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.
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.
Today is March 32nd. I just wanted to be funny to make light of an ongoing depressing situation.
I’ve been meaning to post this for a long time. Took this in 2017. An acquaintance of mine had brought this in and I took a picture of it. Not sure what it is, but at the time the joke was a “Participation Trophy” before there was one.
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.
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!
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.
This video shows how my Definity PBX can handle a fairly recent telset, the 9408. Surpisngly it works pretty well despite the labeling not working at all because the PBX release off a year before Avaya introduced screen phones in 2001. Release 9 was on the market from 1999 to 2001. The 2400s would be introduced to the market by the end of 2001 into 2002, and no one was really using them for a few years later. At that same time 7400s were still pretty common place.
I received this from my friend for Christmas, only because he disliked this model. I could imagine why. Screenphones isn’t for everyone.
I want to be clear with the lawyers or techs: this is installed at a home with a decommissioned switch. BY NO MEANS is this a commercial or used in a production environment. I cannot be held liable to anyone who runs across this page and thinks this is acceptable for use. One an R9 PBX probably shouldn’t be used, and secondly, using some very new set on an old switch would raise a lot of support tech’s flags. I have to mention this because this site is for educational purposes of historical sense and shouldn’t be used as a resource with current available products. A lot of things happen behind the scenes at The Museum legally, so just want to keep the boundaries clear.
A part of Outside the Box Project (focusing on outside the US-based office telephony market)
Japan had a huge influence in the US telephony market, which would be an understatement to admit. While Nortel had the Norstar, and AT&T (later Lucent then Avaya) had the Merlin family and Partner and later IP Office, some offices had their comfort in Strata, Omega, or KX-xx.
A part of Outside the Box Project (focusing on outside the US-based office telephony market)
The Japanese has roots in office telephony, that also had bragging rights. In fact ether Japanese based or made products was the go-to that many frugal customers in the States used. It is not abnormal to see NEC (not so much of their predecessors because of the age) still in service.
There were three major companies that would become part of the larger Nippon Electric Corporation (best known as NEC.)
TIE
TIE Communications was based out of Sheldon, Connecticut, with American brains but to lower the costs to customers, all their equipment was made offshore in Japan. First sets were analog Call Directors that were made with cheaper parts. By the late 1970s, they went onto the electronic bandwagon. Growing up in my old town in New Hampshire, the town hall and the local schools had used the TIE systems. (For a side note, if anyone remembers the TV series Las Vegas, while they had modern looking Cisco VOIP sets, the ring tone itself, was a canned sound effect coming from a TIE set.)
TIE’s average customer was under 30 sets audience.
An NEC Electra Key Telephone at a local Christmas Tree Shops, one of the few places that still use this system.
Nitsuko
Was a Japanese based company that actually acquired TIE by the mid 1990s. Nitsuko devloped the DS1000/DS2000 hybrid PBX platform. But as the 1990s came to an end, NEC, would in turn buyout Nitsuko.
Sphere Communications
NEC’s full circle into American consolidation occurred yet again by getting into a softswitch business. By the mid 2000s, NEC was still a legacy, full 2 wired digital system, but their IP offerings wasn’t software based. A company in Illinois called Sphere Communications had some market domestically for a Windows NT based call management system called the Sphericall. NEC decided this would be the go-to system for their legacy NEAX system and later became the Univerge media gateway/media server platform.
NEC
While TIE wasn’t a Japanese company per se, it’s easy to roll them all into the “Big 3” KSU Guys from afar. NEC had a significant US install base and offered PBX systems vis-a-vis the NEAX line and competed against Nortel’s Option 51 and 61, Avaya’s Definity ECS, and Siemens’ 9571 PBX. NEC had a huge presence in the under 200 ports under the Electra line. You will see often on eBay stores selling troubled Electra sets. I guess there was a period of time that NEC wasn’t following their country’s norms of high quality standards. Trivial rejects included the speakerphone not working, and stuff like that.
The Modern Day “Shoebox” KSU
While the North American KSU vendors ditched the stereotypical KSU that looked like a shoebox, the Japanese continued after AT&T’s Merlin, Partner and Nortel’s Norstar, the only difference was it was electronic.
KSUs that were not American based, have high resemblance to these mid- century “shoebox” phone systems.
What they did was:
An open box format. So RTFM if you don’t want a few hundred volts taking your life!
Circuit boards were akin to PCI, NuBus, or the other expansion cards seen in PCs.
In and outputs were all on one board. Compare this to the more domestic vendors where the respective RJ21 or RJ 11 jacks were in a dedicated space and “dumb”, because the expansion cards would enable it. Or if it was a AT&T Partner, these modules were all enclosed. In short, you had to be very delicate when you did changes to the system’s components
Panasonic, and Toshiba also had huge American presence, is outside the scope of this post as this post is lumped in one as they were all consolidated.
