Well, if you found that interesting, here's something that will blow your mind: Copper cable. It takes one pair of wires for each land line phone in your house. So in the olden days when there weren't many phones, 25 pair cable was common. That means there were 25 pairs of copper wire inside each plastic covered cable. The voice went from your phone on one wire to the Central Office, where it was then directed to who ever you were calling. Now-a-days, because cables were getting so big and heavy (Upwards of 2000 pairs in each cable) they've gone to fibre optics and cell towers. But back to the copper wires in the cables. Each pair of wires is identified. So, for example, the first cable placed out of the central office would have been named cable 1, or rather 01, then the wires in that cable were numbered from 1 to however big the cable is. So we could look at a record and see that the first cable was 01,1-25. Then each pair of wires was assigned, and we could look at the record and see that 01, 10 is assigned to Joe Blow at such and such address. It's quite the book keeping night mare, but computer make it much easier. I retired right when fibre optics was coming into being, so I never learned about that. . . cell phones either.
Man, I haven't thought about that stuff in such a long time. Here's a picture of the real olden days before cable, when wires were put up individually:
And then wires were taken down and cables put up:
Ya gotta wonder how this happened:
