion. Could have been double the length and still I would have loved to watch it 3 times :)

Henry J

The reason I found online as to why it's called a "Butt set" is because you can "butt in" on a conversation with it. I like that definition.

[syntax]

your discussion about phones being entirely interesting *except* for what they actually accomplish sounds an awful lot like my day job. I work for a company that makes parking access/revenue control equipment - there’s lots of fascinating technology under the surface, with LF/HF/UHF RFID readers, magnetic field detectors, LIDAR sensors, fiber optic networking, SQL databases… all just to give you a slip of paper and make a gate go up and down. even despite that, though, I love some of the unique and creative problem solving I get to do.

atomicmike

I had attempted to get an ISDN line back in 2002, since I was too far out to get DSL. Turned out I was also too far out for ISDN… my recollection for the telco’s reason for not being able to provide service was that I was on a digital loop converter that didn’t support ISDN, even though the CO did. In terms of pricing, it was a few bucks more expensive than a single analog line, and you got the full BRI with two voice channels, but I think you only got one number. I think the price difference was literally the same as the cost of Caller ID and Call Waiting on an analog line, because we all know you’re not gonna get that for free.

John Salt

This is a nice tour de force. A veritable buffet of telephony! - I believe the tone you refer to as slow busy is fast busy a/k/a reorder - ATA = analog telephone adapter Seriously, this was like watching lay out a Thanksgiving dinner. Some phone nerds might need a cigarette afterward.

John Salt

Ha, I wrote, "...this was like watching (insert favorite TV chef here) lay out a Thanksgiving dinner..." but used brackets instead, so the text got stripped out of the post

Matthew Cooper

re: the Made in France thing, post-WWII skilled manufacturing was cheap enough in Europe compared to the USA that companies like Boeing shipped some production over there. I think that was over by the 80s at the latest though.

Anonymous Freak

1:04:30 - As mentioned in another comment, my dad was a "career man" at our local Baby Bell. 1971-2012.† The only job he had post-college. We also lived in a market that the local Baby Bell tested most of their new technology in, and as a telco employee, he got it as soon as it was available. My parents still have an original 1990ish Caller ID box mounted on the wall next to the wall-phone in their basement. †Annoyingly for him, he retired less than a year after his 40th anniversary, so he didn't get a full retirement party. They had a budget to throw parties for every 10th year anniversary, and retirements; but you couldn't have two such parties within 365 days of each other. If he had waited another 2-3 months, he would have gotten a company-paid retirement party, but he didn't want to wait that long - my parents wanted to travel that summer. It turned out that the budget for retirement parties was less than the budget for 40th anniversaries, so he got the better party anyway. IIRC, the merger of Qwest and CenturyLink dropped the party budgets significantly - his 40th was still under Qwest's rules, his retirement would have been under CLink's.

Peter Chomczynski

If there are any PBX collectors I have two I'm trying to give away. One Panasonic digital hybrid system with phones and one Samsung call processor that I really know nothing about

Anonymous Freak

1:42:30 - Yep. One of my early jobs in IT was as "the network admin" for a dot-com startup. A month after I was hired, we moved to a shiny new office. I was the "lucky" soul who "got" to do the entire patch panel for both voice and data. (And yes! ISDN PBX to analog phones! So it meant I had to do *TWO* voice patch panels, one for the ISDN lines to the PBX, a second from the PBX to the analog desk phones. I don't know why we didn't use IP phones, they definitely existed.) I got to the point that I could strip the end off the Cat 5, bend the 8 wires in the Cat 5 to line up with the patch panels, and punch them down in about 15 seconds.

Jonathan V

The last phone I bought (sometime in the 00's) has a slide switch on it to toggle between pulse and tone dialing, so they were around more recently than you might realize... granted it was probably designed in the 90's, but it was new at the time. I love this sort of "boring" content from you, the way you present keeps me entertained. I'll watch your other 2-hour video you're still editing too!

Eugenio Dorigati

I live in Italy and we use to have an isdn Line in between the ‘90 and the early ‘00, because my mother shop then can had a phone line for the phone and another for the fax and the pos as the shop start to accept electronic payment. Aaand fast internet! You can Connect with both line together for twice the speed!

Chris Stone

The 23 calls on a PRI is because there's a "D" Channel that tells the ends what those 23 "B" lines are doing, it's 24 total. ISDN was doomed from the start, partially because of the loop restrictions you mention, but more that it requires local power (so if the power is out, phone doesn't work, and in many places that was unacceptable or illegal). Non-cutting head, daisy chaining the wire so multiple endpoints share a phone line.

ManMachine

This was absolutely lovely. Thorough neurodivergent enjoyment was had.

Aerin Neir

this was an incredible video, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. your presentation style is engaging and you held my attention for the entire duration of the video. (pls show us more cool stuff)

Philip Tan

I was “the kids” too!

