Acquired in 2016, this analog conferencing set for handsfree, full-duplex calling that predates the Polycom by a decade, was made by Nortel and was marketed in the late 1980s.
Nortel
Telephony 101: On Voice Mail
Some people love voice mail, many just hate it. Many are apparently so egotistical, they think it’s not worth listening to 2 minutes of a voice based message than a generic email.
People also think email is better, but do you know the history of voicemail?
if the answer is no, lets go down memory lane of Voice Mail.
Voicemail is often assumed to be an electronic answering machine on a server. While it’s true, its origins was almost similar to sending a letter or an email, just with spoken word.
The first indication of such language was in printed publications in 1877. A famous man named Thomas Edison with an invention called the phonograph. For the Gen-X audience and older, this is basically a record player. Millenials are probably familiar to just be cool for the latest trend. While it was well known for songs, the ability to record spoken word, as a way to replace letter writing had the possibility. The “voice mail” language was in the lexicon by the 1910s.
While the answering machine was invented in the 1960s, the ability to install these would be so cost prohibitive, and worse, a wiring nightmare. In the early 1970s, Motorola introduced pagers that provided one way voice messages that would be answered by an “answering center” (this in 2017 is completely archaic with the advent of digital telephony, automated attendants, in fact the size of these answering centers were the size of contact centers, which was not existent at the time.) These pagers used UHF signals and were often used for volunteer fire fighters, etc. In this sense, this could be considered as a voice message.
Phone of the Day: Nearby Kohls | Undisclosed location
This was taken at a local Kohls, just a little north of where I live. This is located in massively redeveloped area of box stores when it was just all trees. I can’t remember when it was built, I’m going to bet before the 2009 bankruptcy of Nortel. (Remember a similar post of noticing Mitel sets of their alleged “Do we stand by our man?” post bankruptcy mentality across any former Nortel sites.) Newer stores went with the “screw them” approach of building new stores with Mitel and older stores still run Avaya Blue.
Video: Nortel Meridian M9617 POTS Telephone
Thanks to Joe the UCX Guy who contacted me offline to offer one of his two sets he had. According to his post, “A friend sent me this set, and it works, although it’s a bit strange, the volume on the handset is really low on both lines. Hands free is loud and clear but the handset is quite low volume.”
These sets were basically NOS or perhaps “New Old Stock” because he had opened them recently.
He tried to install the app on a Windows 10 PC to no avail. Well there is such thing as virtualization and running older operating systems.
This video features the unboxing. The next video I’m trying to shoot for tomorrow, the 19th, where I will literally try to install the application per to Nortels specifications (I’ll try it on NT Workstation 4, with 8MB ram, 10MB harddisk and USB, TAPI, and all the other fun stuff for it to work and run it on Fusion on my Mac mini. I will say it will sure be fun to try!)
Without forgetting, Thank You!
Rants: Sales & Marketing’s Abusive Telephony Agenda
If you thought the previous post on lies about TDM PBX not capable of modern telephony was good, then to use the ol Ron Popiel cliche But Wait There’s More!
This post will be a little raunchy, I should’ve posted this on my personal site, but I couldn’t help to resist when I got a couple off-site feedback from people defending my first one, so “the hits keep on coming!” I hope.
This same site had another post from some dude that can’t tell ISDN from T1 or that anything that supports TDM telephony because afterall TDM is automatically native to VOIP technology. The practices of torture, lies and manipulation from S&M (now did you get the innuendo?) is just getting complex now. Anyone that wants to push SIP as a be-all-end-all solution is now getting pushed to customers who can’t a) fight back or b) they don’t know anything about telecom/telephony so they’ll take a solution and in many VOIP setups w/out telecom support, they leave the system abandoned and most often the VOIP system plus the S&M types push and torture, will often be unsupported, phones crashing, users wanting assistance to then be denied by the heartless IT administrators… (why am I writing this during the holidays when this should be more of a Halloween themed post?)
Rants: IT’s Dissent to Telephony
File this under IT is what it shouldn’t be. I mean, IT as in Information Technology.
A partner of mine gave me a link to a page entitled “Meridian System Tech Support Guide” written by a Nicole Hayward for some pro-IP voice provider. Joe the UCX Guy would have a field day with these types of sales traps.
Let’s take apart the post one by one and call this young lil’ whippersnapper out
It’s no surprise that many network administrators and IT professionals are seeking Nortel Meridian Phone System tech support.
