Introduction to BT&E

BTE stands for Blacker Telephone & Electric, a private telephone exchange for the men and women of Blacker Hovse. Originally ``Blacker Interalley Telephone & Electric'' or BITE, the first incarnation of BT&E was built in the summer of 1968 by the late Doug Winbigler, Stan Levy (class of 1970) and Bill Drake (class of 1970). It consumed most of the $600 social budget and resulted in much scorn from the other houses as to what Blacker considered to be social function. It is also interesting to note that at this time, BTE was actually illegal, as the Bell System had a legal monopoly over everything connected to the phone system. BTE came on line for 1st term 1968 and Craig McClusky was the first Teletroll. Craig was a freshman, and became the Teletroll possibly by default or election or both.

Another related service called Blacker Music Exchange was also started in the 1950s, and allowed sharing of music from room to room. It consisted mostly of coax wires with very little additional circuitry, plus an amplifier to pipe music into the Lounge. About 1984, one could scrabble enough BME together to keep the Ride synchronized, but that was the only time anybody bothered. It's time of death is estimated to be sometime in the mid-80's, and some of control panel is still in the lounge above the mailboxes.

BTE in the 70's was a large part mechanical, being the state of the art in automated telephone switching at the time. Around this time, Doug Winbigler is mentioned in the lore as a ``BTE troll'' who apparently committed suicide by taking cyanide after finishing re-wiring BTE. This story of the suicide is actually true, but whether or not it was actually after he finished re-wiring BTE may only be rumor. But whatever the case, BTE's early years were tempestuous, to say the least.

The original electromechanical BTE was well dead by 1981, though perhaps recently. Since it was mechanical, it could fail bits at a time, so some phones occasionally worked.

In the early 80's, BTE was slowly evolving and upgrading, becoming purely an electrical affair. Starting in the spring of 1982, the mechanical BTE and its cases of contact cleaner were tossed off the sleeping porch, and BTE was rebuilt from scratch as a mostly electronic system, except for relays to ring with (which burned out a lot, and, having been obtained from C&H, were finite in supply.) The hall wiring was still largely OK from the original Doug Winbigler wiring. It was done as a combination CS 121 and EE 95 project by several people, including Rick Walker (RCW) and Dan Kegel (DRK). SLC would be Steve Colwell. In 1985, it was still pulse only, because nobody wanted to fork out for new phones, though people had been trying to get the energy to add touch tone for a while. Some hardware existed, but the software hadn't been written. At some point, Touch Tone support was added, (as a CS/EE 11 project no less!) by one Tom Aldcroft. Also in the early 80's, BTE acquired a microprocessor brain. (A 6502.) BTE continued to develop until . . .

In 1987, an incident with a fire-hose cleaned the dust off much of the computer circuitry, but unfortunately also gave BTE a labotomy. The "incident" involved a fire-hose being hooked up to the water main that sits precariously over BTE's little head for the purpose of sousing Flems or Scurves or both. There were some problems with the valve which resulted in much water being dumped on the sensitive electronics. The perpetratOR was one Mark Huie.

Since then, BTE has languished in a coma, lying dormant in the BTE closet of Blacker House. (It was resuscitated for a couple of months in 1988, but fell back into coma.)

Walker Aumann spent a good deal of time trying to debug the water-soused motherboard, but had problems because the DataWidget® had broken and there were no longer spare parts availible. The DataWidget was a wacky 6502 emulator.

In the early 90's, Bevan Bennett with the help of Walker Aumann started work on a new computer control module for BTE. Work was halted, however, when the campus telecommunications office announced plans for free undergraduate phone service to every room.