Whipped Cream Difficulties

Phone Phriday is back!

I’m kind of fascinated by the idea of disaster recovery. Back in the day when I was a sysadmin, and later when I was doing backup/recovery support, disaster recovery was a part of my life. These days, other people plan disaster recovery for what I do (and we have a lot of redundancy) but every now and then, I see someone who’s got themselves jammed up…

What does the phone company do?

“Operation Desert Switch”. After Gulf War I, Kuwait’s phone system was completely destroyed. AT&T came to Kuwait in early March 1991 to get at least some limited phone service back to the country:

The company first installed a station in Kuwait City to provide 120 outgoing lines to Kuwaiti citizens, the press, and Operation Desert Storm soldiers. The station was established when a group of AT&T technicians drove from Saudi Arabia and erected a portable satellite ground station overnight. The station, which was the first to link Kuwait to the outside world, soon was handling 10 to 12 thousand calls per day. A more permanent station was established later in 1991, with 720 lines.

Bonus: “Miracle on Second Avenue”.

The morning of February 27, 1975 brought a fire in the telephone building at 204 Second Avenue, at East 13th Street. The building housed the Main Distribution Frame that served customers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn–the mainframe was destroyed, disconnecting tens of thousands of customers, and switching equipment was melted or damaged by smoke. The fire took out approximately 170,000 lines.

The Second Avenue fire is not one I remember, but I do recall the Hinsdale Central Office fire: I was reading TELECOM Digest on USENET pretty avidly at the time, and the Hinsdale fire was a big freaking deal.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 30th, 2021 at 2:00 pm and is filed under History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.