Author: clickfo

Avaya 8434 Birthday Cake!

clickfo

Your humble curator turned 30 last month. As a result of the big deal, I had requested to have a special birthday cake. This year, I wanted something to resemble a office telephone. I had turned 25 at the time when the Cake Boss had built for Avaya, an actual cake casing of their IP Office 500 Control Unit and one of the 16 or 9600 sets. The phones and control unit really worked with all the cake covering it.

Mine was a little simple (or complex)

So my mother got a special order at Frederick’s Pastries (a well known baker North of Boston/Suburban NH), of a two layer, gold cake, with strawberry filling, with, white frosting mimicking the “Misty Cream” set color, and the various elements the signature telset. You’ll also notice the side where they made the groove edges of the set. They got the Avaya logo right on too. The handset resembles the 9400 Series DCP terminals (the ones sold during the same time as the 8400 for non domestic customers that looked kinda like 6400s, some have made its away towards America in third hand markets.)  They never made such thing before and they were kinda nervous at first. My mother never ordered a special order cake from scratch.

 

Albeit belated, when we picked it up on the 31st, they were excited and in fact the owner was on site that day when we picked it up. Given a misspelling on my name, it was great!

My gawd how filling was the cake! Took a week to finish it!

Phone of the Day: ROLM phone at the Local Bob’s Stores

clickfo

a picture of a ROLM telephone on a post at a local Bob's Stores in Nashua, New Hampshire

This was taken at a local Bob’s Stores when the day after the New England Patriots won their fifth Super Bowl. (Roger That! Heh, heh, heh.) For this chain, ROLM is alive and well, to use the cliche. Because ROLM predates the Internet and modern day documentation, I have no idea what type of PBX or KSU it lives on. The set themselves is the 1990s generation, before they became German looking (possibly mid 1990s.) When ROLM was fully sold to Siemens, a few years later, they stopped selling their systems to America and incorporated ROLM features and their modernest designs. I’m not the expert in ROLM so forgive me.

Telephony 101: On Voice Mail

clickfo

Some people love voice mail, many just hate it. Many are apparently so egotistical, they think it’s not worth listening to 2 minutes of a voice based message than a generic email.

People also think email is better, but do you know the history of voicemail?

if the answer is no, lets go down memory lane of Voice Mail.

Voicemail is often assumed to be an electronic answering machine on a server. While it’s true, its origins was almost similar to sending a letter or an email, just with spoken word.

The first indication of such language was in printed publications in 1877. A famous man named Thomas Edison with an invention called the phonograph. For the Gen-X audience and older, this is basically a record player. Millenials are probably familiar to just be cool for the latest trend. While it was well known for songs, the ability to record spoken word, as a way to replace letter writing had the possibility. The “voice mail” language was in the lexicon by the 1910s.

While the answering machine was invented in the 1960s, the ability to install these would be so cost prohibitive, and worse, a wiring nightmare. In the early 1970s, Motorola introduced pagers that provided one way voice messages that would be answered by an “answering center” (this in 2017 is completely archaic with the advent of digital telephony, automated attendants, in fact the size of these answering centers were the size of contact centers, which was not existent at the time.) These pagers used UHF signals and were often used for volunteer fire fighters, etc. In this sense, this could be considered as a voice message.

Continue reading →