Story Notes: The Trouble with Unicorns III · 10:27pm Oct 10th, 2018
Telephones.
Note: if you aren’t of a mind to read about telephonic technology, just skip ahead until you get to the ant-sized picture of Acorn. I kinda went on and on.
If you are of a mind to read about telephonic technology . . . well, you’re in the right place!
I’m a little bit behind on watching episodes, so for all I know, in season 6 Ma Bell (or the pony equivalent) strings telephone line all across Equestria and now instead of using Fax Machine* Spike a long distance communications device, Princess Twilight can just let her fingers do the walking.
Still, at least until Season 5, telephones are rarely seen. The only example I can think of is the office building in Manehattan, the one with the Mad Men ponies. And you’d think that such a system—if it existed—would at least be somewhat common in Equestria. Maybe a poor dirt farmer like Applejack can’t afford to have a telephone strung to her farm, and maybe there are certain practicalities of having a land-line run to Rainbow’s cloudhouse, but surely the Crystal CastleTM would have such a thing. Why, that would save so much time when ponies get sent on cutie mark missions. Just call ahead and get some idea of what’s going on, so a pony knows what she needs to pack.
This story postulates one reason why telephones might not be desirable in Equestria, even if ponies do have the technology to produce such a device.
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*Incidentally, it’s worth mention that the fax machine was invented before the telephone. Significantly before: 1843 for the fax machine, and 1876(ish) for the telephone.
There’s a bit of telephone history y’all might want to know. Back in Ye Olden Times, you’d make a call, and that would go to a telephone operator, and she’d (usually) take your telephone cord and plug it into a patchboard which routed your telephone directly to the number you were trying to reach. Such a system was not without its drawbacks, at least to the mind of a particular funeral home owner, who realized that the local telephone operators were directing calls about funerals to his rivals.
Well, a funeral director scorned is a funeral director that invents an automatic relay system to eliminate the need for patchboards and reduce the need for human operators.
Obviously, to use an automatic system, you needed to have a way of identifying a target telephone (so to speak) by something a relay could understand—you needed a number rather than a name. So telephone numbers were born.
In the US, the first three digits were the number(s) of the exchange, and the last four digits were the subscriber numbers. In fact, back in Ye Olden Times, you rented your telephone from Ma Bell, you didn’t own it. Sort of like your cable box.
Anyway, to make things easy to remember, exchanges had names, and usually the first two letters of the name translated to the digits of the number. That’s why telephone keys even on rotary phones had letters on them (technically, you could text with a rotary phone system, but that’s beyond the scope of this blog). Also why back in the old days—which you kids mostly won’t remember—popular area codes had low numbers, so they were easy to dial quickly. Detroit was 313 (also back in the old days, the middle digit of an area code had to be a 0 or a 1).
Getting back on track, you’d have a phone number like PEnnsylvania 6-5000 [PE6-5000/736-50000], or BEechwood 4-5789 [BE4-5789/234-5789]. The capitalized digits are so you know which ones to use (so I suppose it could be PennSylvania 6-5000, but that was rarely if ever done). And now you know that both of those songs are telephone numbers. Also worth noting, the number 5 is JKL, and there are very few if any telephone exchanges that would start with those two letters (KLondike is one of the few); thus KL5-xxxx . . . . or 555-xxxx is a very unlikely phone number. You’ve probably seen that joke in the Simpsons; now you know why.
An exchange would normally start with 1, then 2, 3, and so on, as more numbers got added; if you had too many, you’d make a new exchange. So there’d be PEnnsylvania 1-5000, PEnnsylvania 2-2000, and so on.
My own little town, population about 1200, has only 1 for the exchange. It never got big enough to need a 2.
Also back in the day, the exchanges were local. There was a telephone company building—or several—that served as the local exchange. Most of those are defunct now, I’d imagine, but since a lot of the infrastructure was still in place, I’d have to guess that if the building was still in good condition, many of them are still in use; they’re just full of robots banks of relays in place of human operators.
A PBX is a private branch exchange, and a lot of big buildings have them. You know, the ones where you have to dial ‘9’ to get an outside line? Like a hotel, maybe, where you can just dial a room number for a direct call from one room to the next, or a direct line to the kitchen or the front desk or whatever. Works on basically the same principle, and in fact back in Ye Olden Times, there were actual telephone operators who worked in a small room in the hotel or business office or whatever and handled those calls.
