I recently had the good fortune to attend a local estate sale which featured a great deal of telephone, switching and computer equipment. Although I was two days late for the "good stuff," I did come away with quite a few interesting items. Among these was a small box of slides:
When I spotted the box amongst a pile of scattered papers, I inspected one or two, saw telephones and naturally added them to the pile.
I've had a couple slide scanners for a few years now and have never had any slides to try in them. The more useful-looking one is a Pacific Image PF3600 Pro with USB (1.1!) and Firewire interfaces. Scanning one slide at a time at 3600 dpi was a bit (very) tedious but spread out over a few nights while watching YouTube videos it wasn't so bad. I scanned them to uncompressed TIFs (5124 x 3420, about 102mb each) and reduced them to 2000 x 1394 JPGs before uploading. If anyone has a need for an original TIF file, let me know.
They were all very dirty so each slide was cleaned with a microfiber cloth before scanning. The images are far from perfect but it seems to have taken care of most of the dust particles and other debris.
The slide images look like they may have been used for advertising, training and other documentation. There is no context to any of them but a few are bound to be interesting to Bell fans. Classic Computing hobbyists will also enjoy the Silent 700 terminal, with acoustic coupler engaged.
So here, presented in the order I grabbed them from the box, are 39 slides of Bell System, Western Electric and AT&T images.
When I spotted the box amongst a pile of scattered papers, I inspected one or two, saw telephones and naturally added them to the pile.
I've had a couple slide scanners for a few years now and have never had any slides to try in them. The more useful-looking one is a Pacific Image PF3600 Pro with USB (1.1!) and Firewire interfaces. Scanning one slide at a time at 3600 dpi was a bit (very) tedious but spread out over a few nights while watching YouTube videos it wasn't so bad. I scanned them to uncompressed TIFs (5124 x 3420, about 102mb each) and reduced them to 2000 x 1394 JPGs before uploading. If anyone has a need for an original TIF file, let me know.
They were all very dirty so each slide was cleaned with a microfiber cloth before scanning. The images are far from perfect but it seems to have taken care of most of the dust particles and other debris.
The slide images look like they may have been used for advertising, training and other documentation. There is no context to any of them but a few are bound to be interesting to Bell fans. Classic Computing hobbyists will also enjoy the Silent 700 terminal, with acoustic coupler engaged.
So here, presented in the order I grabbed them from the box, are 39 slides of Bell System, Western Electric and AT&T images.
