[HECnet] Phone company (US) and DEC hardware and the mainframe

[Brian Hechinger]

I don't know anything about billing but the ESS and newer switches all had Datakit interfaces. Back in the mid-90s I supported systems that did traffic analysis of phone switches (mainly for capacity planning) via the Datakit network.

The original systems were 3b2 boxes and the new replacement machines were SPARCstation 20 boxes.

The products were COER [0] that ran on the 3b2 and TDMS [1] on the SS20. The source code to COER was missing which made dealing with bugs fun. Especially as it had a bad habit of corrupting its own db randomly.

-brian

[0] Central Office Equipment Recording
[1] Traffic Data Management System

On May 16, 2013, at 1:23, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:

Hello!
Here's an interesting issue, we all know who created UNIX and its
descendants. I do know that it was extended to accommodate the needs
of running the phone exchanges that the companies setup to use the ESS
and its relatives.

But wasn't there a story floating around that they had worked out how
to have the phone companies systems to communicate the necessary
billing specs to an ordinary IBM system, who'd eventually create the
bills? (Or even had the same DEC hardware who ran the phone system, do
the billing itself?) Basically the story thus told contains a heck of
a lot of holes, and in here I'm hoping that someone does know the
details.

Running those systems now must be quite an accomplishment now though.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."