Mikes Vid! th-cam.com/video/tPT6nIRFI_I/w-d-xo.html The Backing Songs Available here :- www.patreon.com/posts/megamix-8-pt1-59898141 PS not to be mistaken with Magnetic core memory, which is read and write, this is more like how a rom would be programmed. Does anyone have any other examples of rope core memory being used in products? (im not talking about fancy computers, spaceships, telephone exchanges etc, but legit domestic appliances where the user is not necessarily an engineer), im interested if there are any others about!!! so lots of thoughts going round on this! like mentionned in the video chris said about small business or hotel use, however also the idea of confidentiallity being a thing, however there is no lock, and anyone can decode it as the program codes are shared on the underside of the top of the case. Also you can hear the relay clicking, who knows! if anyone has more info fill in the blanks below :)
I used to work with magnetic core memory at Allen Bradley industrial automation. Really robust in the factory environment, but it had a destructive read, so you had to read data then write it back again. 4K was the size of a book, like a Christmas annual. I have never heard of rope core being used outside of NASA, sorry.
I worked on a project for a domestic controller that I built a couple of years ago and the safety standard that it had to comply to was written assuming that you had some kind of clever toaster with ring core memory (from the 80s!). As such it assumed that you had a tiny amount of memory and you had to check every cell of the memory - probably not too much of an issue with a 16x16 array but when you have 3Mb in multiple pages it became quite an effort! The clever bit was checking an area of memory, temporarily moving the running application into the checked area, checking the normal location and then moving it back again.
from a comment on mike's video: @Leo's Bag of Tricks Love this! Reminds me of the "Tormat" memory used in Seeburg Jukeboxes to remember the song selections. Tormat = toroid matrix.
It's quite curious, that in Russian even to this day process of flashing the firmware into a device is called "прошивка" - "sewing in", back from the early days of computing when workers were "sewing" together core rope memory banks.
This instantly reminded me of the memory banks in the Apollo Guidance Computer, like you mention in the video. All the ROM is woven copperwires and ferrite rings. Amazing technology.
not sure if those where ferrite, from what i have seen there where extremely tiny, like 2 mm or in that range, rather to small for the sintered metal proces.
What amazes me more is how the lunar lander managed the command module that was orbiting the moon. The luna module launched from the moon and met with an orbiting vessel moving at 3000 mph. It did this using nothing more than eadar blips and a telescope. Also the lunar module was encapsulated in some places by tin foil to protect itself from the harshest environment known. I'd love to see them test the navigation system lol
@@mrfunnynames1742 true, soooooo many things could go wrong here... One tiny miscalculation or unforeseen change in conditions, and we wouldn't see Buzz and Neil back home! Scary stuff, isn't it?
@@KeritechElectronics I k ow radar blips and a telescope and meeting and attaching to something travelling at 10 times the speed of a regular passenger plane. Its a miracle it truly is. 🙏 . I studied engineering at university and something like this succeeding is similar to a series of genetic mutations leading to evolution. Nasa took a huge risk but against all odds they certainly did come home. God bless America.
I used to work for a company that supported a number of System X telephone exchanges in the USSR. We had to modify the line card hardware as it turned out that the way that a typical Russian lets the phone company know that there is an issue with their line is by applying mains voltage to it! Crazy Russian bar stewards.
I've never heard of it though I was born in Russia and I've been living there most of my life. Sounds really crazy and at the same time it's likely true
Wow! I thought about the same thing for a while but never actually did. There was no reason for that, I didn't want to destroy some critical equipment. Now it's weird to hear someone doing that on purpose) Well, if your provider (or a government) doesn't give a spark, then this is definitely a way to leave a feedback (literally. haha)
“This won’t work with a modern phone system, so let’s just wire it up to this 1980s phone exchange I just happen to have behind me” 😆 The modern phone line in my old house still worked with an old rotary dial phone. It even rang the bell if there was an incoming call. Now I live in a house that has fibre optic and can’t even have a copper line even if I wanted one.
oddly enough I was browsing the web looking into a way to connect up a functional telephone display. I found there is some bluetooth adapter that plugs in series onto the back of your phone that makes it bluetooth extention of your cellphone. The Adapter has to be plugged into a power outlet. I dont remember the name but look for rotary phone bluetooth adapter. Have a good day.
That method of storing program data was pretty common thing In Russia. Today in Russian language the process of flashing firmware and a firmware in general is called "stitching".
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER Personally i don't know any. Just that ferrites was an old computer thing. But USSR had a lot of electronic factories that produced their own stuff independently, so it is possible that there is more similar devices.
Well you got it wrong, the verb "прошить" is used as a synonym of the English verb "to patch". Translations are very similar, indeed, but the etymology is totally different. The same verb (to patch) is still used by the Western software developers. The origin of this slang term dates to the perforated paper tape era. In that time if you punched a tape and when realised that some part of it is wrong (has a bug), you would not re-punch an entire tape. Instead, you would fix and re-punch only a small piece of it. Then you would cut off the wrong piece from the original tape and glue a piece with a debugged code -- in other words, you would make *a patch* in the tape. Hence the name. We still refer a software fix as a "patch". Russian verb "прошить" has the same origins and it doesn't deal with wires.
