Concept
The Number One Electronic Switching System (1ESS) was the first large-scale stored program control (SPC) telephone exchange or electronic switching system in the Bell System. It was manufactured by Western Electric and first placed into service in Succasunna, New Jersey, in May 1965. The switching fabric was composed of a reed relay matrix controlled by wire spring relays which in turn were controlled by a central processing unit (CPU). The 1AESS central office switch was a plug compatible, higher capacity upgrade from 1ESS with a faster 1A processor that incorporated the existing instruction set for programming compatibility, and used smaller remreed switches, fewer relays, and featured disk storage. It was in service from 1976 to 2017. The voice switching fabric plan was similar to that of the earlier 5XB switch in being bidirectional and in using the call-back principle. The largest full-access matrix switches (the 12A line grids had partial access) in the system, however, were 8x8 rather than 10x10 or 20x16. Thus they required eight stages rather than four to achieve large enough junctor groups in a large office. Crosspoints being more expensive in the new system but switches cheaper, system cost was minimized with fewer crosspoints organized into more switches. The fabric was divided into Line Networks and Trunk Networks of four stages, and partially folded to allow connecting line-to-line or trunk-to-trunk without exceeding eight stages of switching. The traditional implementation of a nonblocking minimal spanning switch able to connect input customers to output customers simultaneously—with the connections initiated in any order—the connection matrix scaled on . This being impractical, statistical theory is used to design hardware that can connect most of the calls, and block others when traffic exceeds the design capacity. These blocking switches are the most common in modern telephone exchanges. They are generally implemented as smaller switch fabrics in cascade.