You can have a lot of fun with PBXes; hypothetically, if you’ve got a friend who’s decently into old-school phone hacking, for example, you might be able to find a way to get two separate phone lines into your suite in your dorm in college. All depends on how they wired the system.*
Source (YouTube)
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*also still hypothetically, I can’t remember if we undid that when we moved to a different dorm room.
The modern cell phone system is of course built overtop of the architecture of the old system, and still uses a lot of the old stuff. Like when I said you could text on a rotary phone? Well, you couldn’t physically do that, but the system was set up in such a way to allow texting, to allow extra buttons to be pushed that most telephones didn’t have, etc. The idea was to be able to expand the system later to more functionality without having to do a major upgrade or replacement of equipment, even if at the time nobody really knew what form such an upgrade might take. Similar to Apple famously putting eight expansion slots on the ][e, and when asked what they were for, stating that people would find a way to use them.
<takes deep breath>
Which brings us back to the story.
I’ve gotta be a little bit coy here because as usual, some people will read the blog post before the story, and I don’t want to give away too much. Suffice it to say while once there was a direct physical connection between your handset and the party you were calling’s handset, nowadays there might not be. The signal might be chopped up, digitized, multiplexed, bounced off a microwave tower or who knows what. Computers and fiber optics and suchlike have allowed the phone system to do things that Mr. Bell never could have dreamed of. So even if y’all accept the hypothosis presented in the story, there’s a good chance that it wouldn’t actually work IRL (well, I mean, of course it can always be handwaved away with ‘magic’).
But consider this. When I was in high school, our local phone exchange still supported party lines. If you called your own telephone number, instead of getting a busy signal, you’d get something like this:
Calling party the number you have dialed is on your party line. Please hang up and allow a sufficient for the party you are calling to answer before you return to the line.
Source
Headphone warning!
At about that time, in Jackson, MI, the telephones still supported pulse dialing (what rotary phones did), and also at about that time, many touchtone phones came with a pulse setting. So did auto diallers. [How many of us remember those?]
As it happens, in the town where I live, there’s still a telco building, one of the remains of Ma Bell’s glory, and I’m willing to bet (although I don’t know for actual fact) that there’s a bunch of modern switching equipment in it. And, probably a bunch of old stuff, too. So it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility for a local call to still be made over a single, continuous, non-multiplexed line, from one handset to the next.
Whew! Got off on a bit of a tangent there about telephone systems. Amazing what kinds of things you pick up from knowing the kind of guy who can (allegedly) rewire a PBX.
With this, the fourth story, we’ve reached the end of the trilogy. Coincidentally, this is titled III, thus making my claims of it being a trilogy more believable. Pay no mind to the sequel (which was published first, naturally). In hindsight, I should have posted them 1-4-3-2, which as everybody knows is the typical firing order of an inline-four engine. Ah well, such is life.
Source
This is also not an inline four, but really what were the odds I was going to find a better image?
Couple of other things to cover.
First off, Acorn is a comic unicorn.
From the ant-sized wiki
She just seemed the type, y’know?
Finally, bath bombs are small depth charges, typically containing about 200 grains of black powder or the equivalent. They have a pressure trigger which tends to set them off at about a foot below the water level (obviously, you purchase one that best fits your particular bathtub situation). Traditionally, they were used to solve the common problem of eels in the bathwater.
Eels, as you may not be aware, love to swim through plumbing—although after the advent of installing eel-proof screens on most water supply systems at either a local level, or just household, they’re nowdays often filled with glitter and salts and stuff.
End of the trilogy of four? NOOOO No end!
Wait, does this mean we now move onto "The Trouble With Earth Ponies/Pegasususususususususes"?
Also, I see someone has been looking up bath bombs.
When I saw the old-school pony grabbing the phone, all I could think of was her saying "You say they have a sale on fingers? Hooray! Now I can grab my phone even faster!"
My thoughts exactly
That and "Are those telephone scam that much of a nuisance in the states?". I often go trough a whole week without getting one.
4951294
Not TOO much. But if you ever give your number to the Red Cross for blood donations, they NEVER let you alone.