@@00ffdc NO. It means neither patch nor stitch (but much closer to the 2nd). Literal translation is “pierce”. Can be also translated as “sew through”. It doesn’t have the same roots as “patch”.
@@smackbug9973 Soviet tech lagged behind west by 5-15 years. We had DIY computers in the middle-late 80s and ZX Spectrum and famiclone boom in the early 90s.
haha yeah i probably should doanother channel forthe phone tech stuff! but hey, its nice to keep the vids diverse, still a lot of music related vids :D
Greetings from Russia, Sam! :) Wanted to elaborate a little bit on that thing, but you pretty much explained it yourself. Indeed, it was never meant to be sold for domestic use. In fact I don't think it was shipped to any shops at all. Also, technically there wasn't such thing as "small businesses" in USSR, as all the manufacturing in the country was controlled by the government and plan economics. So most likely this kind of autodiallers used to be sent directly to some big factories or plants or executives' offices, where there was a constant need to call a lot of people on internal lines (and where there also was a designated worker responsible for all the shown comm tech handling). Besides, most usual people would rather use their good ol' phonebook anyway :)
@@noop9k to be exact, they became legal only in 1988 when the party passed a "cooperation" bill. So yeah, finding one of these techs in the market would be highly unlikely.
@@Xaero188 Well, gray or black market businesses were everywhere in USSR though occasionally people were sentenced even to death for that. (Because since you can’t legally have a business and own most of the stuff, all material you used is considered stolen from the state, therefore it becomes a large scale theft and fraud) Also, I think one man artisan “businesses” («кустарные/ремесленные промыслы») were allowed long before that for certain kinds of jobs.
Sounds like when the autodialler dials, it's not 'shorting' the phone, so you're getting a bit of emf from the bell, which could be affecting the loopback resistance, might be something to do with the loop relay, try lifting the receiver on the phone before dialling (1000 ohm bell circuit, 500 ohm speech) I would guess the have all 40 numbers wired, you would use enamelled copper wire.
I used to install the type of phones you have there. The bell pinging was common when an extension phone was fitted. The fix is to adjust the spring located between the two bell coils. If that spring alone was not enough a themister is installed in the bell curcuit.
As a computer scientist I was interested in the coding of those wire in/out patterns. I had a look at it and it appears like it's basically sort of an analogue string of four-bit binary numbers. Each "in" wire acts as a 0, each "out" wire acts as a 1. The peculiar thing is that each of the numbers are shifted up by 1. So 1 = 0010b, which typically codes for 2, 2 = 0011b which usually codes for 3, and so on. The "0" digit is coded by 1011b which typically codes for the number 11, and the digit for "no digit" here is 0001b which typically codes for 1.
I don't know as much as I'd like about electrical engineering, but what I think might be happening with this device is that a current is run through the wire which induces an electric field - that electric field interacts with the field of those electromagnet coils and is read as a change in voltage or current by the rest of the devices in the circuit and then converted into a series signal which can be used by electromechanical devices on the phone line.
Wikipedia calls this "offset binary" but doesn't seem to have anything on this particular variation. Here's one that does have its own page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess-3
I didn't actually look at the schematic but I figure it loads a counter with the stored digit and then counts down with each pulse. Then all zero is probably taken as a signal to advance to the next digit, instead of pulsing the relay.
@@chocladc4942 Mike went through how it works on his video. Each core is basically a transformer. When an energized programming wire is run through the core it causes magnetic saturation in the core, making it ineffective as a transformer. Then the unit sends a pulse. If the core is not saturated it is coupled through the transformer and read as a 1, otherwise the pulse is not coupled.
Oh, I love that electromechanical cacophony of clikcs, whirrs, bells etc. when you dialed a number! Modern tech may beat this by umpteen lightyears, but it feels almost "unsportsmanlike". And it sure doesn't have the charm of this!
the text box in number program sheet is "no digit in the number". I think it is for calling by internal line in some sort of organisation or local calls in small town or village there it is less digits in a number
Ha! Lovely thing to see in action. After I watched Sarah and Astrid get the old switch gear up and running over there at the Connections Museum, I became kinda interested in the tech that made the landlines from my childhood work.
My first computer was an RCA Cosmac Elf which I built using point-to-point wire-wrap. I added an s100 buss and wrapped my own memory using a bunch of ferrite cores and wrapping them with wire-wrap wire. I was able to almost double the storage capacity using this method!
It was designed in early 70s. And was produced till 80s for one simple reason - when you have tons of outdated components like germanium transistors why not to use them for something simpl3 like that? The old don't fix what ain't broke thing.
Wow, I never seen such device. Even though I spent a lot of time with father at telephone station in 90-th. Some time later we bought Caller ID already based on Z80. Really very specific device
Well, in 1985, the average engineer salary was about 120-130 rub's per month. So this thing was very pricy by it's time. Actually, as a 28 y.o Russian boy, never heard about one of those.
