Thanks everyone who donated MO disks! We are now totally covered!

My next hardware project just HAS to have a "CATASTROPHIC ALARM!!!" indicator. Fabulous to see this project coming to life.

There are so few people in the country who know how the infrastructure works and keeps it running. You should feel very proud of all your work and knowledge. ❤

"We're using a VT420 cuz that is what the machine would have originally shipped with" - I love that offhand attention to detail. A big round of applause to everyone involved in the re-animation.

Y’all give this subject the adequate attention it deserves. The combination of skill sets involved in this work is as relevant today as it always has been: we always need people who know how to communicate using whatever technology of the day.

"Everything is fail." Ahh yes, the joys of hardware debugging! ;-)

Shut down a few DMS100’s as our company abandoned local copper customers for fiber. The amperage came off the battery plant but capacitors held current for some time, after we verified it okay, some vendor would come & remove it. These were little CO’s at first, it got eerily quiet without all those fans spinning. And cold, these small buildings didn’t have heat, only air-conditioning, the switch itself warmed the place.

So happy to see all the work, collecting, transporting, storing, assembling, rebuilding, documenting and now "BOOOT UPPPP"! This is a pretty good first time out, and sounds like DMS10 will have a new life at the Connections Museum. Congrats to one and all.

The aesthetic of that machine and its many module panels... feels like a previously unseen peak of late cassette futurism. Nice work preserving this stuff.

The thing about the 'back up from dark' instructions would be that... It's really not too bad to bring up the standby side of most of the systems on a DMS. If I were on site doing that I'd turn it over to the on duty switch techs at the NOC to just correct the standby alarms while you'd clean up the site. Not that we ever had anything like that in my short time working with these... Interesting you had an MO drive. Our MTX was backing up with one of the larger quarter inch tapes. See if you can find one of the Nortel branded HP thinkjets for the console printer. :D

Nice job to get the old tank up and running again. We had the DMS10's big brother, the DMS500 (a DMS100 and a DMS250 combined) at an CLEC I worked for for the longest time. The thing was treated like it was some sort of holy artifact when I started and even had its own floor in the CO to itself. WHen I left it had mostly been supplanted by softswitches & VOIP and _nobody_ loved the poor DMS500 anymore. Though that may have been due to its propensity to randomly trip breakers for reasons nobody could ascertain.

As a former SME for DMS-100 as a technician and manager, it's great to see this switch working

This is too neat. I've always loved older tech that isn't really talked about. Everybody's focusing on old gaming systems but this is where it's at. Thanks so much for the channel and bringing things back to life.

09:03 Minor, Major and Cathastrophic alarm. Only missing the Ludicrous alarm..

My home town in Austria ran these. we talked about them on a tour with the engineering school when we visited the telephone exchange ca 1997. They said "we got these from Canada". It took me until last year to connect the dots, that it was Nortel.

NTPs! I used to write those! 😂

There's nothing quite like a brown and orange piece of equipment, thanks as always for showing and explaining these wonderful machines to us.

Spent some time in Unity, Maine working on a Nortel DMS-100. This video brought back some good old memories. I've always been fond on making two physical devices communicate over a distance. No matter the age of the technology, the idea is the same and I love it all the same!

1:51 Fans!? Yes, here's one, big fan of this channel 😂❤ That orange phone with tack board, lovely!

Nortel switches and fiber optic multiplexers were usually fairly reliable. Where I worked at Telmar Network Technologies, we built our own test lab to test telecommunication ckt. packs. We put together a 5-ESS switch, a Nortel DMS100, Tellabs 5500 DACS, and a complete Nortel OC-48 fiber optic ring. Also we built our own -48 and +130 volt power plant. Also of course NEC optical mux. equip. RC-28 and NEC 405s.

Brings back lots of memories. Never worked on DMS-10 but got my career started working on DMS SuperNode back in the early 1990's at the BNR Ottawa Carling campus. Used to walk up and down the isles in the lab just wondering what it all did. Don't remember much of it so I'm watching this series very carefully. Saw ENET messages fly by on the boot up so it's not that different.

