Recently, my wife and I went to a museum in a town in Pennsylvania. The museum had a lot of cool static displays showing the way things were in the past and different things that had been used in the city as it developed.
They had examples of Victorian bedrooms and 1800s general stores and that sort of thing. In one of the rooms in the museum, they had some electronics equipment that was very fascinating. They had an old telephone switchboard that had the little headphone-looking jacks so that the wire could be swapped from one connection to another when somebody called and said connect me to BR549.
It was funny because the one from the 1940s was very simple with very few lines. Then they had an operator's console from the 1950s and it had a lot of plugs on it. What caught my eye though was the cheat sheets on the console in front of the places where the wires got plugged in to connect people to other people.
The cheat sheets were cut down pieces of notebook paper or typing paper and they had lists of names and numbers. Some names were people and some were businesses and they were laid out in 2x2 grids so that somebody could easily look up a name listed in the alphabetic list.
The reason it caught my attention was this was like what I used when I was working in air traffic control. At each position we had lots of telephone lines that we had access to When we needed to talk to another facility or a position in another facility We had hot buttons that we could press that would connect us to them we had Numbers that we could dial to talk to different positions in our control room There were so many Connections that we could make that we had cheat sheets on the consoles Beside the keypad and in front of the buttons that connected us to them a Lot like that old-timey telephone operators console Thank you.
I thought it was funny that in our modern age we're still using the things that people came up with in the 1940s and 1950s. Sure they take a different format, but it's still the same stuff.
On a side note, it was neat to see a manual typewriter and to share with my daughter that my father had been able to type 80 words a minute on one of those manual typewriters when he was young.
Fun museum visit.
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