Just about 10 miles from Concord (the capital city of my state), is a rest area on Interstate 93 northbound in Canterbury, New Hampshire. These telephone booths are common on state property (remember Cannon Mountain?) What may have been Verizon managed, is now managed by a CLEC. Both booths do provide dial tones as you can see in my selfie in the next image.
This is one of my favorite cable dramas on TV. This series, Halt and Catch Fire (first runs during the summer on AMC) is a fictional drama set in the 1980s where a mainframe computer company took a risk of getting into the PC business and put the company out of business because the PCs totally canalized the fictional Cardiff Electric. (A contributing factor was the characters hacking into a bank which resulted the FBI to seize all property.) The main character, named Joe has resemblance of a non technical, but salesman like demeanor of Steve Jobs.
The other main character is a woman, named Cameron who is a gifted coder who was the #2 to Joe. She helped reverse engineer the IBM PC’s ROM BIOS. (In fact the way it was portrayed in the series had resemblance of Compaq’s successful attempt.) If I remember correctly, the Season 1 ended, Cardiff goes belly up, then begins working for “Southern Lines” – a spoof of Southwestern Bell – it showed her working in an office with white painted walls with the blue and yellow stripes resembling the Bell System! With other dramas on TV, there was a love interest and in season one they had an on and off again relationship. After Cameron realized that the phone company was covering up the fact the central offices could handle data up to like 300 bauds, her next ideas was to start up a new venture. In Season 2, she broke up with Joe out of revenge and created a bulletin board service/online game startup.
This one had more of a telephony taste, and of such here are some images from Season two grabbed off my iPad last summer.
Not to sound like a TV snob, but I like fictional shows that don’t mix real with fake. Don’t get me wrong, I love Silicon Valley, the problem is when they mix the narrative of current real big businesses with fake startups and the lines blur so badly, an average viewer may get confused of what’s real and what’s fake. Worse is integrating real reporters from blogs like Re/Code, Techcrunch, etc. The writing in Halt takes place a over generation ago and mixing anything fictional is clearly stated if you know enough of the history of PCs and or mainframes and they keep the real people or companies to a minimum unlike Silicon Valley, which is why I like watching these types of series instead.
I spy some Telleyphones on the Telleyvision!
Garbage Time with Katie Nolan is taped sports-talk program that runs on Fox Sports 1. What time does it air? Well, the time varies because the network is heavily dependent on live sports events (who knew, isn’t that why ESPN was created?) I gave up the lost cause by turning my set on FS1 at 9:30pm Eastern Time after running into the soccer games or any other sport I wasn’t interested seeing live. I like the talent because good looking people with intelligence is hard to find on TV. Anyways the program with heavy substance* is an Emmy nominee and a new “season” is supposed to be running on a more decent time, according to promos recently running on Fox.
*because cute brunettes from the Boston area cannot sustain a career because they know what they are talking about!
The New York produced program is not at the Fox studios. Outside of their cable news networks and flagship TV station, everything is produced or originated in Los Angeles. I believe Katie Nolan has control over her content, and most likely it’s produced third party studio. (There is a clip somewhere showing the very small studio. I bet My home office is bigger than her “studio”!)
Because of this, you can see this studio operation using Allworx and not any Avayas you see at almost any Fox-owned property (Fox is still religious to being an Avaya Red operation.)
The screengrabs were from about the last 6 months or so living on my iPad. I just finally got the chance to upload them.
On my trip to New York City from last Saturday, the route was from I495, to 84, then to 91 in Hartford then to -95 in New Haven. When accessing Interstate 95 in New Haven, you can see the large central office for New Haven.
This central office has seen many name changes in just the last fifteen years. For a while it was SNET, then SBC/SNET to SBC fully then AT&T of Connecticut then to Frontier. A few years ago AT&T (err SBC) wanted to unload debt from declining wireline services. Like Northern New England, they sold it to Frontier (just they didn’t go bankrupt like FairPoint.)
This was one of their service vehicles along US 1 not to far away
I did not test these on Saturday as the stereotypical SOP of visiting New York is to avoid touching things unless necessary.
I wasted nearly 60% of my battery juice on my iPhone taking pictures and loading them to Instagram (like a stupid teenager) and I stupidly forgot my Lightning charger cable to charge the phone with my emergency battery. I had to go to the 5th Ave Best Buy as the Fifth Ave Apple Store had the worst service, 12 or more people walked by me and didn’t offer me help (i.e. helping me buy the Lightning cable as Apple long ditched the checkout lines.)
So yeah, if there was ever an emergency, I would think it’s important to have a payphone functioning at least for every dozen blocks, I would suppose.
I thought this was an 8410. Till I zoomed in. I did see 8410s (ether D or B as in Blank) throughout the 34th Street Macy’s.
From little of what I know about Ralph Lauren, it appears they are an Avaya Red shop in some capacity (Joe the UCX Guy featuring an enterprise class) and my local outlet using a Partner (or I should use it in air quotes.)
I have my own opinions of Mister Ralph. a) I can never afford his stuff (the local Macy’s is once in a blue moon) b) I find it more suitable for older people (that Denim and Supply line, I mean really?) if not for older people then more Country Club-types. And of course c) he legally changed his last name from a borderline expletive to allegedly a film crush with the now late Lauren Bacall? Also am I supposed to be pronouncing his name like the female given name or the long e at the end?