When I maintained a Memorex-Telex Lexar 2000M (Just a little 1 frame 1024 port PCM switch from the late '80s.), the serial console port was connected to both a glass TTY and an Okidata Microline 320 printer with the serial port option. As a result, everything that echoed to the glass TTY was preserved on continuous feed paper. This was extremely helpful for both troubleshooting and documenting the configuration of the switch. I highly recommend that you do the same.

We actually have three types of alarms; critical, major, minor. I assume catastrophic was the DMS 10 version of critical. Great job turning it up!

Fascinating episode, Colin and Sarah! Nice to see the DMS 10 coming alive, a tremendous accomplishment. I noticed, at the end of the video, that the circuit breaker that wouldn't stay on had been fixed...where was the short? +1 for the Daria patch, Sarah, and if you need help getting the Ethernet up, just send me a ticket and I'll fly out and help! :-)

I love how quickly you’re making progress with this one, breathing life back into a machine like that is not a small job at all!

I was actually surprised how new the system is. The discussions around bring-up and alarm states makes it sound closer to the Apollo program. The industrial level redundancy and diagnostics is pretty crazy (but understandable).

You’re wearing a jean jacket with patches and a Rush t-shirt! That was my wardrobe back in 1983! 😂😂😂😂😊

I work with a gentleman who used to work for Nortel installing DMS-10 systems all around the SE US and the Caribbean. I got the opportunity to check out this beast in the museum last month and he enjoyed seeing the photos of it. Great work over there edit: I realize now the powerup was the day I was at the museum. I recognize one of the guests in the video, ha I also didn't realize that the DMS-10 error output looks suspiciously like that of the Meridian systems. Obviously there is a common heritage here but I wonder how much of that knowledge translates over to the DMS-10. At this point I only have to keep Meridians alive until the darkness falls onto the remainder of their sad existence

6:06 "1202 alarm" that's the kind of nerdery you just gotta appreciate (the 1202 alarm was a program alarm in the Apollo Guidance Computer experienced during with the Lunar Guidance Computer of Apollo 11 during landing)

Excited to see the journey on combing through this beast and extinguishing those alarms.

1202 alarm, love it.

Thank you so much for this update! I had a great time when I visited for my birthday in January. Looks like I need to get back up there and visit again. Congratulations on the boot!

Great addition to the collection! Thanks for the thoughtful video documentation of the initial pickup from Adtran and this next milestone of the cold start. I managed a Nortel Option 61C in the 2000s (baby to DMS 10/100 for sure).

Your channel did quickly go from someting i taught i would find mildly interesting to one of my top ten favorite channels i watch every single video ever since i watched the very first video here! Always looking forward to a new video!

poor thing.. it's lonely.. it cannot talk to all the computers it used to talk to. give it some new friends to talk to 🙂

Thank you. Awesome video

I'm loving this series so much! 10/10 (:

Great to see the DMS-10 fired up. It is going to be fun and interesting to watch the team get it fully operational.

A decade ago I worked with as a CO tech for small telephone company that had a remaining DMS10 at one of its locations. Luckily I didn't have to do much with that switch as the site was pretty quickly converted over to a Nortel CS1500 (Genband C15). It amazed me how a room full of switching equipment was reduced to a single rack of equipment. One day I hope to make it to your museum, its incredible being able to preserve this equipment.

NEC key and PBX systems such as the NEAX2400, SV8100, SV8300 and SV8500 also use major and minor alarms, I believe the NEAX and SV8500/SV9500 are able to actually have a gong hooked up to produce the audible alarm in addition to the alarm lights on the system's main chassis

You might want to go to the Dayton Hamvention in Ohio May 17-20. While there is a large radio focus there I have seen a ton of old parts and telephone equipment there in the past. You may find the disks you are looking for and a lot of other stuff you can use at great prices. There is a HUGE electronics flea market there

Outstanding, well done indeed. 👍

Congratulations y'all!

I think Sarah is very smart and bright in relation to telephony. I work as a telecommunications engineer, and I'm very impressed.

So excited to have been even a minor part of the process!

Congratulations! This is very cool to see.

Congratulations to a wonderful team! Glad to see you got the DMS so much further along! You all are the best! Only regret from my trip to Seattle: not having the nerve to ask for a photo with you all!