4:20 left side of the page is the device passport - unit factory number, price and production date and after that is pretty much QA check. On the right side there is warranty information.
When I was kid in the 80's I could remember several of my friends home telephone numbers. Now I barely can remember my own cellphone number. So maybe I need this kind device and I can "easily" and "quickly" save my friends numbers in it 😅
I remember most of my childhood phone numbers, several of my own, my grandmother's, my uncle's, I have to check my phone nowadays any time I have to fill out a form that requires my own cell number......
neat, core rope memory! This is actually a really good way to teach how it works. I kinda want to try building then using it to store notes for bytebeat now.
Yeah, I worked in a U.S. telephone switching station for one summer as a teenager in the 70's, and this really takes me back. Lovely set-up you have here, Mum! Maybe you could put together a video on how to use the stepper motor wirings to trace calls back to the original dialing number (like in the old police detective TV shows of the 60's).
When Mike did this vid and asked if anyone wanted it, I actually thought of you and the museum. because it had a type of sequencer. here we are. I must have willed this to happen...i'm god-like :)
This would make for a great information station in thr museum, if you could get various answerphones you could dial people could press a button to get certain information about items nearby? Perhaps you've already thought of that, great stuff bro
As i far as i remember my childhood parallel phones did "tick" sounds when other phones were dialing, it was a different sound from actual ringing. It was still quite loud though, so everyone knew someone was dialing. Of course EVERYONE knew when someone were trying to use dial-up (that took dozen of tries on old pulse lines).
Archaically interesting Soviet technology !!, by the way what a nice mechanical selector. I have a video of a telephone plant digital programmer from the 80s that uses a display with numitron, at the time I upload it.
How is it going? Quite well. I am actually surprised seeing this video in my feed since I read the Wikipedia article about core memory (the read-only variant) just today and wondered how that would look like in practice. And there is your video!
Indeed. Now I think that maybe sending my old (early post-)USSR reel-to-reel that can do programmable playlists on analog tape to the museum could be an interesting idea -- if it still works at that :-)
Your museum would make a fantastic set for some kind of Dr. Who like scifi movie where by dialling the right number you will be transported to an alternate timeline.
a week or 2 before this, i saw some more video on vintage Russian telecom gear on my TH-cam account, didn't watch them. Indeed, this form of rom memory was used on rockets (including to the moon). a few videos came by on TH-cam some time ago.
That encoding is wild to me... I wouldn't expect it to be binary, exactly, but I would expect some rhyme or reason to it, and I'm not really seeing any. Very cool device. Even if it's not consumer-level, it's the closest to it that I've seen this sort of woven memory used in!
Non-binary encoding... Ask about pronouns :) But seriously, the number of combinations allows to code 16 numbers - well, maybe 14, because threading the wire through all rings as well as through none of them is no use. So, some kind of binary coded number must be present here, even though the coding itself is not typical at all.
@@eDoc2020 Ah yes, I should've pieced that together, but I suppose my brain didn't jump to subtracting one vs. say, a bit rotation or the like. Makes sense!
8:24 Mother, do you think they'll drop the bomb? Mother, do you think they'll like this song? Mother, do you think they'll try to break my balls? Ooh-ah, Mother, should I build the wall?
Hi, Sam! 4:25 - no, this is the station's price :)) Not the service. It's the paper called "pasport" and the right side is the "warranty ticket". If something starts malfunctioning the owner brings this thing to the service center and it will be repaired with no cost (within the warranty period of course). P.S. 180 roubles was a medium grade engineer's monthly salary. Not very high though.
Back in the Soviet era USSR was closed off with the "Iron Curtain". That meant that USSR was blocked from Europe and most of the world. Ultimately that resulted in super strict import laws. With that said Russia had to work with the KGB to make the agreement of importing thing into and out of USSR. That also meant that USSR had a ton of companies that made Clone products for the Soviet Market. A bunch of good examples are the Soviet Nintendo "Famiclones", Cars, Computers, and Toys. This lead to the Soviet electronic engineers to be creative with the parts they had available to them without importing parts.
As a former telemarketer in the late 90s/early 00s I would love to see how more pre voip dialers worked. And I mean. Everyone hates telemarketing. I'm sure more than myself finds it fascinating
Fun fact: in 1985 Soviet Union not even every household has the phone line, phones were mostly in big cities with >1MM population. Those who did have the phone quite frequently shared the line with their neighbors. Whil one family talked, in other apartment line was dead quiet 🤫
When one family talked the others got a quiet line? That's interesting. In the American party line system you could pick up the phone and listen in on your neighbors.
@@eDoc2020 two apartments shared one physical line. In each apartment there was a device called "blockirator" sitting between the phone and the station. It worked like a flip-flop trigger - when in one apartment somebody picked the handset - family in the other apartment was cut off the phone line. But two families had their unique phone numbers.
