Homebrew Telephone Exchange Keeps the Family in Touch, in the House and Beyond

It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while we stumble upon someone who has taken obsolete but really cool phone-switching equipment and built a private switched telephone in …read more Continue reading Homebrew Telephone Exchange Keeps the Family in Touch, in the House and Beyond

When making international calls someone else answers in a language I don’t understand [closed]

… this doesn’t happen when I make local calls, but when I call numbers internationally I get different types of robocall like answers in different languages, and sometimes ads, I think, mainly in Arabic and I don’t even speak the languag… Continue reading When making international calls someone else answers in a language I don’t understand [closed]

The Simplest Electro-Mechanical Telephone Exchange That Actually Works

Several relays and switches mounted on a metal frame

While rarely seen by users, the technology behind telephone exchanges is actually quite interesting. In the first hundred or so years of their existence they evolved from manually-operated switchboards to …read more Continue reading The Simplest Electro-Mechanical Telephone Exchange That Actually Works