[TUHS] Known Specimens of Pre-5ESS UNIX Telephone Switching Software?

[Andrew Hume]

i’m sure there are standing references to all this. but as i recall,
the 5ESS was a more or less local switching system.

the guts of the long distance network were embedded in the (roughly) 140 1ESS’s. they ran
a completely separate (and substantially older) code that supported things like SS7 (signaling code
that was NOT embedded in the voice channel). the 1ESS was a complex piece of equipment.

my interaction with this was tangential. throughout the 1980-90s, i had a tight grip on how
accounting messages were handled within AT&T and wrote some C code that handled a
a transition from one level of the standard software to another level. and that code ran inside
the 1ESS.

but this was a long time ago.

> On Sep 25, 2023, at 6:24 PM, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello, my studies lately bring me to the question: Are there any extant examples of telephone switching software, built on UNIX, from the various parts of the Bell System prior to the introduction of the 5ESS and 3B20D?  My focus veers earlier as some 5ESS/3B20D/DMERT technology is still in active use, that sleeping dragon can lie.
> 
> What's gotten me curious is reading about 1ESS in a BSTJ volume I picked up, noting the particulars on how previous concerns of manual and electro-mechanical systems were abstracted into software.  Even without surviving examples, were previous systems such as the 1ESS central control ever ported to or considered for porting to UNIX, or was the hardware interface to the telco lines too specific to consider a future swap-out with, say, a PDP11 running arbitrary software?  Columbus's SCCS (switching, not source code) also comes to mind, although all I know that survives of that is the CB-UNIX 2.3 manual descriptions of bits and pieces.
> 
> By the way, it's funny, I have UNIX to thank for my current experiments with telephones and other signalling stuff, what with making me study the Bell System more generally.  It's starting to come full circle in that I want to take a crack at reading dialing, at least pulse, into some sort of software abstraction on a SBC that can, among other things, provide a switching service on top of a UNIX-like kernel.  I don't know what I'd do with such a thing other than assign work conference call rooms their own phone numbers to dial with a telephone on a serial line...but if I can even get that far I'd call it a success.  One less dependency on the mobile...
> 
> - Matt G.