@@nneeerrrd That seems like a much more complicated system, they probably needed a couple extra wires between the two customers. And was it limited to two customers? AFAIK the US system could usually handle a few more.
In older systems 'extension' phones and 'master' phones were wired differently because the 'master phone' had the capacitor that separated the bell signal rather than it being done in the 'master socket'.
180 rubels is not a service price, but the price of the machine it's self. In soviet russia everything had it's own determined price. By the way, I've never heard of such machines))))
This principle was used in txe4 telephone exchanges in the early eighties in the UK for programming the subscriber numbers and attributes. And also the programming for the Main Control Unit which ran the exchange
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER ex-GPO / BT engineer here: The reed-relay exchange is TXK ("K" for "Crossbar") TXE4 and TXE2 are (were!) the electronic exchanges before digital. Even TXE2 used these cores for identifying the call through the exchange, including calls to STD / Trunk routes that were given "hypothetical" exchange numbers, in their own (incoming-barred) number ranges..
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER yes, you'd need a big space for one of them with dedicated racks for each function. If you're after a small electronic one lookout for uxd5 or Monarch PBX. (Not reeds though).
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Mikes Vid! th-cam.com/video/tPT6nIRFI_I/w-d-xo.html
The Backing Songs Available here :- www.patreon.com/posts/megamix-8-pt1-59898141
PS not to be mistaken with Magnetic core memory, which is read and write, this is more like how a rom would be programmed.
Does anyone have any other examples of rope core memory being used in products? (im not talking about fancy computers, spaceships, telephone exchanges etc, but legit domestic appliances where the user is not necessarily an engineer), im interested if there are any others about!!!
so lots of thoughts going round on this! like mentionned in the video chris said about small business or hotel use, however also the idea of confidentiallity being a thing, however there is no lock, and anyone can decode it as the program codes are shared on the underside of the top of the case. Also you can hear the relay clicking, who knows! if anyone has more info fill in the blanks below :)
brilliant lol!
@@ИВАНСусанин-щ5у да. блестящий
I used to work with magnetic core memory at Allen Bradley industrial automation. Really robust in the factory environment, but it had a destructive read, so you had to read data then write it back again. 4K was the size of a book, like a Christmas annual. I have never heard of rope core being used outside of NASA, sorry.
I worked on a project for a domestic controller that I built a couple of years ago and the safety standard that it had to comply to was written assuming that you had some kind of clever toaster with ring core memory (from the 80s!). As such it assumed that you had a tiny amount of memory and you had to check every cell of the memory - probably not too much of an issue with a 16x16 array but when you have 3Mb in multiple pages it became quite an effort! The clever bit was checking an area of memory, temporarily moving the running application into the checked area, checking the normal location and then moving it back again.
from a comment on mike's video: @Leo's Bag of Tricks Love this! Reminds me of the "Tormat" memory used in Seeburg Jukeboxes to remember the song selections. Tormat = toroid matrix.
It's quite curious, that in Russian even to this day process of flashing the firmware into a device is called "прошивка" - "sewing in", back from the early days of computing when workers were "sewing" together core rope memory banks.
That's awesome, too bad I don't know how to pronounce that.
I think I'm going to stay with "Blyat!"
@@jamess1787 proshivka
ProSHivka! WOW! That's amazing! Does that refer only to flashing firmware or does it cover more high-level programing too??
@@billysgeo only to firmware.
@@billysgeo Прошивка - proshivka is only for flashing firmware.
Oh my, I am deep in Soviet stuff myself and this just adds to that.
And so it begins!
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER Do a song together, played only on soviet era electric instruments/synthesizers! :)
@@whoho1 most are clones of the western stuff anyway. Except Polivoks and derivatives Moog filter everywhere. Multiple minimoog clones.
@@whoho1 No no no. No synthesizers, cmon. Soviet (military) radio and test equipment :)
@@theprstc Oh my... Now we are talking. There got to be some phone test tone generators and bit pattern generators that make a great looper together.
This instantly reminded me of the memory banks in the Apollo Guidance Computer, like you mention in the video. All the ROM is woven copperwires and ferrite rings. Amazing technology.
not sure if those where ferrite, from what i have seen there where extremely tiny, like 2 mm or in that range, rather to small for the sintered metal proces.
[turns the dial and the operator picks up]
Heeeeey, where is Fran? Again in her lab? C'mon, we're discussing some cool stuff here! :)
What amazes me more is how the lunar lander managed the command module that was orbiting the moon. The luna module launched from the moon and met with an orbiting vessel moving at 3000 mph. It did this using nothing more than eadar blips and a telescope. Also the lunar module was encapsulated in some places by tin foil to protect itself from the harshest environment known. I'd love to see them test the navigation system lol
@@mrfunnynames1742 true, soooooo many things could go wrong here... One tiny miscalculation or unforeseen change in conditions, and we wouldn't see Buzz and Neil back home! Scary stuff, isn't it?
