cml@cs.umd.edu (Christopher Lott) (02/06/91)
Hi, This past weekend I visited relatives in AT&T country (NJ) and tried to help them activate an old telephone jack in an upstairs room. I found the network interface outside - left it alone - and also found the knot of interconnections in the basement. Single terminal with two brass knobs, and then a mess of wires and goofy connectors. We got nowhere in a hurry. Can anyone explain what the installers do? I know that only red and green are needed, so usually black/yellow are left dangling. But this setup looked odd; in some cases it looked like all four wires were used, and in some cases only black/yellow (not red/green at all). A complicating factor in this is that they have two lines, but I didn't expect this to make it *too* nasty. They use a two-line phone, but it has exactly two lines running to it, nothing fancy. In the knot of connections, I found two interesting connectors: thin, 3/4-inch diameter disks with some three or four wires sticking out of each. One was green and the other red. Are these magic? Thanks for any and all explanations, pointers to literature, etc. chris