One time, at band camp -> Re: PBXes at home

Around the 1993 time frame I was at high school band camp for marching band. We had an hour or so for lunch, so a friend and myself headed off to the nearby Burger King. Burger King was located next door to a GTE telephone switch facility in Chesapeake Virginia. The facility had a parking lot, and maybe a yard behind it with the trucks and what not. Lunch happened rapidly, and we were talking about the telephone company building. I had the bright idea that it's also their lunch time, and if we stand in front of the door -- maybe we could get a tour. With some 40 minutes to spare of our lunch, we stood in front of the door and caught the next employee. We asked about a tour, and she said it shouldn't be a problem but she needed to check. She had us wait in the entrance area while she checked with the manager. As I recall the manager wasn't available then, but she said it was fine and she could give us a tour. She started off, but then the manager came and was able to take over. They were both super friendly. He took us in his office and abruptly busted out with "Why you boys so interested in the phone company?" We explained we had BBS systems and were into computers, he seemed to think it was cool. We got a tour of their DMS-100 switch. My eyes were big everytime I saw a modem wired to that puppy, behind the managers back of course. It wasn't terribly large, they explained the building used to be full of switch but with the modern digital one it was now less than 1/8th of the building and the rest of the building became offices. I remember there were the line subscriber modules and the newer ones were twice the density of the older ones, 32 versus 64 POTS lines IIRC. And the 64 POTS lines module wasn't that large. A lot of it was the copper wiring frames with punchdowns. The DC power system was awesome, the whole setup was very clean. The security was higher than I would have imagined, IIRC the manager had to call in before opening the door. All and all it was pretty cool. When we were leaving the manager and the lady were waving goodbye and the manager said "Have a good onee boys! Please don't sabotoge my switch!" It was pretty surreal. He knew. How did he know I read phrack magazine and ran Tone Loc?! We were 20 minutes late getting back but word had gotten back to band director that we were getting a tour of the phone company building. He was cool with it.