@@KeritechElectronics I k ow radar blips and a telescope and meeting and attaching to something travelling at 10 times the speed of a regular passenger plane. Its a miracle it truly is. 🙏 . I studied engineering at university and something like this succeeding is similar to a series of genetic mutations leading to evolution. Nasa took a huge risk but against all odds they certainly did come home. God bless America.
I used to work for a company that supported a number of System X telephone exchanges in the USSR. We had to modify the line card hardware as it turned out that the way that a typical Russian lets the phone company know that there is an issue with their line is by applying mains voltage to it! Crazy Russian bar stewards.
hahaha thats funny!!!
I guess one could trace the induction through to the problem. :p
I've never heard of it though I was born in Russia and I've been living there most of my life. Sounds really crazy and at the same time it's likely true
Now they'll have to come and fix it
Wow! I thought about the same thing for a while but never actually did. There was no reason for that, I didn't want to destroy some critical equipment. Now it's weird to hear someone doing that on purpose) Well, if your provider (or a government) doesn't give a spark, then this is definitely a way to leave a feedback (literally. haha)
“This won’t work with a modern phone system, so let’s just wire it up to this 1980s phone exchange I just happen to have behind me” 😆
The modern phone line in my old house still worked with an old rotary dial phone. It even rang the bell if there was an incoming call. Now I live in a house that has fibre optic and can’t even have a copper line even if I wanted one.
oddly enough I was browsing the web looking into a way to connect up a functional telephone display. I found there is some bluetooth adapter that plugs in series onto the back of your phone that makes it bluetooth extention of your cellphone. The Adapter has to be plugged into a power outlet. I dont remember the name but look for rotary phone bluetooth adapter. Have a good day.
I could watch all those relays work for hours. There's just some comfort in watching well kept EM parts operate.
That method of storing program data was pretty common thing In Russia. Today in Russian language the process of flashing firmware and a firmware in general is called "stitching".
are there other examples of commercial products with core rope? im trying to find more examples
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER Personally i don't know any. Just that ferrites was an old computer thing. But USSR had a lot of electronic factories that produced their own stuff independently, so it is possible that there is more similar devices.
Well you got it wrong, the verb "прошить" is used as a synonym of the English verb "to patch". Translations are very similar, indeed, but the etymology is totally different. The same verb (to patch) is still used by the Western software developers. The origin of this slang term dates to the perforated paper tape era. In that time if you punched a tape and when realised that some part of it is wrong (has a bug), you would not re-punch an entire tape. Instead, you would fix and re-punch only a small piece of it. Then you would cut off the wrong piece from the original tape and glue a piece with a debugged code -- in other words, you would make *a patch* in the tape. Hence the name. We still refer a software fix as a "patch". Russian verb "прошить" has the same origins and it doesn't deal with wires.
@@00ffdc NO. It means neither patch nor stitch (but much closer to the 2nd).
Literal translation is “pierce”. Can be also translated as “sew through”. It doesn’t have the same roots as “patch”.
@@smackbug9973 Soviet tech lagged behind west by 5-15 years. We had DIY computers in the middle-late 80s and ZX Spectrum and famiclone boom in the early 90s.
The sound the lab makes with the first button press "bweeouuwww" before the dial is incredible.
Wait, so this is like consumer rope core memory? That’s crazy!
Sure is!
im trying to find more examples ha
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER HP9100a desktop programmable calculators from 1968 had both rope memory and magnetic core store.
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER the Apollo Guidance Computer uses a similar set up but far far more complex AGC core rope memory (ROM) super thin wire
I here by proclaim the new channel name as ' Look Mum No Dial Tone ' It's a weird rabbit hole to fall down but love the retro tech that comes with it.
haha yeah i probably should doanother channel forthe phone tech stuff! but hey, its nice to keep the vids diverse, still a lot of music related vids :D
and then when computers with modems start to appear it becomes "LOOK MUM NO CARRIER"
That sound the dialer makes is awesome
This is Unironically some of the coolest content on TH-cam right now
Greetings from Russia, Sam! :)
Wanted to elaborate a little bit on that thing, but you pretty much explained it yourself. Indeed, it was never meant to be sold for domestic use. In fact I don't think it was shipped to any shops at all. Also, technically there wasn't such thing as "small businesses" in USSR, as all the manufacturing in the country was controlled by the government and plan economics. So most likely this kind of autodiallers used to be sent directly to some big factories or plants or executives' offices, where there was a constant need to call a lot of people on internal lines (and where there also was a designated worker responsible for all the shown comm tech handling). Besides, most usual people would rather use their good ol' phonebook anyway :)
Greetings Comrade. We agree.
Never have seen i such a thing in my life.
This because “secretary” is taboo
In 2nd half of the 80s small businesses were legal. And this one thing costs 2 wages.
Never seen one in my life too.
@@noop9k to be exact, they became legal only in 1988 when the party passed a "cooperation" bill. So yeah, finding one of these techs in the market would be highly unlikely.