555 was reserved by the phone companies (they only used it for 555-1212), and they were the ones who encouraged Hollywood to use it. Before that, conscientious filmmakers would use Q or Z words, since those were originally omitted from rotary phones.
Typing phone numbers on this iPad for this comment is really weird. They recently changed the keyboard so that you pull down the QWERTY row for numbers, and it feels SO MUCH like dialing a rotary phone...
Yes hello, this is horse
As long as youre not trying the modem ring hack I did at home where the extension lead to the computer actually spliced into the line for the kitchen house phone from the window junction box, so the same cable ended up with teh phone coming and going in teh same four cores due to a little side step in the junction box. Saved on trying to double the cabling to the phone itself.
Current external phone line only goes up the wall to where the pole line reaches the property. There the 4 terminal box drops two to me, and the other two core go straight through the back of the box and into the upstairs apartment. Really confused me for a while why there was only one cable coming out.
The office building I used to work in still has telephone operators you can call if needed.
You might find this old article about the fabled White House switchboard interesting:
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/14/us/whitehouse-a-switchboard-that-is-justly-fabled.html
So if you’re worried about magic not following the cabling if it goes digital (valid) then what you really need to worry about are spells that carry as far as your voice sounds.
What I’m saying here is it’s lucky the Sirens never got enough juice to go viral.
4951282
We can only hope we get the others.
4951282
I might have one or two “Trouble with Pegasuses” in the works. Also the tentatively titled “The Trouble with Tourists.”
What amazes me the most is that I put all that random stuff about eels before I found the YouTube video.
What I’m saying is that the internet rarely disappoints.
4951289
Not to mention winding the cord around a finger. You can’t do that with hooves.
4951294
I get a few of ‘em on my cell phone. Mostly robocallers, which is a disappointment. Back when it was real people, I tried my hardest to get them to hang up on me.
We get them a lot at work, but then that’s a business phone.
In the old days, before computers got involved, if you wanted to make a long distance call from one side of the county to the other, you needed to have an unbroken circuit to make it work, This resulted in Ma Bell having to lay a whole lot of copper all around the country. It also resulted in things like the AT&T Long Line Building, which is a skyscraper in NYC that looks like it was built for something other then humans.
Now a days with all the packet switching and multiplexing, plus all the other fun things, those sort of physical connections aren't required. Though the building is still used to hold lots of modern switching equipment. Plus NSA offices (not a joke).
Also, 2/3rds of the AT&T long distance network once went down because of a single line of bad code, and the resulting investigation lead to the Secret Service raiding Steve Jackson Games.
4951306
Does the Red Cross handle those calls in-house, or do they contract them out? While I was looking up various scams, I came across a company that does calls for charities. They prioritize callers who have given money in the past.
4951311
I wonder if that was before they went to seven-digit numbers, or if that was just an exchange that was never (or hadn’t been up to that point) and so was a natural fit? Because I can’t see them thinking that far ahead in the very early days, although by the time Ma Bell had her monopoly, they were actually quite far-sighted when it came to phone technology.
Huh, that’s interesting. Seems like a strange design to me . . . although then again, on my Samsung phone, I often type numbers when I mean to type a letter (3 instead of e is really common), so maybe that was to address that problem.
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mountainrosehorsemanship.com/images/photo_horsephone.jpg
4951332
I could see that arrangement back in the days of using a dial up modem. Heck, I remember when it wasn’t very common to have more than one or two phone jacks in the house, and you’d just get a phone with a long curly cord.
Interestingly, I don’t know where any of the telephone jacks are in my house, or even if there are any. I mean, I’d assume that there are, but I’ve not got a home phone to plug in, so I’ve never bothered to look for them.
4951335
A lot of buildings do, sort of--a receptionist or secretary, for example. Probably not too many of them are still running patchboard systems, though. Some of the dealerships we call for parts have receptionists who answer and direct all incoming calls.
It is! I like the idea that they can find anyone, anywhere. That’s pretty awesome. I wonder if the current crop still has the same skills, and how they get trained. Is there an apprenticeship program?
