Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: 21 Jun 91 18:45:39 GMT From: Jeff Carroll Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Tour Given of CO Freely; No Questions Asked Reply-To: Jeff Carroll Message-ID: Organization: Boeing Aerospace & Electronics Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 477, Message 4 of 11 Lines: 47 In article Wally Kramer writes: > nstar!syscon!viking!drmath@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Doctor Math) writes > in Volume 11, Issue 471, Message 6 of 11: >> [The CO] will have NO windows, it may have Bell emblems on it, and you >> should find a parking lot behind it which is filled with Bell >> vehicles. > There are windows on the Corvallis, Oregon CO (503 75x, x=2,4,7). > They have mini-blinds on them, but you can look through the holes > where the string goes and see the equipment from outside. There are windows at our CO too (Bellevue, WA; 641, 643, 644, 747 and possibly others now), but admittedly not very big. Big enough, in any case, that you can look in and see part of the MDF as you drive by. Might be a regional thing. The CO/business office in Huntington, Indiana, where I grew up, has windows only on the first floor, where the Indiana Bell business office used to be before they moved out of town. This raises a tenuously related question. Huntington just got its second exchange (the whole town has been (219)356 since time immemorial, when the exchange was named FLint after the original Indian settlement). I see from the latest home town papers that the local hospital and some individual customers are being placed in (219) 358. Yet while I was growing up, other towns of roughly the same size had multiple exchanges in service. Logansport, for example, was served by GTE, and had *six* exchanges. Warsaw, which for most of the period I speak of was a town of *half* the size of Huntington, was served by United Telephone, and had four or five. The question: why? Legal reasons? Better (or more efficient) switching equipment in the Bell System? How much is this sort of thing responsible for the fact that we're rapidly running out of area codes? Jeff Carroll carroll@ssc-vax.boeing.com