@@Xaero188 Well, gray or black market businesses were everywhere in USSR though occasionally people were sentenced even to death for that. (Because since you can’t legally have a business and own most of the stuff, all material you used is considered stolen from the state, therefore it becomes a large scale theft and fraud)
Also, I think one man artisan “businesses” («кустарные/ремесленные промыслы») were allowed long before that for certain kinds of jobs.
Seeing you progressing into this telecoms madness is the single greatest thing ever. You are so entertaining, and these machines are so fascinating!
Sounds like when the autodialler dials, it's not 'shorting' the phone, so you're getting a bit of emf from the bell, which could be affecting the loopback resistance, might be something to do with the loop relay, try lifting the receiver on the phone before dialling (1000 ohm bell circuit, 500 ohm speech)
I would guess the have all 40 numbers wired, you would use enamelled copper wire.
yeah. it was a thing i messed about with bit of a bummer, however it was still being awkward without a phone wired in at all
You might also try it in series, using it with the phone off-hook.
th-cam.com/video/zbKh16dC5XA/w-d-xo.html
you can see original wiring in this video , yes these're thin copper wires
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER In fact the parallel phones did ring on soviet lines once you were dealing a number.
I used to install the type of phones you have there. The bell pinging was common when an extension phone was fitted. The fix is to adjust the spring located between the two bell coils. If that spring alone was not enough a themister is installed in the bell curcuit.
As a computer scientist I was interested in the coding of those wire in/out patterns. I had a look at it and it appears like it's basically sort of an analogue string of four-bit binary numbers.
Each "in" wire acts as a 0, each "out" wire acts as a 1.
The peculiar thing is that each of the numbers are shifted up by 1. So 1 = 0010b, which typically codes for 2, 2 = 0011b which usually codes for 3, and so on. The "0" digit is coded by 1011b which typically codes for the number 11, and the digit for "no digit" here is 0001b which typically codes for 1.
I don't know as much as I'd like about electrical engineering, but what I think might be happening with this device is that a current is run through the wire which induces an electric field - that electric field interacts with the field of those electromagnet coils and is read as a change in voltage or current by the rest of the devices in the circuit and then converted into a series signal which can be used by electromechanical devices on the phone line.
Wikipedia calls this "offset binary" but doesn't seem to have anything on this particular variation. Here's one that does have its own page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess-3
I didn't actually look at the schematic but I figure it loads a counter with the stored digit and then counts down with each pulse. Then all zero is probably taken as a signal to advance to the next digit, instead of pulsing the relay.
@@chocladc4942 Mike went through how it works on his video. Each core is basically a transformer. When an energized programming wire is run through the core it causes magnetic saturation in the core, making it ineffective as a transformer. Then the unit sends a pulse. If the core is not saturated it is coupled through the transformer and read as a 1, otherwise the pulse is not coupled.
It will 100% be related to the number of pulses and how they were interpreted on USSR dialling infrastructure
Отличная вещь! Сохраняет способность работать даже после ядерной войны. Звонить только будет некому)
нюанс в том, что ферритовая память там уже сбоит, правда. но вещь действительно крутейшая!
позвонить можно сэму ахахахахха
Мммм, надеюсь корпус вкусно пожелтеет
жаль АТС-ку щас импульсную найти - диковинка!
@@photocanonn в частных музеях можно
I'd like to see you and Mike collaborate on a sound and light thing.
There are myriad examples of lights responding to sound, but what about doing it the other way around?
Oh, I love that electromechanical cacophony of clikcs, whirrs, bells etc. when you dialed a number! Modern tech may beat this by umpteen lightyears, but it feels almost "unsportsmanlike". And it sure doesn't have the charm of this!
the text box in number program sheet is "no digit in the number". I think it is for calling by internal line in some sort of organisation or local calls in small town or village there it is less digits in a number
for like a secretary in a factory or office to call internally
@@AsbestosMuffins having glanced through the schematic that Mike posted, it does mention something about connecting to a PBX
How to cheer up on a grey day: Sam dailing Techmoan's message machine using core rope memory! 📞😃
Ha! Lovely thing to see in action. After I watched Sarah and Astrid get the old switch gear up and running over there at the Connections Museum, I became kinda interested in the tech that made the landlines from my childhood work.
My first computer was an RCA Cosmac Elf which I built using point-to-point wire-wrap. I added an s100 buss and wrapped my own memory using a bunch of ferrite cores and wrapping them with wire-wrap wire. I was able to almost double the storage capacity using this method!
8:40 - wow! your analog station looks amazing :) This is really the museum! And this autodialler seems more like 60-70s device.
It was designed in early 70s. And was produced till 80s for one simple reason - when you have tons of outdated components like germanium transistors why not to use them for something simpl3 like that? The old don't fix what ain't broke thing.
5:58 the words say "No digit in number"
Wow, I never seen such device. Even though I spent a lot of time with father at telephone station in 90-th. Some time later we bought Caller ID already based on Z80.
Really very specific device
Well, in 1985, the average engineer salary was about 120-130 rub's per month. So this thing was very pricy by it's time. Actually, as a 28 y.o Russian boy, never heard about one of those.
