I noticed this the other day, which I thought "hrm, thats cool..."

At my job as an IT person, I was punching down phone cable
in the phone room the other day and went over and actually
looked at the old Tadiran phone switch that is sitting in
the corner, unused. Never paid much attention to it before,
but each slot card has at least 4 80c51s (copyrighted 1980,
printed right on the chip). Looks like each one was connected
to 4 other dedicated ICs that handled the calls, but kinda
makes me wonder what the specific function of the 8051s was.
Were they simply for communicating to the Tadiran backplane
which phone pairs were in use? Obviously, I doubt an original
8051 could handle the actual data of 100s of phone conversations
per chip... at least not well. I'm thinking more along
the lines of system monitoring on the backplane. Any thoughts?
I don't have a model number, but its been out of use for at
least 10 years. I'm asking my boss tomorrow to scrap it. Good
source of crystals and caps, but I doubt the older 8051s are
worth keeping, even if they are socketed.