Quote:
Originally Posted by julie_m
I was living in Birmingham in the early 1990s, and there were still some clicky-clicky (pulse dialling only) exchanges in use in those days alongside the more modern ones (which could understand both dialling systems).
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I was one of the twenty or so present when BT switched off what they claimed to be 'The Last public Electro-Mechanical exchange' an SAX at Crawford between Glasgow and Carlisle at 10.25am on 23rd June 1995. I videoed the entire change-over and the engineer-in-charge definitely says the 'last electro-mechanical exchange'
But I was the only one present who knew it wasn't the last public electro-mechanical exchange! I was present at the changeover of the last one - a tiny 20 line 'Island Automatic eXchange No 5 - on the evening of 12th July on a tiny island 25+ miles out in the Atlantic to the west of the Shetland Islands - so remote that all calls in to/out of the island were trunk calls. They were still dialling two digits to reach each other up until then. I then recovered the exchange to add to my collection - the round trip took eight days with a distance of 1600 miles including 500 miles by sea!!
You can hear an excerpt from a BBC Radio 4 programme entitled 'The Secret Life of Telephone Numbers' which includes sounds taken from my video of the change-over on a Lerwick number 01595 708222 (a geographic number in most 'free' packages).