That is so cool! I can’t wait to see more of this behemoth of a machine :D

Brilliant progress - well done everyone. You are my favourite telephone guys 😍.

The boot process explanation being Step 1: apply power Step 2: did it come up? Step 3: if yes, cool! Step 3A: if not, panic! was hilarious 😂 Awesome that it’s up and running. Can’t wait to see it fully working and switching. What an awesome project and kudos to all of you at the museum!

This is so interesting. Thank you for sharing.

Interestingly, the number 3 crossbar has listed in its CDs regarding the alarms, a "calamity alarm" in addition to the MJ and MN alarms. It was designed to report the alarms electronically to a centralized alarm center.

Awesome that it's starting to come back to life. Lotta hard work we didn't see, I'm guessing. :D

Kudos Colin and team! 🤎

From a hardware design aesthetic appreciation perspective, I just love the vertical slot mounting, with buttons and LEDs. Just looks plain cool.

nice job brings back memory's

Great work. That's an intimidating piece of equipment.

It's great fun to see the other half of Nortel. I worked on the data/LAN side as a Systems Engineer and my colleagues would go on about the DMS's and I was pretty clueless.

The indicator LED gives vibes of the light on the Gargantua 1 space station's mainframe on the "Venture Bros." cartoon series. As an electronics engineer myself, one who much prefers hardware over software, one of my bucket list items is to design a piece of equipment with a really vague, cryptic, but still panic inducing error indicator light that isn't really documented. This way subsequent generations will get to experience the same fear, anxiety and frustrations we all got to go through working with technology that was before the ubiquity of screens on every piece of equipment. The nightmare of trying to hear was that 3 beeps followed by 2 beeps or was that actually 5 beeps. Things of that nature.

Nice work on this project!

This was particularly interesting because the company I worked for once had a Nortel switch like that; it might have been a DMS-10. My manager at the time was formerly an executive with a telecom company attached to a major university, and had converted them to running their own phone system. I think our system replaced a Centrex setup. It must have been installed in the early 1990s. Eventually it was replaced with a VoIP box-on-the-wall system, and now we're fully remote, so we don't really have company phones anyway. It was a lot of fun to learn more about telecom stuff, and my boss would explain what was happening and show me things. Most definitely I must visit sometime. I'm mentally ranking visiting the Connections Museum with going to Japan...both are way up there, but forgive me if seeing the museum is a little below riding the Shinkansen.

Is it possible to both love and hate at the same time? YES. I both love these video but hate the rabbit holes I go down! Astonishing how FUN and TIME CONSUMING this old tech is! arg!!! 😁😂🤣

I've been involved in a complete data center blackout. Bringing an entire server infrastructure (for an Enterprise sized business) back online from Cold And Dark is just as tricky and time intensive. There really isn't a manual for it other than "pray" and "think creatively" (and swear creatively, too)

That only leaves one pre-voip era 'big' switch to aquire to complete the museum... the 5ESS.

I swear I felt you upload this one, literally yesterday I went "huh, wonder what the Connection Museum peeps are up to"

You guys are just awesome…! 🤓👍 (CuriousMark & team also comes to mind…)

Absolutely love the "Catastrophic" alarm indication.

I think it's great that you all sound like you're really familiar with this hardware at a professional level - but also like the hardware is *older* than any of you are :-)

I started watching this saying "this is something that normally happens *ONCE* in the lifetime of the machine." And even then, it was done by Nortel engineers. I've only seen this in passing once. (and it ended up in a wood chipper a few years later, after the power company's stupid attempt to be an ISP/telco _totally_ imploded. as far a I know, they never fully paid for that DMS.) So, are you prepared to keep this thing powered 24/7 for the next 50 years? This isn't something you can power up every weekend for tourists. The telco / ISP I worked for 20 years ago went to sell one of the long distance switches (Alcatel 600E). When Alcatel got word of this, there were numerous calls from them basically screaming if we turn it off they'll never certify it ever again. The only way to sell it is to sell the building it's sitting in -- without turning the power off. (that was a problem, as we couldn't sell the entire Manhattan CO.)