Skylar

I loved this. For anyone else who loved this, and has an interest in those big machines at the telco... the channel Connections Museum is amazing.

doink

Not sure if this was mentioned, but the 110 block was for phones that used repurposed/rewired ethernet cables. We’d wire up 2 or 3 Avaya phones with one cable. There’d be a 110 punch somewhere and it would go back to the main closet with the PBX. Ethernet is so cheap, it’s the Franks hot sauce of cables. Everyone puts that shit on everything. My doorbell and garage door opener use repurposed Ethernet. 1Gbps Ethernet would also do fine on a patch panel that used the 110 punch. We had lots of sites that did it that way. Cables through the wall, punched to a patch panel. Patch panel wired to the switch with patch cables. Most of the sites I was at were saddled with 20 years of tech debt. We’d buy like 3 or 4 channels of a PRI trunk to run a doctor’s office. The big call center/main(ish) office had an entire 23 channel trunk. We ripped all that out and switched to Teams Voice when the last Avaya guy left. This was in 2019-2020.

Simon Mikkelsen

This episode was totally awesome. You could do much do an episode 2,3,4 etc and go into the tiny details.

Charlotte

I love this 💖 also the ISDN section reminds me of a particularly blursed section of my childhood. In the UK, DSL rollout in the early 2000s was extremely patchy, and cable was a crapshoot, so my family was stuck on dialup for quite a while. That was until we realised that we could get an ISDN phone line for not appreciably more per month line rental, and AOL didn't charge extra for ISDN access! So I hooked up a cursed AOL-router PC that just ran the shitty AOL login client and acted as a router for the rest of our house. Truly cursed technology, but it was so cheap compared to the alternatives and meant we could download stuff without tying up the phone line 😅

zebby

Leaving this comment here because it might get drowned out on Youtube: I absolutely adore videos like this! Just someone passionate about a subject going on about it for as long as they think is appropriate - I just love it! Doesn’t matter the subject, if someone is passionately telling me about something, I could listen to them for hours. So thank you for two hours of phone talk! Please more of this!

Loading_M_

From what I can tell, ISDN may not have been entirely doomed by the technical issues. Rather, one important point to remember, is that telecoms run a long refresh cycle - so it's quite possible that ISDN just landed between refresh cycles in the US. The US built out their telecom networks early, and by the time ISDN came out, it would have been extremely expensive to upgrade all equipment to work with ISDN. Then, by the time the older switch gear started to give out, and telecoms actually started upgrading, broadband, fiber, and more modern technologies were clearly the future, so skipping ISDN made a ton of sense. Also, on the point of a consumer ISDN line offering 2 lines for the same amount of copper pairs - If only one house on a junction box wanted two lines, it might be cheaper to just run two more cables than to upgrade the entire junction box. Businesses almost universally need more lines, so upgrading right away makes a ton of sense.

Eric B.

Hey Gravis, my Dad worked for the phone company as well.. although he was a foreman and not really in the technical side. He would bring me home random equipment all the time so I could take it apart and see what was going on inside. He has an insane amount of old equipment at his house.. I think I will go through it and see if there’s anything you might be interested in. Anyway, that’s not why I am here. I am a nerd living in the eastern Massachusetts and convinced my Dad to get an ISDN line so that I could call my local ISP using ISDN instead of my regular modem. That process, with someone that WORKED at the telephone company was a complete nightmare. This was a little over 30 years ago so my memory isn’t perfect but I do remember parts of it because I was so excited. Connecting to the internet at a pure 64k was INSANE at the time and my friends couldn’t believe it.. but I digress. So, when the line was ordered my Dad kept me in the loop as to what was going on. The first major hurdle was that you couldn’t be more than I think it was 5 miles of cable distance from the CO (at least for New England Telephone’s equipment). So, they had to send out a technician to measure that. Once they determined that it was feasible from a cabling standpoint they had to trace your pair from the house to the CO to make sure that it didn’t have any taps to other junction boxes (for example if my pair left the CO and hit a few other boxes where it could have been used in other neighborhoods but was never terminated to a house there). Once they did that they would do the installation and drop on termination box at the house and give you the ISDN feed. Since that was just going to an ISDN modem I don’t remember any fancy terminating equipment. Also, there was some rule/restriction on using two bonded connections in a residential hookup. Lastly, this was so early on in the internet/ISP situation that my Dad told me we were the only residential ISDN hookup in our town so perhaps that was part of the months it took to get hooked up. The entire process was a shit show and I was talking to various linemen and engineers at the phone company during the process. I think I was maybe 16 or 17 at the time so it was hilarious that these guys were asking me about what I wanted and what I was doing. I had that ISDN line until cablemodems were an option here in which I was one of the first cable modem installs in my town as well. Good times. Anyway, I hope that gives you a little insight into why ISDN was nearly impossible to get out here in Massachusetts and some of the reasons why its adoption here never really took off.

AdamR

As somebody who worked at AT&T for decades, I was waiting for you to cover the color-coding scheme. You've probably noticed that your standard 2-pair telephone wire and 4-pair ethernet cable has a specific color standard. Well so do larger cables, even 1200 pair cables. I've had to splice some larger cables together and that's only possible due to the color coding standard.

HYKGOML

Please don't ditch doing the long form brain dump now and then. I am one of the people that sat and watched the whole thing. Learned a ton and clearly could see your interest and passion.