Love the sound the autodialer makes before the interchange starts dialing. What an eerie sound! 7:45
4:20 left side of the page is the device passport - unit factory number, price and production date and after that is pretty much QA check. On the right side there is warranty information.
You should be able to stop the bell tinkle in the phone by fitting a Thermistor No. 1A-1 in series with its bell.
I find the way stuff like this works really neat.
As a 70s kid, this really spoke to my inner geek!
Amazing job! You've gone through a quite adventure with wiring and setting up all this stuff together!
When I was kid in the 80's I could remember several of my friends home telephone numbers. Now I barely can remember my own cellphone number. So maybe I need this kind device and I can "easily" and "quickly" save my friends numbers in it 😅
I remember most of my childhood phone numbers, several of my own, my grandmother's, my uncle's, I have to check my phone nowadays any time I have to fill out a form that requires my own cell number......
neat, core rope memory! This is actually a really good way to teach how it works. I kinda want to try building then using it to store notes for bytebeat now.
The buzzer of this machine instantly reminded me of the phones in Terry Gilliam's Brazil,
Saw this on mikes channel, awesome bit of kit.
Yeah, I worked in a U.S. telephone switching station for one summer as a teenager in the 70's, and this really takes me back. Lovely set-up you have here, Mum! Maybe you could put together a video on how to use the stepper motor wirings to trace calls back to the original dialing number (like in the old police detective TV shows of the 60's).
When I saw mikes video, it immediately made me think of the museum and your channel on this one.
When Mike did this vid and asked if anyone wanted it, I actually thought of you and the museum. because it had a type of sequencer. here we are. I must have willed this to happen...i'm god-like :)
This would make for a great information station in thr museum, if you could get various answerphones you could dial people could press a button to get certain information about items nearby? Perhaps you've already thought of that, great stuff bro
At first
As i far as i remember my childhood parallel phones did "tick" sounds when other phones were dialing, it was a different sound from actual ringing. It was still quite loud though, so everyone knew someone was dialing. Of course EVERYONE knew when someone were trying to use dial-up (that took dozen of tries on old pulse lines).
That’s how they rocked back then! Look up analogue memory another miracle of the past…🤔
That is the way some of the old telco analog switches provided number identification. Ran a few of these jumpers.
This is absolutely the best! I had no idea such an implementation of ferrite cores existed!
Woah you look like someone from Dive Bella Dive. You sir, are amazing. So inspirational.
Keep doing your thing! Great work.
Sir, your Museum makes me so happy. Thank you for being so awesome.
то чувство когда понимаешь и принцип и все что написано, и это у британца - и он кайфует от той технологии которой пользовались мои родители ))))
Мне кажется он не кайфуей, просто хайпует
Very interesting kit. Mike did a great job showing the internals.
Man!!! I really like your content!!!
Came to this channel for the telephone switching equipment. Stayed for the cool music and talented host.
Archaically interesting Soviet technology !!, by the way what a nice mechanical selector.
I have a video of a telephone plant digital programmer from the 80s that uses a display with numitron, at the time I upload it.
7:37 that dailing sound ramping up and down is so awesome! is that the autodailer?
its the ringing machine turning on :)
it seems to function just like a Telephone Central Office frame. using magnetic pickups to set a phone number for the local loops.
Bloody brilliant mate!
How is it going? Quite well. I am actually surprised seeing this video in my feed since I read the Wikipedia article about core memory (the read-only variant) just today and wondered how that would look like in practice. And there is your video!
Russian engineers did many unbelievable stuff.
Indeed. Now I think that maybe sending my old (early post-)USSR reel-to-reel that can do programmable playlists on analog tape to the museum could be an interesting idea -- if it still works at that :-)
Inferior technology plus abundance of underemployed low-paid engineers.
I love that this entire appliance existed to serve as something that would just be a basic function on phones, moving forward.
I admire your determination mate 👏👏👏
Thanks for putin this video together...I know you're rushin' to put out more great content.
Don't forget your coat on the way out! 😜😁
Your museum would make a fantastic set for some kind of Dr. Who like scifi movie where by dialling the right number you will be transported to an alternate timeline.
Greets from Russia, thanks for the review, I did not know that such device was produced in USSR.
a week or 2 before this, i saw some more video on vintage Russian telecom gear on my TH-cam account, didn't watch them.
Indeed, this form of rom memory was used on rockets (including to the moon). a few videos came by on TH-cam some time ago.
Imagine the days and months it took to core wire the program for the L.E.M.- Apollo lander.
That is super cool. The museum sure looks awesome.
hahaha... I was watching Mike's vid and thinking how perfect for you this would be....
Love what your doing man. So cool.
its alive! Pretty crazy this even works!
Loved this video, felt like an old school LMNC
Not gonna lie, I was super pleased when I heard the phone ring.
Nice one
That encoding is wild to me... I wouldn't expect it to be binary, exactly, but I would expect some rhyme or reason to it, and I'm not really seeing any. Very cool device. Even if it's not consumer-level, it's the closest to it that I've seen this sort of woven memory used in!
