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History of AT&T Long Lines

82 points by p_ing

by ericwood

1 subcomments

One of my favorite games when traveling is spotting the iconic horn antennas that are still in operation or the various towers that were a part of it. A good chunk of the site are still in active use with all kinds of new equipment bolted onto them, and you can sometimes see holes in the platforms where the original horn antennas used to be mounted.
Microwave is line-of-sight so here on the Colorado front range and deeper into the mountains there's a bunch of sites high up on mountain tops that connect more remote towns. It's always fun to stumble across them when hiking, and I've made a point now of visiting some of the ones that are trail accessible to take photos. The juxtaposition of industrial equipment with the scenery is very striking and it's been fun to take film photos and submit them to the gallery on long-lines.com. Sometimes I worry someone might mistake some of my B&W photos as being much older than they actually are!
There's a bunch of amazing videos from the era on the AT&T archives channel on youtube, they're a lot of fun. It's easy to forget how groundbreaking this was at the time! https://www.youtube.com/@ATTTechChannel

by ipdashc

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Neat seeing this get posted! There's a great map of these at https://long-lines.com
https://long-lines.net/ and the coldwarcomms group are always interesting as well.
For anyone who wants a fun entry point into the rabbit hole, I'd recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Offices

by drewnick

1 subcomments

Somehow I was recommended the /r/longlines subreddit, so I subscribed. I now get pretty much a daily picture of a Long Lines abandoned tower somewhere in the country with upvotes and discussion. It is fascinating the hobbies people have.
This was a great article and put some context around it. It's interesting that many of these stations are basically apocalypse bunkers to keep equipment shielded for military use. There are many sites with the equipment still just sitting there untouched, slowly aging away.

by cogman10

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> all of the Long Line towers I’ve seen in person (like the Slater station) have sat abandoned since the early 1990s.
I know of a few in Idaho that were operational and maintained at least up until the 2010s ish.
The one I'm familiar with was for a ranger station and a scout camp tucked away in the mountains. It was only replaced because of infrastructure spending for rural telecom which happened around 08 crash. All the sudden for these rural telecoms it made sense to put in a line for miles up a mountain for 1 or 2 people.

by cadamsdotcom

3 subcomments

> The era spawning from the 1950s throughout the 1980s can be considered the golden era of telecommunication
I’m not so sure! These days we have FaceTime and dozens of other video and voice call services on our bodies 24/7 - and it’s so competitive among them that they are ALL free! We live in a golden age in a great many ways!
It’s awesome to learn about the engineering and history that got us to to this point.

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by hydrogen7800

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I'm glad there is a name for these. I remember once driving past one[0], but the combination of terrain, road curvature, sunlight and foreground/background around them made a pair of these antenna look like a pair of giant hawks perched in a fire tower. For a split second it was a bit creepy.
[0]https://long-lines.com/viewsite/10470

by nerdile

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The original article is better: https://personal.garrettfuller.org/blog/2018/01/19/att-long-...

by parpfish

2 subcomments

i haven't had a landline for a loong time, so i'm curious -- do long distance phone plans even exist anymore?
there were so many TV ads and telemarketers pushing those plans that "the last long distance phone plan closed today" seems like it would've been a bigger story and the end-of-an-era.

by tiahura

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The history of these early networks is really interesting. I was digging into the history of early radio networks and found some of the details of the dedicated circuits fascinating. NBC was actually created by AT&T.

by dboreham

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by nathanaldensr

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There are some very cool videos on YouTube[1] showing what the insides of these bunkers looked like.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmm-epqkmoQ

by heraldgeezer

4 subcomments

Funny how people hate these large monopolies, but they are the only ones that can actually DO something real.