Month: February 2019

AT&T Deathly Commercials (AT&T Merlin)

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In the mid to late 1980s, AT&T used what I would characterize as deathly commercials and using fear from alleged real-life experiences. Another part of this series was the AT&T Spirit system (see here)

“Turned out our new phone system hadn’t had the whole place intimidated. No one could make it work   Supposed to make us look good, we were coming cross looking like a bunch of clowns.”

The style of the ad was very film like, with a tight shot and a loose pedestal so the camera looked as if it was a person looking at the individual. The last 10 seconds had a dark soundtrack with a stern warning “that your business phone is your business lifeline.”

From my knowledge, it is unclear what system or vendor AT&T was attacking (or attempted to mock). As previously posted, the AT&T Merlin was more designed for simplicity over any technical features, that may had not been available for all customers who would connect to the phone company for a decade longer. While AT&T is mocked by some, that marketed “Fisher Price toys” of phone systems; there is some sign that they had decent market of the US Small business market, leaving the others to the consolidated Japanese market as well as Nortel.

On a sidenote: I feel that such campaigns have not only been long gone, and since the advent and aggressive marketing borderline on backstabbing, “Cloud PBX” and Voice over IP have ultimately made business telephony less of a “lifeline” with no responsibility to defend it.

Since the 2000s, with Millenials and Gen Z coming to age, and their “Meh” attitude, if a call is dropped, they just move on, forget 5 minutes ago while they don’t have attention to realize why a call was dropped in the first place. (The attention deficit and the retention deficit that makes these people not function well in a real business world in 2019.) Not to mention they assume everyone has caller ID and insist a “missed” call is good enough for them.

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AT&T Commercials: System 25 PBX

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I know my way around the switchboard better than anyone. But this new system we got here…well it’s so complicated no one can work it.  It’s no wonder things are running amok around here. I think they should cut their losses and work from scratch.

 

This was one damn good ad campaign that ran on mainstream primetime programming. I mean when I was growing up Nortel and Avaya could only get their way on cable news. CNN was the highest they could go outside the 3 business cable networks. But with the rise of VOIP and other UC vendors out there that could be just as bad as 1987, you wonder if there’s another vendor out there that could do “Your Business Phone is Your Business Lifeline”

By the way: The System 25 while it sounds like System 75 is not. The System 25 was based on code from the AT&T Merlin but the catch here is could do light duty PBX. The “hybrid” boards used on the Definity PBX was actually designed for the System 25 for users upgrading from the 25 to the 75. Under 200 ports was the audience. System could stack up to 3 carrier cabinets, and the cabinets were recommended to sit on top of a desk or a filing cabinet and not on the floor. Many years later, the signature design of the System 25 carriers can be seen in modern day Avaya G650 rack mount carriers.

The System 25 didn’t have much of a roadmap. It didn’t last long as a new system and the recommended replacement was a small Definity G3 small carrier cabinet, could hold a System 25 in one wide carrier.

System 25 cabinets can be purchased on eBay. Without software it can’t do much, and to load them you would need data cassettes to load the software into memory. Yup it’s that old!

My Collection: Cisco 7970 IP Phone

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This is not confused to another 7970 that was in production prior to. As of 2025, the aging 79x0s do not age well and the set is physically broken. 

This Cisco 7970 is different than one that I’ve shared previously.  A close dear friend of mine had given this to me a while back. I don’t remember which to be quite honest the last four years has been a blur and at the same time vaporized.

The phone was given to me because her day job is a job trainer for people with developmental delays. I used to work for her and the company as well*.

The client had found this Cisco 7970 at a yard sale and thoguht to look like everyone else, he could literally Bring Your Own Device to the company. But as you know they can’t hook up any Cisco set that they don’t own and in order to hook it up, a license on their end would be required.

As a result the attraction was lost, and the set was given to me for the Museum.

This set is very old, firmware is just over 15 years old to the time of recording and it’s very likely this could’ve been a corporate phone likely at a New England Cisco branch office. I cannot confirm.

 

*To show how long ago, they were using a Cisco CallManager 3.1 that was still running off Windows 2000 Server edition. In the late 2000s, Windows 2000 was the default operating system in many enterprises. Windows XP SP2 was only 3 years old. SP1 was End of Life and the original XP was already EOL’d. (I tend to obsess on the technicality of the lifecycle of Windows XP, arguementively  the last best Windows NT grade operating system from Microsoft.

Obviously their systems have been refreshed and I have been told they are using OS X Yosemite at the desk. (When I was there I was using a pre Compaq era HP workstation with Windows 2000 Workstation. Same with the Cisco CallManager.