Non-binary encoding... Ask about pronouns :)
But seriously, the number of combinations allows to code 16 numbers - well, maybe 14, because threading the wire through all rings as well as through none of them is no use.
So, some kind of binary coded number must be present here, even though the coding itself is not typical at all.
It is binary if you squint. Wire in coil is zero, wire inside coil means one. The encoded number is one apart from the number actually dialed.
@@eDoc2020 Ah yes, I should've pieced that together, but I suppose my brain didn't jump to subtracting one vs. say, a bit rotation or the like. Makes sense!
Well, this will survive a flight to outer space and keep dialing on Mars.
Omg thats actualy briliant
Oh man I love how you've got crazy into exchanges XD
Absolutely fantastic
Brilliant, Made me smile :)
I love his crazy tech dungeon..
gotta say, this is so cool in a way, that I can't even explain
8:24 Mother, do you think they'll drop the bomb?
Mother, do you think they'll like this song?
Mother, do you think they'll try to break my balls?
Ooh-ah, Mother, should I build the wall?
This is just cool old tech.... I'd love to see that museum.
Hi, Sam! 4:25 - no, this is the station's price :)) Not the service. It's the paper called "pasport" and the right side is the "warranty ticket". If something starts malfunctioning the owner brings this thing to the service center and it will be repaired with no cost (within the warranty period of course).
P.S. 180 roubles was a medium grade engineer's monthly salary. Not very high though.
I was just watvhing mikes video the other day
О, это Трель, Советская аппаратура.
Back in the Soviet era USSR was closed off with the "Iron Curtain". That meant that USSR was blocked from Europe and most of the world. Ultimately that resulted in super strict import laws. With that said Russia had to work with the KGB to make the agreement of importing thing into and out of USSR. That also meant that USSR had a ton of companies that made Clone products for the Soviet Market. A bunch of good examples are the Soviet Nintendo "Famiclones", Cars, Computers, and Toys. This lead to the Soviet electronic engineers to be creative with the parts they had available to them without importing parts.
I just read about woven core memory for NASA missions. Brilliant.
As a former telemarketer in the late 90s/early 00s I would love to see how more pre voip dialers worked.
And I mean. Everyone hates telemarketing. I'm sure more than myself finds it fascinating
ive gotta be honest that probably wont bein the scope for thiis channel! but mebbe more comp channels might do who knows :D
Fun fact: in 1985 Soviet Union not even every household has the phone line, phones were mostly in big cities with >1MM population. Those who did have the phone quite frequently shared the line with their neighbors. Whil one family talked, in other apartment line was dead quiet 🤫
When one family talked the others got a quiet line? That's interesting. In the American party line system you could pick up the phone and listen in on your neighbors.
@@eDoc2020 two apartments shared one physical line. In each apartment there was a device called "blockirator" sitting between the phone and the station. It worked like a flip-flop trigger - when in one apartment somebody picked the handset - family in the other apartment was cut off the phone line. But two families had their unique phone numbers.
@@nneeerrrd That seems like a much more complicated system, they probably needed a couple extra wires between the two customers. And was it limited to two customers? AFAIK the US system could usually handle a few more.
Dip switches was my first guess actually. This is cooler than dip switches, obviously.
In older systems 'extension' phones and 'master' phones were wired differently because the 'master phone' had the capacitor that separated the bell signal rather than it being done in the 'master socket'.
yeah. but i was just following what the manual was saying, as it says to literally wire both in parallel. i was using a master socket.
had the same issued without the phone wired in, bit funmky. aaah well
cool seeing some old soviet stuff like that
180 rubels is not a service price, but the price of the machine it's self. In soviet russia everything had it's own determined price.
By the way, I've never heard of such machines))))
Oh great, we get to hear Techmoan again!
This principle was used in txe4 telephone exchanges in the early eighties in the UK for programming the subscriber numbers and attributes. And also the programming for the Main Control Unit which ran the exchange
ohjhh is that a reed relay exchange thingie? fascinating, wish i could track one down hahaha. notmany about anymore! i guess most of em in a skip!
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER ex-GPO / BT engineer here: The reed-relay exchange is TXK ("K" for "Crossbar") TXE4 and TXE2 are (were!) the electronic exchanges before digital. Even TXE2 used these cores for identifying the call through the exchange, including calls to STD / Trunk routes that were given "hypothetical" exchange numbers, in their own (incoming-barred) number ranges..
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER yes, you'd need a big space for one of them with dedicated racks for each function. If you're after a small electronic one lookout for uxd5 or Monarch PBX. (Not reeds though).
@@erdekind well I can always make room if I found one 😂. Yeah monarch is solid state right??? Not as cool right! Ha
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER yes virtually wholly digital.
It looks quite fiddly and complicated, weaving all those wires in a set pattern. It could even be a concept for a game.
Я ждал, когда он скажет "Трель" ) I was waiting for him to say "Trel")
That's actually really cool!