In 1974 I moved into a condo complex in Marina del Rey near USC-ISI. As has
been my usual practice, I ordered two POTS lines and I went to the phone
company to get the phones. The condo was pre-wired with jacks in each of the
major rooms. The phones I got from the phone company came with plugs that were
wired for either line 1 or line 2. It took me a minute of incredulity to
understand the system. Each jack was wired for both lines, and each phone was
wired to connect to one or the other of the two lines. Clever but definitely
different from anything I had seen before. I could move the phones from room
to room. Each phone "knew" whether it was for line 1 or line 2.
Steve
On Jan 3, 2013, at 9:52 AM, Dave Crocker <dhc(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> wrote:
On 1/2/2013 7:08 PM, Ned Freed wrote:
Of course. However, we're talking about post-Carterphone here.
Carterphone was
1968, and I'm sure four pin plugs were in use by then.
Not in Los Angeles. As I recall, all the phone around there were hardwired
into the 70s.
Also keep in mind that AT&T fought the Carterphone decision for many years.
So it would seem...
I went to work at MCI in 1983, building MCI Mail. Our group was on M street,
near corporate HQ. One morning I got a call telling me to come into work
wearing sloppy clothes. (This was normally a 3-piece suit place.) There had
been a fire on the floor above, where the MCI attorneys for the case against
AT&T worked. Lots of water and smoke damage. The claim was that the fire
had burned, ummmmm... especially hot...
A line mod was probably against the rules irrespective of Carterphone in
those
days. But had you bought your own phone with a ringer switch and hooked
that
Not allowed at that point. All user equipment that was wired to the system
had to come from the phone company in L.A.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net