Can you get a cutie mark in telephone operator? Asking for a friend.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2016/8/13/1224340__safe_artist-colon-jumblehorse_sweetie+belle_cute_diasweetes_open+mouth_simple+background_solo_telephone_white+background.png
4951339
Yes, you do. Canon suggests that most unicorn spells aren’t verbal, but there are lots of other species in Equestria, and I bet some of them can do verbal spells.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2012/6/29/25447__safe_artist-colon-anjila_zecora_smug_zebra.png
Yeah, or the Sirens.
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The building is the size of a city block and old enough that the Eisenhower era additions are the new parts. They also make a lot of international calls so that might have something to do with it.
4951351
Yeah . . . I haven’t seen any big installations, but as mentioned in the post, I’ve hypothetically played around with a PBX. Well, actually two (hypothetcially), since I’m now remembering that we might have done something with the phones at the campus radio station, too. I think that was just fixing problems, though.
Unbroken lines of copper were a big deal for telegraph systems, too. Back in the day.
I’m willing to bet that a lot of it at a more local level is still the old-school stuff, though, only replaced as needed. Just the trunklines and so forth are modernized, fibered, multiplexed, and so forth. And of course the NSA has an office in there; why wouldn’t they? Easiest place to tap into the system.
Oh really? Hadn’t heard about that one . . . tell me more!
4951369
I wonder if in DC it’s a sign of how important you are by how old your building is?
It’s kind of amazing to think how easy that is to do these days, but not so long ago it was not only a major hassle, but it was really, really expensive. My parents have friends in Norway, and they used to send reel-to-reel tapes back and forth by mail.
4951351
I'm intrigued by this story, there any more to it?
4951365
There's a reason Zecora always speaks in rhyme.
In fact...her magic instantly IDs Twilight as being from an alternate timeline. This is evidence of an interdimensional conspiracy of rock-and-roll zebras. Clearly.
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4951382
Okay, very short version. After the long distance network went down (it was on a major holiday, which created a heavier load and helped cause the problem) AT&T instantly blamed hackers, because they had been dealing with the phone phreakers and the like for a while, so it was easy to blame them. And while they had gotten into a number of system, it was never into the network that went down (which I believe was isolated).
In response the Secret Service started Operation Sundevil as a way to crack down on computer hackers. One of the thing they focused on was a single document from AT&T about the Enhanced 911 system. Version of this document was spread out over the BBS system at the time, so lots of people got caught up into it. This resulted in the raid on Steve Jackson Games and the creation of the EFF.
There is a whole book on it (now in the public domain) called The Hacker Crackdown that makes for a very interesting read on the subject and goes into a lot more detail and history of all the parts involved in Operation Sundevil and how much of it was bad comedy.
4951382
I have an idea in my head which I don’t think would translate to the written word (sadly) where Zecora gets in a rap battle with somepony. Things are going well until her opponent tosses out a world like ‘orange’ for Zecora to rhyme.
Zecora does.
Heads literally explode.
Zebras know what’s up, and that’s a fact.
4951387
I’m surprised that I never heard about that (or if I did, I forgot). My hypothetical friend who knew a thing or two about PBXes and phone systems was really into that stuff, and I read a lot of the material, too. 2600 magazine, all of that.
Ma Bell's bastard offspring have constantly been trying to re-amalgamate like a Jenova Reunion for decades. Everyone needs to get on their congresspeople's asses about net neutrality and keeping telecoms honest and accountable. AT&T and Verizon and Charter are completely evil. Almost as bad as EA.
https://wccftech.com/net-neutrality-abuses-timeline/
https://www.cnet.com/news/q-a-kevin-mitnick-from-ham-operator-to-fugitive-to-consultant/
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/after-throttling-firefighters-verizon-praises-itself-for-saving-lives/
http://telephone-museum.org/telephone-collections/capn-crunch-bosun-whistle/
https://supporters.eff.org/donate
omg, I do. My mom worked from home when I was young, actually from years before my birth until I was like 14. She had an enormous auto dialer, must've had at least 30 numbers, and apparently required a special phone wiring setup, not the normal RJ 11 plug. I was still young when her employer went under, so I never got to figure out what was so special about the phone wiring with it.
