Some things never change
Some times it surprises me in a way how little things have changed. This week we had our network event where many of our customers join us for dinner and some interesting conversations. This time we organized it in the museum of communication. Before the meeting they gave a short tour and showed us an old telephone switchboard. You know, where they had to connect phone calls by wiring connections by hand.
Funny thing is , there were two features that already existed for a long time: voicemail and teleconference. When somebody was not reachable you could leave a message at the operator who would call the person at a later time. Also creating a teleconference call was easy but just wiring the different connections together. Pretty impressive 8-) .
Other functions that caught my attention: they checked if a line was busy by touching the connection in the switchboard with a plug: when they saw a small spark the connection was busy. Connecting somebody from Groningen to Maastricht worked a bit like a router through gateways: they connected to the next switchboard, they connected to the next switch board etc. Pretty failsafe since ...
