Talk:Autovon

Untitled
Could somone add some dates to this article if they have them? Like when construction on the Autovon started, when it finished, when the military started using it, when they abandoned it, etc.?

Silver Box
Silver box redirects here. Shouldn't we include something about them? ;-) --67.172.99.160 00:31, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Anarchist eBook entry
From the Anarchist's eBook: Brodo 05:20, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

Silver Box Plans                                by the Jolly Roger

Introduction:

First a bit of Phone Trivia. A standard telephone keypad has 12 buttons. These buttons, when pushed, produce a combination of two tones. These tones represent the row and column of the button you are pushing. 1  1   1            2   3   4            0   3   7            9   6   7     697   (1) (2) (3)     770   (4) (5) (6)     851   (7) (8) (9)     941   (*) (0) (#) So (1) produces a tone of 697+1209, (2) produces a tone of 697+1336, etc.

Function:

What the Silver Box does is just creates another column of buttons, with the new tone of 1633. These buttons are called A, B, C, and D.

Usefulness: --    Anyone who knows anything about phreaking should know that in the old days of phreaking, phreaks used hardware to have fun instead of other people's Sprint and MCI codes. The most famous (and useful) was the good ol' Blue Box. However, Ma Bell decided to fight back and now most phone systems have protections against tone-emitting boxes. This makes boxing just about futile in most areas of the United States (ie those areas with Crossbar or Step-By-Step). If you live in or near a good-sized city, then your phone system is probably up-to-date (ESS) and this box (and most others) will be useless. However, if you live in the middle of nowhere (no offense intended), you may find a use for this and other boxes.

Materials: -    1  Foot of Blue Wire 1 Foot of Grey Wire 1 Foot of Brown Wire 1 Small SPDT Switch (*) 1 Standard Ma Bell Phone (*) SPDT = Single Pole/Double Throw

Tools: -    1  Soldering Iron 1 Flat-Tip Screwdriver

Procedure: - (1) Loosen the two screws on the bottom of the phone and take the casing off. (2) Loosen the screws on the side of the keypad and remove the keypad from the mounting bracket. (3) Remove the plastic cover from the keypad. (4) Turn the keypad so that *0# is facing you. Turn the keypad over. You'll see a bunch of wires, contacts, two Black Coils, etc. (5) Look at the Coil on the left. It will have five (5) Solder Contacts facing you. Solder the Grey Wire to the fourth Contact Pole from the left. (6) Solder the other end of the Grey Wire to the Left Pole of the SPDT Switch. (7) Find the Three (3) Gold-Plated Contacts on the bottom edge of the keypad. On the Left Contact, gently seperate the two touching Connectors (they're soldered together) and spread them apart. (8) Solder the Brown Wire to the Contact farthest from you, and solder the other end to the Right Pole of the SPDT Switch. (9) Solder the Blue Wire to the Closest Contact, and the other end to the Center Pole of the SPDT Switch.››(10) Put the phone back together.

Using The Silver Box:

What you have just done was installed a switch that will change the 369# column into an ABCD column. For example, to dial a 'B', switch to Silver Box Tones and hit '6'. No-one is sure of the A, B, and C uses. However, in an area with an old phone system, the 'D' button has an interesting effect. Dial Directory Assistance and hold down 'D'. The phone will ring, and you should get a pulsing tone. If you get a pissed-off operator, you have a newer phone system with defenses against Silver Boxes. At the pulsing tone, dial a 6 or 7. These are loop ends.

-= Exodus =-

Other source
The Autovon used the 1633 Hz column of tones, a part of the DTMF standard set that rarely (never?) appears on consumer telephones. The silver box adds these tones to a regular telephone. I suppose it could in theory work on an Autovon network. If anyone has tried this they probably never came out to say whether it was successful or not.

In civilian networks these keys sometimes had special uses. Holding one of the keys while connecting to the operator would drop you into a special system. It sounds like it was mainly used by telco engineers to diagnose their networks, but that is just a guess and i would like to find out more.

The service that was provided is described in this article:



I found particularly interesting that military prioritization was all on good faith. They may have had strict regulations on what priority could be used for a type of call, but it was not enforced by the Autovon system. Presumably abuse could get a write-up if the culprit was caught.

--Kevin L&#39;Huillier 00:00, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

Excellent reference, but don't have time to integrate it at the moment:
Enjoy. Jouster (  whisper  ) 11:04, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

1ESS
The switches were Number 1 Electronic Switching System (a computer), #1 ESS, of the 4-wire type when I was programming them in the late 1960s. Ma Bell cut the first #1 in 1961.

PointyHairedEE, 5-27-10

GTE and Independent Telcos
Several CONUS AutoVon sites used GTE Automatic Electric AutoVon switch systems. Some of these were are Topaz Lake, Nevada, Delta, Utah, Terre Haute, Indiana, and Fairview, Kansas.

The GTE switch had a mechanical three stage fully non-blocking network, call processing logic using Boolean logic implemented via multiple AND, NAND, OR, NOR, and FlipFlops on printed circuit cards with hard-wired backplane connections, and call routing data stored in static RAM. Call processing logic changes required backplane wiring changes. As an example, during the installation of the Fairview site in 1969 the third version of logic was implemented, meaning some card pins had three wires wrapped on that pin.

Wilsonse (talk) 06:23, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Digitization and Upgrade section
Don't take the information out on the new AUTOVON system. There is plenty more that could be said, if you do go taking this out then I will have to source more information to justify building a bigger page. It is best that this was kept short and accurate with the right amount of uncertainty in the right places. CompSciFutures (talk) 11:49, 20 May 2024 (UTC)