the.com/switchboard
Humanity's first social network, run by women who could hear everything and judge accordingly.
means A switchboard is a manual exchange panel where operators physically plugged cables into jacks to connect one telephone call to another.
from Straightforward compound of 'switch' (a device that redirects a circuit) and 'board' (the panel it's mounted on) — borrowed from earlier telegraph switching systems. Telephone exchanges adopted the term in the late 1800s once human operators, seated before walls of jacks and cords, became the living routers of the phone network.
- origin
- 1878, connecting calls by hand with cords
- staffing
- operators were almost entirely women by design
- obsolescence
- killed by direct-dial and automated switching
- legacy
- hold music exists because of switchboard delays