CMS:Outline of the Connections Museum

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Connections Museum:

The Connections Museum is a museum that collects, maintains, and displays objects related to connecting people to each other, most notably telephones and telephone switching systems.

City-scale telephone switches

The museum contains several operational city-scale switching systems, most of which were originally installed in cities in the Pacific Northwest:

• a Western Electric 355 A Strowger Step-by-Step (SXS) switch
• a Western Electric Panel switch from the Rainier/Parkway Exchange
• a Western Electric No. 1 Crossbar (1XB) switch from the ?? exchange
• a North Electric CX 100 from the Battleship California, towns of Wilkeson and Lester, and Camp David and Camp Pigott in Monroe, Washington
• a Western Electric No. 5 Crossbar (1XB) switch from the Mercer Exchange
• a Western Electric 3ESS switch from the ?? exchange in Crosby, WA
• a Nortel DMS-10 switch from the ?? exchange in Huntsville, AL

Business-scale telephone systems

The museum contains several smaller scale manual and automatic switching systems:

• a collection of private branch exchanges
• a collection of private automatic branch exchanges
• a collection of key systems
• a low voltage switchboard

Telephone exhibits

The museum contains several collections of different types of telephones:

• a comprehensive collection of phones throughout history
• a collection of AT&T's Design Line phones
• a collection of payphones
• a mobile phone display

Telephone adjacent exhibits

The museum contains exhibits of devices, tools, and infrastructure that is directly or indirectly related to telephony:

• an early telephone history display, including a working telegraph and replicas of experimental transmitters
• AT&T Long Lines microwave transmission equipment from several stations in the Pacific Northwest
• a power board used to control and monitor power used by telephone switches
• a ringing and tone plant used to generate alternating current for ringing and acoustic tones played over phones
• a collection of appliances manufactured by Western Electric, the main manufacturer of Bell System equipment
• a collection of telecommunications engineer tools and Picturephones
• a phone lines construction display
• a portable step-by-step switch custom built to be easily transportable and show the inner workings of step switching

Other telecommunications equipment

In addition to telephony, the museum covers other forms of telecommunications such as the transmission of text and data:

• a collection of Teletype brand teleprinters
• a collection of computers from the 1980s to 2000s