The late 1960s saw the start of the move from the old mechanical exchanges with their noisy banks of selectors, switch arms and electromagnets, to the electronic exchanges of the future - silent, compact and far more capable.
In the process something else was created - switching that had logic and memory, i.e. that could be programmed and had memory. Machine intelligence had arrived on the telephone network.
By the end of the 1960s the technology for digital switching had been tried and proven. The Post Office was ready to transform Britain's telephone network from analogue into digital based on electronics and binary data transmission.
This would turn out to be one of the...
The switch to electronic and digital networks coincided with two other trends in technology - the miniaturisation of devices and the tumbling cost of processing.
As networks were getting smarter, so too were the phones and other devices being attached to those networks.
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Television proved it was possible to send moving pictures along wires. This raised the further possibility of what had always sounded like a great idea - videophones on which callers could see as well as talk to each other. But there were some problems with that vision.
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