Lol. Someone says '1202 Alarm!'. #peaknerd. But in the good way. Great video.

This is awesome, though I'm sat here thinking 'hey it's brown and orange so it must be late 70s' but no, it shipped with a VT420 so that means late 90s, then Sarah says it's from 2000 and I'm going 'huh, only a few years ago.' No. 24 years ago. Ye gods. I love this stuff.

Great initial power up, always good when there is no magic smoke.

Man this is so interesting to follow, really looking forward to seeing it complete calls. I would love to eventually see how the CLI is structured on this switch or the 3ESS for that matter.

Interestingly I was thinking about the Major Alarm chime a few minutes before you showed it!

The CPU is not in network 0/1. The CPU is in Core 0/1. You need to keep in mind that the CNI combines control and network bays into a single module. In the CE-3 bay, the bus extenders are the dividing line. The left side bus extender is part of the Core (lower shelf is 0, upper shelf is 1). The right two bus extenders are part of the network. The left of the pair (the middle most) is associated with Core 0 bus and the right one is associated with Core 1 bus. This is for both shelves. You can get yourself into trouble by just pulling all of the bus extenders on the same shelf thinking you've got the shelf disabled in 1BUS. Oops, switch just init'd...

Part of me really wants to play with something like this :) I did get to work around a switch about 25 years ago, when the ISP I worked at briefly became a LEC. I can't remember exactly what type it was though.

6:02 Roger. We got - We're GO on that alarm

The telecom I work for still has 40 or so of these running with and without SDMs. We also still run DMS100, 250S, 500S from Nortel. We have quite a few LUCENT 5E, Siemens EWSDs, old DCOs, and some newer switches like the Genband G9. They are lol slowly being decommed for Meta and Perimeta VOIP switches. Parts are getting too hard to find for the older switches. As a side note I live 2 blocks away from the old Rochester, NY Nortel headquarters.

That is nuts!

You got the matching chair too!

This machine makes me proud to be Canadian haha, sadly after Nortel imploded, most people these days don't know how impactful we were in the telecom industry.

Super cool!! What all do you plan to demo/exhibit with the switch once it is up and running? Would be amazing have a working display of early home internet services such as dial up and ISDN.

This is so cool

Introduce rain water to the line drawers, and chaos becomes the pain that never leaves the office. Tarps over the switch & buckets below is the new normal.

Mister Hammond, I think we're in business!

By the year 2000 they were still shipping equipment with that quaint and lovely but ever so ugly 1970's burnt orange and brown paint job? O_O Now that's sticking to tradition! ^_^

This is cool.

This shit is fucking rad. This channel is dope.

Catastrophic failure. In 1986, I found the Y2K bug which resulted in every DMS100 system crashing and rebooting. Almost 1 hr later, the switch was backup. Catastrophic means calls dropped and calls not processed!

I have to come to Seattle to see all this. If you ever get a dms100 I could do this in my sleep. The LCME frame is well within my scope of expertise too. You will not get rid of the critical alarm until you remove or offline the customer facing equipment that is part of the database. The best thing would be to offline the equipement

The VT420 didn't hit the Canadian market until ca.1988, and IIRC the DMS10 predates that noticeably. The VT320 or even VT220 would seem to be more likely craft consoles to be bundled with the DMS10.

I always thought it was just the one or two of you in the video working on things - there is a raft of people!

Hard to believe the DMS-10 was the predecessor of the CS-1500 (later known as Genband C15)

"I don't know how to get out of Catastrophic Alarm Mode yet" Talk about a meme for modern times. 😂

At least you have fans.

Ahh... The DMS-10. The first product that I worked on as a coop in collage... good to see some of the design stuff I worked on still there. Did you ever get the telnet terminal to work on it?

I think my parents have that exact orange office chair. Given the lengthy bootup time, will this switch be left on 24/7, or will it only be powered on for special occasions? Can't wait to put a call through it once you get it onto CNET.

new connections video? with fluffy hair?? hell yeah!

9:30 When Evan is making a phone tape

The DMS10 looks a lot more interesting than the UK equivalent, known as "System X". I got to see a pair of System X processors and they looked like W.O.P.R. from Wargames.