Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: john@bovine.ati.com (John Higdon) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Dutch, British Telecom (was Billing and Answer Supervision) Message-ID: <6125@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 6 Apr 90 08:16:09 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Reply-To: John Higdon Organization: TELECOM Digest Lines: 23 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 236, Message 10 of 14 Mike Olson writes: > I never saw this contraption myself, but I heard about it from > engineers who made the trip over there from our company. Can anyone > confirm or deny this? I don't know about Great Britain, but such a contraption existed right here in the US. Back when I used to be a CO groupie and had a friend who was night supervisor at AXminster (Santa Clara), there was a windowless room that had an entire wall of mechanical digital counters. I was told that these were for traffic analysis, not for billing. Anyway, every few minutes the lights in the room would go off, there would be a big flash, and the lights would come back on again. Cameras were actually photographically recording the numbers on the dial. It can only be assumed that the film was ultimately developed and scrutinized by some bean-counter types. John Higdon | P. O. Box 7648 | +1 408 723 1395 john@bovine.ati.com | San Jose, CA 95150 | M o o !