Telephone History Circa 1952
From Don Kimberlin: (internal link)
I finally got around to reading that 1952 file, Tom, and it was fun -- kinda like some hot chocolate and cookies. While the content was stuff I had learned being "on the inside," I can guess that in 1952 it was, as it was even decades later, a "great revelation" to outsiders.
http://www.ndu.edu/library/ic2/L52-107.pdf (external link, 3.8 megs!)
The vast majority of the public has never been invited to peer behind the Oz-like veil to the inside of the telephone plant, so when they are given a snatch of information, they are thoroughly impressed. I got tickled at all the pages of stats marked "Restricted," since they were simply stats from the FCC reports common carriers had to make every year. The maps of plant routes are simply a few that someone inside the company passed out to placate an influential inquisitor.
I was able to recall that in 1962 and into the 1970s, AT&T had only 5 high-capacity routes, some microwave and some cable, crossing the Rocky Mountains. In 1990, that's all they still had, although some of the routes now had fiber optic cable on them. And, now, going back to that 1951 document, we can see they only had 3 routes back then. Other than some points like that, AT&T is and was not about to bother itself with drawing tidy maps of where every telephone cable was in every city, nor where every radio circuit went. They had all this in documentary records of connectivity, but not those neat maps for the public.
Speaking of that, I must tell you about the really great security system they had for government secret private line circuits. They were, of course, inside the relatively secure offices of The Phone Company, but they were simply there, intermingled with all the other stuff from Muzak and radio broadcast loops to burglar alarm circuits and press wires, to foreign exchange phone lines and bank or brokerage data circuits, so when one went pawing through tens of thousands of record cards, one wouldn't even know what he was handling, unless he knew what he was looking for and what The Phone Company called it. So, if I, as an AT&T plant employee, made a deal with the Russians, which I could have done, I could have made photocopies of circuit cards (we all did that quiite a lot), taken them home and sold them, with interpretive info, so the Russians could have bombed Uncle's strategic telecoms heavily. But who would think of doing that?
http://www.ndu.edu/library/ic2/L52-107.pdf (external link, 3.8 megs!)