Phonoland

Stupid things I think about while driving to work:

Back in the day, if there was a diner that had many wallboxes, what prevented selection errors if multiple wallboxes were sending pulse streams at the same time? In MY mind, it seems that it could happen quite often at a popular restaurant. What was the eventual outcome? Wrong record? No record?? Were people even malicious enough to try and mess up another's selections by doing theirs at the same time?

-Jim

Hi Jim,
That all depended on which system was used. On all but AMi's , more then one wall-box could transmit at the same time, which resulted almost always, in the phonograph playing the highest numbered selection on it. On AMi's of the 50's, they developed a "wait" circuit, which lit the "(red colored) wait lamp" on the wallbox, and would hold, any transmission, till the other wallbox finished transmitting--however, if two or more were "waiting", with the buttons pushed down--guess what, would happen as soon as the first one finished-- ??
As for being "malicious"-- I'll let you guess about that, too !! Ron Rich

Jim, it isn't as much of a potential problem as it once was. The era of 'free music" means people aren't playing jukes quite as much as 15+ years ago.

last Friday night I was at one of my large retro locations which has a modded K w/20 V3W boxes. I was sitting near the machine and the back door was open. The place was packed and I did hear a lot of selections coming in. The machine never stopped running. At one point two pulse trains did collide and the stepper had spasms. Obviously, two customers got wrong selections, but given how busy It was they probably ate and left without waiting for their songs.

No one ever complains about this happening when it is busy.

"Wait" or holdout circuits came in with the AMI G-200 in '56. It was needed because of the search interval.
Rock-ola never added it until 1962 when they adopted a search unit. Wurlitzer never added any hold out ckt.
The Seeburg and Rowe digital wallboxes could in theory have the train corrupted, but the process is so instantaneous it isn't necessary.

Rob