Revisiting an earlier post on the AT&T Spirit system; on the apparent campaign of “Your Business Phone is Your Business Lifeline”
“It takes a brain surgeon to make it work.”
AT&T
AT&T Commercials: System 25 PBX
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!
POTD: AT&T/Avaya 26B DXS Module
More of part two than anything else, for the reason that this device came with the CallMaster I got a couple years ago. Despite the size and dimensions and other similarities, they cannot work together AT ALL.
This had not worked until I got a 302B in early 2017. Wether the 302B will work is still uncertain because it came in a sketchy condition when I received it in that same time.
These “lamps” lit up like a tree because I applied power before plugging them into the four wire DCP port.
This module is called the “Direct Extension Selector” or DXS. It also serves as a classic Direct Station Selector or DSS. What makes this module unique, is the Hundreds Selector. The row 20 buttons below the numbered buttons, is almost like pages. So if you have a 4 digit dialing plan, “31” would be the “3100” range, 32 would be “3200” range. (Ironically these were original to the module, 3100s have been the range for my museum wall for a while; actually the button at “31” is actually “2” because the dialing plan in the house is 3 digits, so for the handful of 200s would be labeled “2” If you have a five digit plan, the numbers would be 3 digits. For 52655, that label would have to be “526”.
Early on in the System 75 PBX era, there were only about 8 to 10 buttons, then later models had up to 20 HGS, short for the Hundreds Group Selector, since the port counts went up as the Definity G1 and G2 grew.
Other vendors have similar modules, and even in the Avaya world, since smaller ends are totally separate technologically than the larger PBX. In the ol Nortel world, they had DSS for their 2250 Attendant console, but it only had up to 100 stations. If you wanted to monitor a bunch of sets, there was this LCD screen that was very ahead of it’s time (the idea that is) but it really wasn’t that easy to manage.
POTD: Avaya CallMaster IV
Today’s Phone of the Day is a retake of the CallMaster IV terminal for the use of Avaya enterprise grade PBX systems. These are not telephones, and they are not attendant consoles and while there is an apparent resembelence of the Call Director, these sets would not be used for “answering centers” since Voice mail had taken many of those roles anyways.
POTD: Artsy photo of an Avaya 302B Attendant Console
An artsy picture of the Avaya/Lucent/AT&T 302B Attendant Console, made in the late 1980s, one of the few sets with button caps for the switchboard control of the System 75 and Definity PBX. Taken with a Nikon D3200 DSLR camera on Aperture priority, ISO 800.
Video – Pro Breakup views before the AT&T Divestiture – Early 80s
In the early 80s, anger was brewing towards a rebellion against Ma Bell. Before the settlement in 1982 with the US Government vs. AT&T, AT&T was in court with the infamous 1974 suit against the company with its control of everything, from its Long Lines (Long Distance), to Western Electric, the local Bell Operating Companies and so on. The opposition hated the company because they felt AT&T thought because the
Around that same time, a series that ran on PBS in the early 80s called Enterprise did an episode on the more fun stuff, the technological issues with the monopoly. The people who had a beef were people who hated or loathed AT&T equipment or services.
In 1968, the infamous case brought to the FCC that disrupted the telephony industry was the Carterphone ruling. The Carterphone was the first ever cordless phone, and prior to 1968, no one could have any phone other than a Western Electric phone leased by your local Bell operating company. (In fact one of the reasons why the phones were so damn reliable, was to keep the operating costs down to sustain their monopoly – which actually wasn’t bad – except if you were in the Carterphone camp.) The Bell System would threaten customers if they were using non Bell System equipment cutoff of services. In other resources, the Bell System allegedly would monitor customer’s voltage to see if they were using Bell equipment or not. Too bad there wasn’t an ACLU around at that time!
The lawyers for the Carterphone were not your highest quality legal team, because many lawyers didn’t feel it would be worth it to put the Bell System into court. The oddball lawyer, coming from a small town was laughed at big time by the big Bell System legal team. They would attack like a prosecutor by cross examining the AT&T executive and compare it to a speakerphone as this lawyer explains:
http://www.youtube.com/ceA2hYeqQ6E?t=7m39s
The administrative judge was totally taken aback, and realized that AT&T really didn’t want anything but their own products in their own customers hands. As the lawyer describes, the judge felt it was illogical, unreasonable for the bell exec to answer that way.
The Carterphone Decision (whether it was for the better or for the worse) opened up the market for lower cost equipment and third-party equipment to come, as the clip above mentioned from PBX, to KTS systems and answering machines alike.
One example was the head of MCI, who thought there could be competition in a growing market called the long distance market; he compared it to that one couldn’t fight AT&T like one can’t fight city hall.
Vintage Video: AT&T’s Production of Consumer Telephones
This is one of my favorite classic AT&T video of designing, testing and producing AT&T telephones post Divestiture. I don’t recall posting this before, but this is kinda cool.
What’s strange is most corporate video moved from film to video such as Betacam, but AT&T was still on film till the end of the 1980s.
Today’s modern world of consumerizaton means disposing things in shorter time because plastics and printed boards are similar to a Michael Kors bag, because technology is a fashion. We have to replace it to be “secure” to be on “the latest and greatest” because the latter will always enable strong “security” – in the sales and innovation units of course! Nortel types tend to vintage shame. I find it unprofessional for people to vintage shame. I do not agree with things of this nature. I also don’t have a problem if a phone is old as I am, if it works, why are we shaming people?
Phone-O-Graphy – Old Long Lines Tower – Manchester, NH Central Office
Video: eBay Haul – Old AT&T Documentation
In this video, I show my latest eBay finds of old Dimension PBX and Bell System Practices on the Dataphone from 1983! Enjoy!
Rants: at&t Acquires TimeWarner (They THINK They Can)
AT&T (nee SBC, nee Southwestern Bell) dropped a story Friday evening while some of the East Coast was disrupted by the DDOS attack that they had intentions to acquire Time Warner, the owner of CNN (the Cheap News Network), HBO, Warner Pictures, etc. for about $85 billion dollars.
Of course, this is subject to approval by the Federal Communications Commission, and similar to the NBCUniversal/Comcast acquisition from GE in 2010; expect concessions and terms of sale to also follow.
This deal however, does not include Time Warner Cable (historically branded for it’s Road Runner triple play services) which was spun off several years ago, but kept the name and the “sight and sound” logo.