Author: clickfo

POTD – Local Kohls

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In today’s Phone Of the Day I recently took this picture of a Mitel IP 5212 set (if memory serves me)  at the Bedford NH store. This Kohls has a few IP telsets and boatloads of analog sets all across the sales floor. There are no sets near the fitting rooms. This store was built within the last five years around the time where perhaps Kohls was in a position of like a dysfunctional marriage: Do I stand with my man? (i.e. sticking to Avaya.) Don’t forget in early 2010s there was a bunch of doubt whether if Avaya would continue in supporting an overrated brand of telephony equipment. There is probably many reasons why in newer stores (of which popped up in my area, as their stores came to my area around 2002 – of which the Norstar 7200s are still in use in those locations) and other reasons such as higher maintenance contracts if you go through Avaya directly and the change of the user interface. Continue reading →

Avaya Red (AT&T) 8434 Brochure

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The Museum is having a low in terms of new features. Here we go with, Stretch, Stretch and Stretch by finding something to fill up for the lost posts. I thought since the 8434 telephone from Avaya was one of the attractions to this site, that I’d post it’s brochure from the time I found deep on the Avaya hosts.

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The copyright is from 1994 from AT&T and it doesn’t indicate the DX suffix. The 7400s were well popular in the early 1990s. The most funny thing about the world of Avaya Red (then AT&T) was most phones used were within that decade from the mid 80s to mid 90s. Many Avaya Blue shops still had those wedge SL-1 telsets in production even past the 21st Century. The MET sets (that kinda had the resemblance the first gen SL1 sets) were made around the same time, mid 1970s. Not sure if AT&T had aggressive buyback offers or just simply those quasi digital sets couldn’t do things like multiple lines.

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As much as I liked the 7400s because it shared the Merlin shell; the 7400s were kinda like the Ciscos of the 1980s. Overpriced and underperformed. Most first gen sets (made from 1984 to like 1988) had no ability for integrated speakerphone (known as listening only); displays were add ons, and it was known for its proprietary “R” handset and tactile buttons other than the dialpad. Volume was a dial wheel, as well as it’s display contrast. Isn’t that interesting, analog controllers to a digital telephone? By about 1988, the BIS (Built in Speakerphone) series appeared for both Merlin and System 75/85 users, as well as hard buttons for line and features, and models for call center and dedicated display (7406D and 7407.) For the people who didn’t like the futuristic looks, the 1990s came with something that resembled more like an “office telephone” – Enter the 8400 Series.

Similar to the whole AUDIX saga, AT&T’s documentation was very lousy from the 84 breakup to the Lucent spinoff. Because information is very scarce, I’m going to bet the 8400s were introduced to the market around 1993/94; and not 1990. If I am wrong on the year of introduction; then it would be safe to say; by that time; these sets were starting appear on desks as time went on.

To prevent the reader from being constantly bombarded with repetition of history, please click on this link for additional information

POTD: Whole Foods Market Bedford, New Hampshire

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In recent weeks, the world’s newest Whole Foods Market opened in Bedford, NH. Built on top of the legendary Wayfarer Inn (known more during the Primary Election years), it’s also within hundreds of feet of the now torn down Macy’s.

As proof from Joe the UCX Guy from Chicago, many Whole Foods stores are Cisco shops. Interestingly, the WFM in Nashua, just miles on the Everett Turnpike, is wired for TDM telephony using Toshiba’s Strata system (opened in 2014 to replace a former Market Basket.) Building was totally gutted and rebuilt mostly from the ground up.

The store in Bedford is mixed with 7942s and the 6902s at the cashier’s lane. Paging works, as teenage girls don’t know how to lower their octaves and learn how to page professionally.

The 7900s are still in the market, despite the more cheaper quality sets being deployed more and more. The 7900s are in a depreciation mode. Current generations are all multi lines, Java based and/or colored displays and I was surprised to see a 7942 because I believe its End of Sale.

I snapped two pictures, one showing how much characters you can use to describe your telephone extension. If the characters can’t fit on the top black colored indication bar, it will break the description up in two screens

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Personally, these devices are just “endpoints” – they are PCs acting as telephones. Sure Mitel, and Avaya and others sell the same thing (and acts the same way), but for sales people or the accountants, its just another device attached to the Internet and it shouldn’t be treated special like a office telephone. These phones are not easy to manage outside of expensive Cisco solutions or if you like to code and reverse engineer – be my guest! I feel like the 7900s were always a 2554 with Internet connectivity and a great audio quality of its SCCP signaling.

Other than that, Cisco just keeps on winning on selling “free” gear and report them as “profits” by smooching up to the CIOs and heads of IT departments at the Fortune 500 companies. You think I am kidding???

Telleyphones on Telleyvision: Halt and Catch Fire

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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.

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The blue box is a Paradyne modem. Above would be some circuit boards for telephony

 

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The PCs on the left were used to host the services. But users on the far end were using C64 machines. Supposedly in one episode, a “software PBX” was mentioned, but I cannot confirm myself if there was even such a thing in the 1980s before say the Asterisk around year 2001. You can see the ol 500s and Trimlines on the bottom

 

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Joe goes to a new company pitching the idea of cloud services or utility computing before it got its name 30 years later. His pitch was to max out their own internal IBM mainframes (which was featured in the series) and use “timeshares” and rent out the unused resources to customers. Remember IBM really did invent virtualization in the 70s but because Joe is a dimwit, he brought this company down due to poor planning of his idea. The series reflects the phones of the day, here you see a BIS 22 set (I believe this was made around 1987, this season’s timing was circa 1984.)

 

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Cameron is shown in the background, but to the table in front of her is a 500, 2500 and I think a Trimline too

 

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For the wiring guys and girls, there was scenes of 66 blocks, and other early networking gear. This capture I got was a bunch of modems allowing the Commodore 64s to get in to the bulletin board and play games. This character Donna, was the wife to an grumpy engineer who fought with Joe over style and substance, and technical vs non technical.

Phones @ Work: Garbage Time with Katie Nolan

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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!

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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”!)

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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.

Central Offices – Frontier – New Haven, CT

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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.)

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This was one of their service vehicles along US 1 not to far away

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Pay to Call: NYC Visit: Telephone Booths

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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.

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POTD: Ralph Lauren 5th Avenue Store

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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?

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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.)