Historical Telecommunications

Retronetworking is a volunteer-led effort by technically minded people to preserve and explain digital telecommunications history, especially technology from the late 1960s through the late 1990s. Its members use their own time and money to acquire historical equipment, research it, repair it, and make it operational. The project responds to a perceived gap in many telecommunications museums, which it considers too superficial: displays may show hardware without explaining its historical context, internal workings, components, or accompanying documentation. It also emphasizes digital communications rather than the analog telephone and telegraph systems that often dominate museum collections.

The group aims to gather, digitize, archive, and publish technical materials such as data sheets, manuals, schematics, firmware, and historical publications. It documents equipment with detailed photographs, including images of circuit boards, and sometimes exhibits devices at computing and hacker events. Another goal is to build and operate emulators that let people connect vintage equipment to simulated telecommunications networks over the internet. Its areas of interest include ISDN, circuit- and packet-switched public data networks such as Datex-L and Datex-P, digital telephone exchanges, Frame Relay, ATM, and transmission standards including PDH and SDH. Online forums and other communication channels support collaboration among people working on these preservation and research activities.