History of AT&T Long Lines (telephoneworld.org)
52 points by p_ing 6 hours ago
ericwood 2 hours ago
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
topspin an hour ago
> Microwave is line-of-sight so here on the Colorado front range
In such places it was common to bounce microwave trunk lines with "passive repeaters": big aluminum reflectors, about the size of a highway billboard, setup wherever a line needed to get around an obstacle. There is an excellent article about it all here[1].
[1] https://computer.rip/2025-08-16-passive-microwave-repeaters....
ipdashc 3 hours ago
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
hydrogen7800 an hour ago
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.
nerdile an hour ago
The original article is better: https://personal.garrettfuller.org/blog/2018/01/19/att-long-...
drewnick 4 hours ago
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.
RiverCrochet 2 hours ago
How to keep something working and resilient 24/7/365 is extremely fascinating to me, and a lot of the old Long Lines stuff was built with the idea of attempting to survive a possible nuclear war. Even the reason why locations were chosen were part of that.
cadamsdotcom 3 hours ago
> 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.
parpfish 3 hours ago
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.
ssl-3 3 hours ago
AFAICT, the rules requiring consumers to be able to choose a long distance carrier came into effect with the 1984 AT&T breakup, and those rules were never applied to the VOIP providers we have today for "landline" service.
But if a person can even get a traditional POTS landline (a pair of wires extending from the handset to the telco CO) at all in 2026, then: I'd imagine that choice still exists. There's probably still information about it on the back of the phone bill that shows up once every month.
But that whole business is practically dead, hence the lack of popular advertising.
It amazes me sometimes. One year, it was kit-and-parcel to move to a new place and order a real phone line (maybe with the same number -- or maybe not!), and it was important to make sensible choices for a long distance carrier. Then, MCI started offering flat-rate long distance for $50 per month. Soon after, it was common to switch to ISP-bundled VOIP to save some money, or perhaps a discount provider like MagicJack.
Then cell phone plans got cheap (Verizon was offering them for $7/mo at one point -- cheap enough for everyone in the family to have their own, and save money doing it!), and then got they got very expensive with the introduction of the pocket supercomputer, and now that pocket supercomputers are ubiquitous the plans can be cheap again.
Throughout all of these perfectly-rational and very sleepy transitions, the old telco cable plant still persists. It's in shambles, but it's present. One can see the infrastructure hanging up there on poles and connecting to houses, or down there with pedestals poking out of the ground roadside, but (at least in my city) ~nobody uses it for anything in the consumer space.
dylan604 8 minutes ago
> But that whole business is practically dead,
Good riddance. The amount of scams in the long distance industry was baffling. Legend has it one of the companies named themself "I Don't Care" so if someone said that when asked which long distance carrier you wanted, that's who you got with their ridiculously expensive rates. Calling cards were just an extension of the same idea.
dboreham 3 hours ago
They do exist, at least in some places: https://www.att.com/home-phone/landline/
Long distance plans were a regulatory invention that allowed customers to opt out of the local phone company's long distance service. Today those companies don't make monopoly profits (because everyone uses mobile phones and VoIP) so they price their bundled services reasonably. This pretty much kills the market for stand alone long distance plans, although they do seem to exist still. No market, no advertising.
tiahura 4 hours ago
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.
dboreham 3 hours ago
Looks like the site has been hugged.
heraldgeezer 3 hours ago
Funny how people hate these large monopolies, but they are the only ones that can actually DO something real.
mmooss a minute ago
> they are the only ones that can actually DO something real.
Do you mean to say only monopolies can do 'real' things? I agree that some have, some did them and then became monopolies. And it sure seems like most things done in the world are by non-monopolies. Just look at the IT world.
hydrogen7800 an hour ago
Wasn't this the original basis for their justification of being a monopoly? And that the concession to the public was their mandate to operate bell labs and give fruits of their research to industry who did not participate in the monopoly?
Lammy an hour ago
Relevant wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
ipdashc 3 hours ago
I know AT&T had its issues, but I've always wondered if it was a mistake to take down the monopoly. The amount of tech that came out of Bell Labs boggles the mind. And the reliability of the network at the time was, I've been told, incredible compared to today.
I suppose tech companies like Google are the modern equivalent, but they don't seem to do quite as much cool stuff.
ssl-3 2 hours ago
It was ridiculously reliable. The telephone, as it was, Just Worked. The importance of this reliability was very ingrained in how they did things. (Which makes sense: When you've got many tens of millions of customer circuits to maintain, and the switching gear to cross-connect them, you need that stuff to work. The manpower required to maintain an unreliable system of that scale would be astronomically expensive.)
The one time in my life when the home phone didn't work in our house, I decided to wander out back to have a look. I saw a cable just dangling there in the alley that I visually traced back to the house.
I called the phone company from our other line (we had one for the modem) and reported this combination of no dialtone, and a down line. A truck appeared in less than 10 minutes. A short time after that, they knocked on the front door to say it was fixed, and speculated that maybe it'd been clipped by a truck or something.
If the old AT&T had purchased GitHub instead of Microsoft, it would be stodgy, featureless, grey, robustly-reliable, and delivered into homes and businesses over a dedicated copper circuit at profound monthly expense.
dylan604 4 minutes ago
topspin an hour ago
CPLX 2 hours ago
nathanaldensr 3 hours ago
There are some very cool videos on YouTube[1] showing what the insides of these bunkers looked like.