larry@uunet.uu.net (Larry Lippman) (10/11/89)
In article <telecom-v09i0436m01@vector.dallas.tx.us> the Telecom Moderator writes: > Apartment building front door 'enterphone service' provided by > Illinois Bell (a CO-based service) also uses panel phones, but with > armored handsets instead of the old kind which retracted back into the wall. The service to which you refer is known as ADAS (Apartment Door Answering Service), and was primarily available in CO's served by No. 1 ESS and No. 2 ESS. There was actual ADAS hardware in the CO which was connected to each subscriber line, but I never actually saw it and don't know any technical details. The lobby telephone was a touch-tone panel telephone, with the prospective visitor dialing an abbreviated 3-digit number (selected from a directory chart) to reach the desired apartment. A call-waiting feature was automatically implemented with ADAS in the event that a regular CO call was in progress at the time of an ADAS call, or vice versa. The entrance door was opened by the subscriber dialing a particular single digit. A CO pair provided a switched 48 volts to operate an interface relay in the apartment building, with the contacts of this relay being connected to an electric strike which opened the entrance door. More than one entrance door/electric strike could be accommodated. The timing interval for the electric door strike was controlled in the CO, and was a customer-specified option. With the advent of divestiture and related changes in the way BOC's operate, I suspect that ADAS may be no longer offered for new installations, although I could be wrong. I haven't seen an ADAS installation in a good many years. > And for quite a few years, *the* picturephone center was located > in the lobby of the Illinois Bell HQ building, 212 West Washington St. > They had a rather nice looking conference room set up, with camera, > speakers, etc, and they rented it out by the hour to companies wanting > to have picturephone conferences with a branch in some other city. PT] As far as I know, the Bell System Picturephone >CENTERS< did not in fact use the station apparatus which is commonly referred to as "Picturephone". Instead, the Picturephone Centers used conventional video cameras and monitors, with the camera being typically hidden behind a wooden panel, having just its lens protrude. While the station-variety Picturephone service used video bandwidth compression to about 1 MHz, as far as I know, the Picturephone Centers arranged their conferences using a standard broadcast-quality 6 MHz monochrome video channel. I have taken part in a few Picturephone Center conferences, with the most recent being about 12 years ago; in fact, somewhere I still have a souvenir ball-point pen given out by New York Telephone after attending a conference at their Picturephone Center at Columbus Circle in Manhattan. :-) The Bell System charged exorbitant rates for use of Picturephone Centers, which hardly placed Picturephone conference center use within the reach of "the masses". I suspect that offering Picturephone Centers was merely a face-saving effort on the part of the Bell System to keep the Picturephone name "alive", since it had obviously died as a customer station offering. As implied above, the Picturephone Centers offered no service which had any resemblance to the proposed *switched* Picturephone service of the 1960's. The original switched station Picturephone concept was rather clever, and so was the circuit design. There were neither integrated nor digital circuits in the original Picturephone design, and the resultant size and performance did indeed represent a significant design achievement. Incidentaly, having once been directly involved in the telephone industry, and having known many people at AT&T, Bell Labs and the Bell System operating companies, I have tried, tried, and tried over the years to get my hands on a surplus Picturephone station instrument - with no success. A significant amount of Picturephone apparatus - ranging from Picturephone station sets to CO line repeaters to special KTU's to 5-line keysets with *pink-colored* keys for Picturephone-equipped lines - was manufactured in the, ahem, "anticipation" of sales which never materialized. All of this apparatus seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth; it has either been quietly scrapped over the years, or now resides in a super-secret storage location, perhaps presided over by Elvis Presley. :-) I would be most curious to know if any other Telecom readers have ever managed to lay their hands on any surplus Picturephone apparatus. I have known a few Bell Labs employees who were ham radio operators and had real motivation to obtain surplus Picturephone apparatus for amateur television purposes - but even they were unsuccessful in their efforts. <> Larry Lippman @ Recognition Research Corp. - Uniquex Corp. - Viatran Corp. <> UUCP {allegra|boulder|decvax|rutgers|watmath}!sunybcs!kitty!larry <> TEL 716/688-1231 | 716/773-1700 {hplabs|utzoo|uunet}!/ \uniquex!larry <> FAX 716/741-9635 | 716/773-2488 "Have you hugged your cat today?" [Moderator's Note: When I said '*the* picturephone center' I did not mean there was only one everywhere; I meant only one in Chicago. For a few years in the early seventies, there were maybe a couple dozen customers with picturephone service here. IBT had a little booth set up in the lobby where the public could go to call the relatively few people who had the service; mostly businesses used the service to display their wares. PT]
dave@uunet.uu.net (Dave Levenson) (10/15/89)
In article <telecom-v09i0443m01@vector.dallas.tx.us>, kitty!larry@uunet.uu. net (Larry Lippman) writes: > In article <telecom-v09i0436m01@vector.dallas.tx.us> the Telecom Moderator > writes: > > Apartment building front door 'enterphone service' provided by > > Illinois Bell (a CO-based service) also uses panel phones, but with > > armored handsets instead of the old kind which retracted back into the wall ... > With the advent of divestiture and related changes in the way > BOC's operate, I suspect that ADAS may be no longer offered for new > installations, although I could be wrong. I haven't seen an ADAS > installation in a good many years. My parents have a condo in Bethesda, Maryland (a Washington, DC suburb) in which ADAS was installed during the last year. At the same time it was installed, they were offered equal access, call-waiting, and several other custom-calling features. From the sound of things, I think they had number 5 crossbar switching until the time of great changes. It now sounds more like 5ESS. (Does anybody know for sure? It's 301-229 for the curious.) This may mean that the 5ESS supports ADAS. It may also be a CPE-based version of the same service. Perhaps the armored panel phone in the foyer detects the touch tone from the resident's set and unlocks the door? I don't remember seeing any brand name on the set. When I visit, the directions on the phone tell me to dial # and their appartment number. When I lift the handset, there is no battery or sound in the receiver. When I enter the #, I hear what sounds like CO dialtone. I then enter their three-digit appartment number, and hear the three touch-tones in the receiver. As soon as I have entered three digirts, the phone dials their 7-digit number, using pulse-dialing (I hear the pulses in the handset). The microphone is dead (i.e. no side-tone) until after dialing is complete, but is enabled during ringing. When they answer, they dial 9 to admit me. I hear the first few tens of milliseconds of their tone signal, and then silence. About 500 msec later, the entry door goes "thunk-buzzzzzz" and I am given access. Does anyone recognize this system? Dave Levenson Voice: (201) 647 0900 Westmark, Inc. Internet: dave@westmark.uu.net Warren, NJ, USA UUCP: {uunet | rutgers | att}!westmark!dave [The Man in the Mooney] AT&T Mail: !westmark!dave