Guest Posts

Follow up: A Brief History to the ROLM PBX

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I promise when we move to the big leagues away from WordPress, I’ll have a broader palette on subject matters! Meaning I can set the content and forget it!

A follow up from yesterday’s post from Andy in Missouri had contacted me at least several years ago, perhaps in late 2016, around the time of the Ugly Console theme.  As you have seen; he’s got a lot of insight of ROLM, the leading vendor of PBX systems in the country – only for a short time. Thank IBM and their uptight attitude towards a wild but hard working group of people out on the Left Coast, where some of their ideas was the seed to what would become the standard well into the Facebook days.

I happened to reach out to him last fall to ask about the Redwood; ironically Joe The UCX Guy had posted an abandoned Redwood around the same time, however it was just pictures of that system.

As you probably know, ROLM’s demise has been perceived failure on support of IBM to finance the company effectively and a lack of leadership made them fall behind in evolving technologies (such as It Still Does Nothing or ISDN?), resulting a sale to Siemens in 1991, and basically took their existing American clientele, and fused some of ROLM’s technologies with Siemens. ROLM is well known for their bullet proof PBX systems. Your local Sears Roebuck store is probably using a system that’s almost as old as I with sets older than your’s truly. The rest is an adaptation of an email from him discussing the differences of a failed small end system called the Redwood and their flagship unit, the 9751 and the CBX as in the Computer Branch Exchange.

Like the last post, any first-person reference implies to Andy and not me.

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Follow up: A Brief History to the ROLM PBX

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The Redwood, like the old Dimension, was barely a subject that could be found on a search engine. Within a week of reaching out to Andy last fall, because I knew he had knowledge on the subject; Joe the UCX Guy posted an abandoned Redwood with some pictures. Unlike his site, that since April 2019, his site, domain and everything is down; Andy from Missouri was able to provide some pics and a pretty detailed narrative. The subject may get technical and may go back and forth between the background of the workgroup-grade Redwood and the carrier-grade PBX. Parts of this narrative is part of that email with Andy, some may have first-person references, and that should not imply me of course.

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Basics on the ROLM CBX

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This film made c 1980 shows how the ROLM CBX works. The CBX stood for the Computerized Branch Exchange and it differed from other phone systems that signaled the devices and machines differently. ROLM didn’t care about “dumbing down” the content to make it easier to understand. Despite the cute character, the intent in these engineering focused companies was to keep it highly technical.

For whatever reason the company did very well until the suits from New York decided to go into phone systems and then destroy it within several years, just like what AT&T did to NCR in the early 1990s. IBM (yes that same IBM that believed people needed to be “computer literate” to use a large mainframe) really lacked the telephony and innovative literacy to help pull them out into their misery in the early 1990s.

Siemens would later buy them out and use ROLM’s brains and talent to replace their existing offerings and inherited many of ROLM’s designs, and other tangible assets that made ROLM what they were for a period of time.

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Central Offices In Montana

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Check out more Central Offices from the Outside. (More tags in the singular sense)

Here are some pictures sent to me by one of my followers who asked to not be identified by name, but with this tight community, does everyone need to be identified everytime, all the time? 🙂 I did get permission to post these, and I want to keep the descriptions to a minimum. If you are accessing this from the home page, click to read more.

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Guest Post: The Deaf Use the Phone?

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UPDATED: March 29, 2016 Title has been renamed to reflect the original submission.

I received a submission of a guest post from Jason from Montana, edited by your humble curator kinda out of the blue. I did a pretty brief post on TTY a couple weekends ago and was surprised that I’d get a response, and got more insight to the TDD use of TTY. I’ve been meaning to post this subject for a while. Anyways the rest of the post is from him.

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Yup, it’s true, the deaf can use the phone. And ironically, they’ve been able to for many years.  The Telecommunications Act of 1982 “allows states to require carriers to continue providing subsidies for specialized equipment needed by persons with impaired hearing, speech, vision, or mobility”.

 The TTY device introduced in the 1970’s used the Baudot protocol to transmit text over standard telephone lines.  They’re actually primitive modems in the sense that TTY’s use Frequency Shift Keying to have a tone match the character typed on the keyboard.  Baudot runs very slow by comparison at only 50 baud.  Most TTY’s have a character buffer so one can type faster than 50 baud, and the TTY will transmit as fast as it can. For someone who types 120 wpm, reading or typing a TTY conversation is painfully slow.  By comparison, excluding compression, at the end of the dial up internet era most modems could do 56k, or 56000 baud.  On the other hand, the phone lines don’t need to be very clean or clear to keep up with Baudot.  Also, the conversation was simplex, meaning only one party could communicate at a time. TTY didn’t have any advanced algorithms to enforce this, so it was up to the users to clearly delineate when they were done typing by using the phrase SK (stop keying).  This Wikipedia article (use with caution) has 3 fairly believable sample conversations.

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