Telephony 101: Key Service Units

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In the 1960s, customers of Key Telephone Systems or KTS units, were able to add onto their phone system, such as adding private lines, private trunks, modern intercom and other features alike.

An Automatic Electric KSU with the cover open
(Found from a PDF catalog I found online.)

 

Key Service Units acted like apps/appliances/snapins/plugins of yesteryear. Most often KSUs lived in a shoe box sized unit, a 66 block, a couple fuses, a 3 pronged power cable pigtailed directly to some hardware, and a unit to place features in a circuit breaker sized device. These would be tied to the 66 block where then wiring could be terminated for other goodies like overhead paging, music on hold, link the Muzak service in, etc.

This is also where the trunks from the central office would feed into, and the telephones that would connect.

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POTD: Avaya 4610 *One-X Quick Edition* IP set

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Back in 2013, I acquired an Avaya 4610 IP set. However, not to long after the acquisition, I’ve found out that this was a special version. A very strange one to say the least. I would’ve retuned this to the eBay seller as a “Not as Described” claim but I don’t like pulling that unless I really have to.

For a period of time from 2006 to 2008, Avaya marketed (albeit with limited fanfare) a peer to peer IP phone system called the One-X Quick Edition. To be honest, I never understood the brand.

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Video: Ericsson Computer/Telephone Terminal

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This is pretty rad for the 1980s. Just you need to have a supporting PBX or ESS service. The comments on the Instagram post from at-neontalk was amusing if you do not know what a “terminal” is…

The first digital like carphone can be seen near the end of the byte.

Glad to be a phone dude!

Avaya 8434 Birthday Cake!

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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

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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.