https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/1A_Frame...
I just remember thinking it looked awkward getting to the equipment under them.
I don’t know if the ‘5E’ as he called it was actually in operation yet, he ended up moving us all out of state to take a job developing and delivering training material for it...I think that’s what finally broke him lol. Hands on kinda dude.
I’ll have to hit him up later today to see if he remembers ‘remreed’ (he will). Thanks for the info!
At night, traffic was often low enough that you could hear individual call setups and teardowns, each a cascade of relay actuations rippling from one part of the floor to another. The junctor relays in particular were oddly hefty and made a solid clack, twice per call setup if I recall correctly, once to prove the path by swinging it over it to a test point of some sort, and then again to actually connect it through. On rare occasion, you'd hear a triple-clack as the first path tested bad, an alternate was set up and tested good, and then connected through.
Moments after such a triple-clack, one of the teleprinters would spring to life, spitting out a trouble ticket indicating the failed circuit.
The #5, on the other hand, was completely electronic, time-division switching in the core. The only clicks were the individual line relays responsible for ringing and talk battery, and these were almost silent in comparison. You couldn't learn anything about the health of the machine by just standing in the middle of it and listening, and anyone in possession of a relay contact burnishing tool will tell you in no uncertain terms, that the #5 has no soul.
I believe the #5 ESS machine itself is always in closed cabinets, so it's likely that what you're remembering was the toll/transport equipment, or ancillary frames. Gray 23-inch racks as far as the eye can see!
Depending on how old that part of the office was, they were likely either 14' or 11'6" tall with rolling ladders in the aisles, or 7' tall and the only place they'd have laddertrack was in front of the main distributing frame.
As for magnetic core, if you could see it mounted in a frame, what you probably saw was a remreed switching grid, which is a sort of magnetic core with reed-relay contacts at each bit, so writing a bit pattern into it establishes a connection path through a crosspoint matrix. It's not used as storage but as a switching peripheral that requires no power to hold up its connections. (Contrast with crossbar, which relaxes as soon as the solenoids de-energize.)
Remreed was used in the #1 ESS (and the #1A, I believe), and is extensively documented in BSTJ volume 55: https://archive.org/details/bstj-archives?&and[]=year%3A%221...