Well anyways, here is a Siemens set taken from the sales floor on Saturday. The interesting question would be is did they go to Siemens or were they legacy ROLM users?
On the other hand here are some sets I didn’t (or wasn’t able to) capture but noticed
The Times Square Aeropostale uses an Avaya Blue Norstar system. For many years the non flagship Aeropostale stores used some analog Centrex, MPLS, or maybe VOIP terminated to analog phone service, up until the last couple months they had fallen into the Cisco bandwagon. Aeropostale is doing very lousy and is in danger of ether going out of business or being sold. Friday’s close was around a couple US dimes. What turned me away from there was all the shirts having these stupid embroidered fabric that is better for little kids. It’s hard to wash, then you have “loose” fabric, etc.
A Ruby Tuesday on the outskirts of Times Square had a Norstar system. (Nice service while I had lunch with the mother.)
The Apple Store on 5th Avenue (lousy service just like if you’re in the burbs. Another topic for another day) had clerks carrying around Cisco 7921 like wireless sets. This isn’t a surprise. Cisco has crept its way through Apple over the years, and now it’s gone to their VOIP or telephones. Most Apple Stores are still an Avaya IP Office shop with most of the wired sets tucked into drawers on the sales floors.
A Best Buy where I got better service, downtown a few blocks had Cisco.
The operations for the Fox News Channel still uses Avaya 8400 and 6400 sets. From what I know at the 1211 6th Ave facility, that the few first floors of the building are for FNC, Floors 7 to 8 (or 9?) is for The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s.
Once located at the World Financial Center (using a Meridian 1 system), they went to VOIP when the built the new facilities within 1211. An interesting note, on a blog I once found a picture of Roger Ailes, the head of FNC having both an 8434 and a Cisco set. Without getting into a political discussion, it would not be a surprise he has a direct line to a paper that could favor his views. (WSJ is a joke today and I am a big fan of markets and corporate news.)
I did not set foot inside 30 Rock, but I’ve seen on MSNBC on cable with more and more Cisco 8900 sets. It’s apparent that NBC wants to do away with Avaya at least at their New York operations more and more. They relocated their Southland facilities from Avaya in Burbank to Cisco in Universal City 2 years ago, their other hubs in Texas has been wired to Cisco and I can go on and on seeing yet another customer of Avaya Red disappear.
Many financial institutions are using Cisco (walked by Capital One Bank, TD Bank, JPMorgan, etc.)
Yesterday, I posted pics from my trip to Manhattan on Saturday. To my surprise I saw a lot of Avaya Red terminals despite Cisco selling VOIP sets like they are generic IP devices that corporate accounts pay little to none (allegedly) for.
The 8403 is a display-less set, designed for “walk up users” (to use a modern day cliche) or people who do not need functionality of a fully blown 8405 or 8410 terminal. The set supports up to 3 call appearances and if a user desperately needs features with indicators, one can program a feature (or two) but the set would act as a single appearance terminal.
It’s cousin set is the 7401, because it shares similarities to the 12 button personal features assignment. Someone can have up to 12 functions for abbreviated dialing, features, etc by hitting the Feature button and hit a single digit on the dial pad. There wasn’t a similar set till the late 2000s when Avaya released two sets, the 1403 and 1603 both for DCP and IP respectively, but ironically this require both to be run behind an IP Office, and not their enterprise PBX systems. It’s not to say one could reload firmware with the 1603 with some SIP firmware (which I believe it can work) and run it against Avaya’s SES services, and claim it to be a generic SIP set. These models furthers more irony because the 8403 was incompatible with Merlin systems anyways.
Yours truly was Live from New York yesterday. Put it this way, I saw more Avaya Red sets this time around than Ciscos. A couple Avaya Blues here and there.
I don’t know much of the history of the original Macy’s. Macy’s went under 2 decades ago, and was sequentially boughtout by Federated Department stores that went on a buying spree of regional department stores; then in 2005 made their big buyout of the May Department Store chain of brands. Between the Federated and May buyouts Macy’s was in almost every mid sized city than prior to. Most of the Macy’s around where I live used to be the brands of Jordan Marsh and Filene’s both using/used ROLM CBX switches.
What’s interesting is I’ve been to Jordan Marsh/Macy’s stores and they had resemblance to the flagship 34th Street store, while former Filenes still has resemblance of the pre-Macy’s buyout, but by default all first level stores has that signature all white look. More non telephony related subjects to this store I set foot for the first time on the above link.
Now from what I can tell Macy’s uses an Avaya Red PBX. This one appears to go back in the System 75 days. Now I didn’t see if this thing worked, because in Release 14 (branded as 4.x) of their enterprise PBX system, they depreciated the 7400s because the four-wire cards carried a lot of legacy code (from what I’ve read on the list serves, just dumping the 7400 DCP drivers gave Avaya some million lines of code removed.)
This particular model I forget, because AT&T made various models in the 10 year period, it may be a 7410 BIS set. Also, just because the 8400s released in the early 1990s, it was not a surprise to still have a part number (known as Comcodes or PECs) – I believe some models of the 7400 were still orderables in the first year of the Avaya spinoff (early 2000-late 2001.) If you were still on the 7400s at that point, Avaya did want you to go to the 6400 series (crap sets.)
More to come throughout the week.