Tell you what, though, I don't know about today, but up to when I was maybe 16, I had a rotary dial phone actually hooked up to the land line in my bedroom (because I'm just weird like that). And pulse dialing still worked then. I'd wager it would still work today, because like you're saying, telephone technology has been built up and added onto since Bell's day. The old principle is still there under all that, so it's mostly backward-compatible. However, after that we switched to VOIP and to my knowledge, no VOIP system has ever supported pulse dialing. However however, they do have pulse-to-tone converter boxes that you can plug into your land line system.
Did you know (assuming your telephone provider supports pulse dialing) you can manually pulse dial? I literally discovered this entirely by accident when I was a kid. Turns out, pulse dialing is literally pulsing the phone connection on and off, and the number of pulses = the number dialed. Pick up your phone and tap the 'hook' or whatever it's called, 10 times fairly quickly. You'll get the operator lol.
Also,
4951415
Of course they have. And lest we forget, for all the bad stuff they did, Bell Labs did some pretty good stuff, too.
Amusingly, I don’t do business with any of those companies. And would avoid them if at all possible.
4951428
My dad had one of the handheld Radio Shak ones, played the tones through the handset. Just pick up the phone, hold it to the mic, and push the button for the number you wanted to call. I think that one could be set to pulse mode for the primitive systems.
I wouldn’t bet money on it still working today, just due to upgrades in the system (but it might). However, my grandma was still using a rotary phone up until she passed away in 2002, and she’d also refused to pay extra for touch-tone service at her house.
I’m betting at some point she got it anyways, since it wasn’t worth the telco’s effort to have non-touch-tone lines.
Now I’m curious to try it. I bet I could find an old rotary phone somewhere (I doubt I have any any more, unless there’s one in the trunk of my Oldsmobile or something) and plug it in at the shop and see what happens. Or take it around Lansing to the group homes where I work and try it there.
I did know that. I was never all that good at it; there’s a certain sort of rhythm that you ideally need if you’re dialing a phone number, but I did try on more than on occasion. Not as a kid, but when I was in college and learned a lot about the phone system from a guy who was into that kind of thing.
Actually, I bet it would still work on an older PBX, too. Maybe not for an outgoing call--might depend on how the system’s wired--but it could work for an internal call.
The best part about that many vacuum tubes is that you’ll never have to pay to heat the room.
4951335 Interesting semi-fact. So far, every incoming President has ordered a new phone system for the White House. Every. One. (Since Reagan, at least) Most of them don't even get fully implemented until a year or two before the Prez leaves and the new one comes in.
4951428 We did this in the dorms at college, back in the Paleolithic Age. You had an intercom in your room. The desk would page you if you got a call, and transferred it to one of about four booths/stalls, which you would run half-naked down the hall to grab before somebody else did. Well, since the phones didn't have a dial, you could manually dial local numbers by resting your hand on the receiver and tap-tap-tap-tap-tap (for 5) pause tap-tap-tap (for 3) pause... until you had the number (hopefully) called. Ordered several pizzas that way, because the dorm phones *charged* for local calls, unless you paid the oh-gods-that's-expensive fee to get a phone in your room.
At home before we got direct dial, we had a party line for a few years, which was neat. You'd pick up the phone, pause to make sure nobody was on it, then dial. If somebody was on it, you'd ask how long they were going to be and call when they were done, and maybe get some gossip in the process. When we got direct dial, we had a phone in the milk barn too, and we could ring that by picking up the phone, dialing 4 digits, then hang up. BOTH phones would proceed to ring-ring-ring. When they quit, that meant the kids out in the barn picked up so you could pick up and talk to them.
I got to stand in a switching building back in the dawn of civilization when men were men and tons of copper went into phone devices. It was like the worlds largest castanet orchestra, all clattering away at once as all of the mechanical relays nudged down one click at a time. 785-555-7854 is 59 clicks Deafening.
4951306 Huh, mine only calls me to remind me when the bloodmobile is in town (which I need, because otherwise all I see is their taillights) Over five gallons now.
FYI: that one photograph is two '66' blocks that look like they're feeding a four-line Nortel PBX system from the late 1990s. There are no bridge clips on anything but the bottom right 2 lines, so I'm not sure what they feed except maybe a Fax line and a hardwired line for the security system maybe? Early 2000/late 1990s could be a hardwired T1 line, I suppose. Going into some of these small offices that have seen 5-6 phone systems over their lifespan can give you the royal heebie-jeebies. *NOTHING* gets removed. The Phone Company puts in new T1 cards when the old ones break, and don't remove the duds. I've got an office that was originally wired in the '40s. Glass insulators, corroded wires, and somehow (God only knows) a functional T1 went through that maze, the system from the 60s, the system from the 80s, and out into the office built in 2000.
