Connections Museum in Seattle is where they should look. As deep as it gets! They maintain working switches dating back to over 100ya, massive documentation libraries, and artifacts and parts out the wazoo from telephones to teletypes to outside facilities and equipment to momentos and books and on and on.

If Connections has a weak zone in its collections, it's in the post-ATT/1984 era of cell technology and computer networking. Open Sundays 10-3.

https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/

used to be Tecom student , move to embedding engineer then data engineer then AI engineer, TeCom actually give me many of ideal on data compressing ,communication protocol . Nowadays, look like the old old become the old new

I was expecting something more ancient. In case anyone is interested in the humble start of world wide communications I can recommend the book Masters of space [0].

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12375

Anyone remember the Proteon token ring? Seemed much simpler/cheaper than IBM, but they had to switch to IEEE 802.5.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian%E2%80%93American_Teleg... here's a great historical episode that few people are aware of attempting to cross Siberia with a telegraph line in the late 1800s. The Americans involved in the project were probably the first Americans to see that part of the world.

Also interesting is that ancestral relative of the Cold War era American Diplomat George Kennan of the same name was involved in the project. In fact it's the ancestors experience that likely led him to become a Russia expert and in turn define critical parts of American Cold War Doctrine