My Collection

Follow up: AT&T Merlin

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In February, I had made a series of posts on the subject of the AT&T Merlin. There was a meaning behind this. One was I had acquired two BIS and a 34 button set in the fall of last year.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BuBq73mh_r4/

The other was I was in the process to acquire at Merlin unit. I was building all this up to a big post sometime in the mid winter, that turned up to be a big smoke.

I mean literally too..

In February I acquired a Merlin 410 control unit, from an Etsy seller as this was a vintage equipment. I received this on President’s Day. The video rolling was originally going to be an unboxing, and as a result, it quickly became a documented situation to prove beyond a reasonable doubt I received this $88 item defective.

The following day, after the house had some bad fumes for part of the previous day, I then took it to the garage and it fumed up one last time.

By May, the system was working without much hassle. I still assume the system could blow up at any time, and still presuming the system is not fully operational. 

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My Collection: Stromberg Carlson 1704 1A2 Telephone

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image of a front view of a Stromberg Carlson 1704

Here is a special something I have teased on the social media platforms. I found this ol relic on eBay in late July. Was this a corporate phone to Big Blue? Does it work? Can it work in dumb mode?

I’ll share video to followers especially ones on Pateron. That video is in the process of getting cut up on my Avid workspace, should have a final cut soon!

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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.

My Collection: Avaya Red 8410D Voice Terminal

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It’s that time of year, a start of a new [fiscal] year and now it’s time to take my recently repaired DSLR camera to take photos of all the equipment that I have collected.

To start, this is the 8410D Voice Terminal I got when I received my Definity switch in 2015

It supports up to ten call appearances, and depending on your vintage of the PBX, it can support up to fifteen features (the ones that active in green lamps) as down triangles on the 2 line display when pressing Menu. When AT&T marketed these terminals in the 1990s, the Menu functions was encouraged to the users to take advantage of the multi call appearances.

These sets can work in 2 wire or 4 wire environments, requiring a respective circuit card. There is no need to tip DIP switches or do any other setups, if the wiring and the card matches to the right set. You can plug this into a 4 wire then move it to another desk on a 2 wire.

The traditional wiring environment for four wires required conductors on the 1 and 3, and 4 and 5 pins. Later models that used two wiring only needed conductors on the 4 & 5. These sets could work on the original System 75 PBX with intervention of the administrator to mimic the 7410 set, while maximizing the potential with the display and Menu/feature button assignments.

The 8400 series while been discontinued by Avaya for a number of years, is still compatible with current PBX hardware if you use 2 wire boards and sets. Meanwhile 4-wire boards became unsupported in CM 4 (or the 14th release of the Definity system.)

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My Collection: A Definity AUDIX Board!

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Update: 02-23-15 at 9:20 pm We’ve gots some problems… Presently tried to follow all the instructions but the board appears to be booting up but the ASA and even TUTTY (Putty + AT&T Terminal) clients are stuck in the BSOD. According to historic documentation, the LEDs are working as they should after boot, so maybe something failed at the connector side. I sure hope I didn’t “break” it…

So I got another surprise gift from Jason that was sent on President’s Day. I just received it a couple hours ago. This Definity AUDIX board is an integrated voice mail system for the Definity platform. These are no longer available and were designed in small environments. It was on the market for most of the 90s and probably up to 2001. The replacement would be an external PC or now a Modular Messaging running on a server class PC or an Aura virtual appliance. The beauty of this tiny board is it gave customers in small sites the power of the bigger AUDIX system. And hopefully I can hear the AUDIX lady once I get into the thing!

So much for that cutover back to the Cisco huh?