Yeah, they're going fibre as soon as we can get it there. Maybe 2020.
My grandpa worked as an engineer for Bell Labs. He had many stories, but my favorite...
So they had giant circuit printing machines, which would pick up electronic bits and automatically solder them onto the boards. Part of the machine was an enormous vat of solder that had to be kept liquid.
Now, they were having a problem. For no apparent reason the blocks of solder would freeze and need to be replaced. And of course that stops production for days while they lever out an enormous chunk of metal and then remelt the replacement. They have a whole warehouse full of the blasted things. So they call him in to figure out what the heck is going on.
And when he looks at the process, what he sees is that the dip-solder-repeat cycle was putting the electronic components in the solder directly. Electronic components which were gold for conductivity. And gold, as it turns out, is soluble in molten solder with a much higher melting temperature. Without any explanation he had them put a guard on the warehouse and rushed out to make a phone call, because those thousand pound blocks of metal were around 30% gold by volume by the time they froze.
Around then was when he got his own lab and an unlimited budget
That is cool.
To think, we now live in a post-fax world... (not my joke.)
Bell 103 PSK, nuff said
As opposed to their current "ultra-modern anorexic" design philosophy.
In any case, I actually knew a fair amount of telephone lore already thanks to my dad's old Mad Magazines from the 50's and 60's, but it's always fascinating to hear more. Thanks for the further information.
4951511
That’s a pretty awesome story. Funny to think that some industrial engineer would have messed it up, but then my grandpa worked for GM and once recounted to me a few of his department’s screwups . . . one of them that he was technically responsible for ‘cost’ millions (I put ‘cost’ in quotes, because it was a production cost estimate, and they didn’t factor something in). My brother worked for an aviation company in the weights department, and someone on his team forgot that the nail in pop rivets comes out when you use them, and they came up with a much higher estimated weight for the airplane than what was really the case . . . I think that one got caught pretty early, though, and there’s really no disadvantage to the empty weight of the airplane being less than you thought it was going to be.
My favorite Bell Labs story was when they decided the length of the handset cord--they started with a long one and then kept making them shorter and shorter until people started complaining that they were too short.
4951555
You say that, but there are a surprising number of people in my current job who still want things by fax for some dumb reason. Like, e-mailing a PDF and emailing back a completed PDF just isn’t acceptable. Gotta be a fax.
It’s dumb.
4951709
Never got to use one of those. Oldest modem I ever used personally was a 1200 baud in a custom-built 386. I’ve got a 300 (ish?) baud in my old Compaq, but I’ve never attempted to hook that up online.
There was apparently a geek challenge some years back to see who could get the oldest personal computer online and one of my buddies was trying to get a Timex Sinclair on the internet. No idea if he ever did.
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My guess is that it was designed by an electrical and mechanical engineer working together, and the idea of metals being soluble in each other never crossed their minds.
I really like the pop screw story too, there's always some darn detail or other.
4951715
Yeah, which I think is dumb. Give geeks holes to stick things in, that’s what geeks want. Heck, that’s what I want, even though I haven’t modified a computer in any way in something like 20 years. I was kind of reluctant to buy the Lenovo I’m running now because it had like no expansion bays, but then I kind of needed a desktop in a hurry and cheaply, because my old Compaq was on its way to the data haven in the sky.
It’s funny, I hadn’t expected this to be a long blog post but when I started writing it I infodumped a ton of stuff I’d learned back in the day and not really thought about for years.
Anyway, glad you enjoyed!
4956625
That’d be my thought, too. Maybe someone who was good at industrial processes but not so much at basic chemistry. Probably not the first time that kind of thing has happened either. Heck, I’ve read a depressing number of industrial accident reports that involved people not realizing that fine dust can and will explode. Be it flour, sawdust, sugar, iron, or whatever else, if it’s fine enough and airborne, boom.
Yeah, which is why I’m glad I’m not in that field. Although, being a mechanic, I do get to fix lots of dumb from engineers.