Office classes and arrangements, notes on the 4ESS More on International Operator Centers

Office classes and arrangements, notes on the 4ESS

Around 1978 I was really interested in the hierarchy of switches. (Large diagram, 68K, internal link) I knew where the ten Number 1 switches were and I remember NY and Oakland had them, but the rest is foggy. Only a few Number 1 switches were needed, I'll explain.

Ten is about the right number and I believe Omaha also had one. That was because they were geographically central in the United States and transcontinental cables converged there. That is also why it was the "800" capital of the U.S. Not only was 800+555-1212 directory assistance located there for that reason, but airlines, catalog companies (like J C Penney and Sears), or any large scale 800 inbound operation was also. The original call center city so to speak.

More On International Operator Centers

What gave AT&T the ability to locate International Operator Centers in smaller cities where they could draw from a different (and lower wage scale and less union oriented) labor pool was the #4 ESS. So instead of NY, White Plains, and Oakland being the only location of Overseas Operators because of access to a Number 1 switch, and having to expand because of rapidly increasing call volume, Pittsburgh, Springfield, Missouri, Jacksonville, and Denver were selected for the first Number 4 ESS switches and IOC's placed there. In fact in Jacksonville, Florida the 4ESS was located in the AT&T building downtown and a remote switch off of it located in our IOC (across the St. Johns river which divided the city in half) dedicated to International.

Jacksonville also had a terminating transatlantic cable and was atmospherically ideal for MARISAT (Maritime Satellite) and (AIRSAT) and we did ship-to-shore and air-ground for the Atlantic region, both for the IOC and the regional telephone companies. (The local Toll and Assistance cordboard operators had for a long time gone regional.) For years after TSPS came in (JAX was one of the first cities to go to TSPS), in the downtown TSPS office located in the high rise AT&T building, there was a 15 position cordboard located in the same center that handled ship-to-shore and air-ground for the region around Florida and the Caribbean and Venezuela. I suspect that's why it was selected as an IOC location. At the IOC we handled the entire Atlantic along with London on ship-to shore and air-ground. An additional factor was that the JAX NAS and Mayfield NAS was located there and their primary function was naval military communications.

When the JAX IOC was being retrofitted to ISPS (International Service Position Systems), which was still a cordboard but with a keyboard placed on the horizontal shelf and two small monitors placed on the lower part of the vertical circuit board, they temporarily laid off a couple of hundred operators and about 20 of us who had worked local Toll and Assistance cordboards were sent to the downtown AT&T building and cross-trained for TSPS (which I enjoyed) but spent most of our time on the cordboard.

That was where I first started training because they needed more operators (who had only worked DA (history, internal link), CAMA and TSPS, history and Snyder's recollections, both internal links) for the cordboard. The cordboard also handled Inward for all of northeastern FL and there were still exchanges that didn't have 1+ dialing in south Georgia and northern Florida. They came in the cordboard also and we answered with the name of the town (Maxville comes to mind). We plugged in, said "Maxville" and the customer told us where they wanted station-to-station and we filled out a mark sense ticket and marked it station-to-station and "DDD" so they got the lower direct dial rate and connected them.

By the time the IOC was retrofitted I went to Saudi Arabia for 6 months and lived in the American Compound because AT&T was building a telephone network there with #4ESS, #5ESS and RSS switches and I trained Arab men on TSPS as operators. I wonder if they still have them. I then went to Atlanta for 5 months for the computerized repair conversion to LMOS, Loop Maintenance Operations System, and MLT, Mechanized Loop Testing (internal link) and then went back to Phoenix. So I never worked ISPS but I knew quite a bit about it from information from my rehired friends. ISPS and IDDD closed Oakland, White Plains, Springfield and Denver.

Number 4 ESS switches were also first placed in Phoenix and El Paso and were still on cord boards. They became unofficial de facto operator centers for calls to Mexico. IDDD also changed all that. Now of course, Mexico has gone to the North American Numbering Plan with 10 digit numbers although with the exception of Mexico City and few other places the area code is 4 digit and the prefix 3 digits and the line number 3 digits. From what I gather from Andrew Roberts the U.K. has done the same thing. Did you know that they basically now have country wide no long distance dialing and that all mobile phone numbers are reached by dialing "09" (I believe) before the 10 digit number and landlines "01" and the 10 digit number? They also changed there emergency number from 999 to 120.

As inquisitive as I was there were some things I avoided like the plague at the JAX IOC. I disliked High Seas because it was on MARISAT, the acronym for Maritime Satellite. Notorious for echo and reverberation, sometimes it would take 6-9 call setups for 1 call. Billing and paper ticket nightmate. We had a row of trunks above the tandems, along with the ring down countries, labeled MARISAT. It made me hate to have to learn relatively simple ship-to-shore on Southern Bell's 10 position cordboard in the new TSPS office.

There were two satellites, one for the Atlantic and the other for the Pacific. Therefore, Jacksonville and Oakland. When I was in the IOC from 1976-78 it was still relatively new technology and who'd a thunk Iridium. I believe it's Inmarsat now which bought Motorola's Iridium.

Motorola used to be a major employer in Arizona and a lot of work on Iridium was done in Scottsdale. It's passage cost a lot of high paying, good jobs in Arizona and made Motorola a blip on our now poor state economy.

Many, many more related pages! Click for a list. Information on J.R. Snyder Jr., operators, directory assistance working and history, placing toll calls and so on. Great reading.

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