Well, I mean if you’re in IT, you hate people, why would you want to manage a system that requires people skills (AND having to deal with end users?)
Released initially in 1975*, it’s been said that the Nortel Meridian is still the most widely used PBX for businesses with 60 to 80,000 lines. But when it comes to support, the hard truth is: Meridian systems are well beyond end-of-life
* Somewhat misleading, the SL1 came out in 1975, the Meridian 1 went to market circa 1990. As she implies in the last sentence, lets not let the facts get away of a good sale. She uses Wikipedia as a primary source, instead of here. (Laughing out loud!) Don’t get me started with the agism on the last sentence.
Nortel went out of business in 2009, and Avaya acquired its assets. There is no single source for Meridian tech support, but I’ve gathered a few resources and tips below. Please keep in mind: You’re probably better off selecting a Nortel Meridian phone system replacement.
“No single source” – well wasn’t that Northern’s way of using vendors for non Fortune 500s? Whatever. Like the UCX system. All you need is a server replacement. All gateways and digital and IP stations made in the last 25 years will work, young miss. instead of some crappy phone service that that basically emulates tip and ring over IP to be honest. I gotta do a SIP article sometime soon.
On the common system failures, this girl confuses the M1 line to the key based Norstar. (And yes I’m being crude, because there are women out there who do love TDM phones and can be much more intelligent than some millenial) Again, sales have no damn clue about telephony at all.
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System Programming Failure – “The Nortel Norstar system utilizes a super capacitor (super cap) for maintaining the programming data in memory. The problem is that the supercapacitor has a high incidence of failure as it ages. There are no outwards sign of failure (nor any way to test, other than unplugging the system) as it’s only there as a data “backup” system.” [Kremlacek]
IT people or ones with aggressive sales backgrounds are very manipulative. If she ever worked for me, I’d press her for harassment charges, with her kinda tone that shows below.
If you have prior experience with Meridian equipment, manuals may help. Otherwise, don’t try this at home, folks.
What, I can’t have an M1 in my house? Not even an Option 11… my goodness what planet are YOU on?
While I couldn’t find a single repository of Nortel Meridian manuals on Avaya.com, many of the past PBX resellers and business partners have published them. I found a big list of Meridian 1 Options 11C, 51C, 61C, and 81C manuals here. You can find a particular manual by Googling the system option, e.g. “Meridian 1 Option 11C Manual.”
Yeah Google may not be your best friend, ever tried SUPPORT.avaya.com? And what is this Unix reference of “Repository” – we we call it in the ‘biz a COLLECTION…grrr!
At this point, I want to become a Wookie…and I’m not even a Star Wars fan!
Among the other options, she writes about the various options, but basically rips and writes the content, and doesn’t put it into her words, like whatever Avaya’s brochure says, must be true, type of attitude.
So here goes the sales pitch:
While it’s tempting to keep your existing phone system on its last legs, consider the costs: your time, a technician service and/or Avaya maintenance contract, refurbished parts, etc. And at the end of the day, it’s a short-term fix. You are better off considering a new phone system solution, and it’s likely a hosted VoIP PBX will work for you.
Why hosted VoIP? If you were getting along fine with the basic phone system functionality that the Meridian PBX offered, your organization will be floored with the capabilities that a cloud VoIP providers offer.
Um, excuse me? Do you even have a clue how many features the M1 has, or are you judging on the original SL-1 specs from 1975? Oh wait, there’s more!
Switching to hosted VoIP can be done in a matter of days. Most hosted VoIP solutions, like OnSIP, have 50+ phone sytem features, utilize your existing LAN, and require no investment in equipment beyond the phones.
There is over 300 end user features on the M1 and I am not even CLOSE to being a Nerdtel fanboy, Nicole! There you go, these scare tactics + sales makes customers creep out and cave into some dummy millenials who can’t tell from tip vs ring, or the functionality of a true PBX vs some Asterisk type. Good luck cutting over to a “hosted” solution for 8,000 ports (an average port count in an M1 setup.) These IT and sales people want to sit at their workstations and not get them fingers dirty in those lovely 66blocks with hard wired telephones.
Of that, lets turn this sales pitch, to something relevant to the Museum, if you walked away in the last calendar year learning something new about telephony, please return the favor with kind feedback or a donation or something on the Wish List. I’m love to get tiny compensation to take time out of my busy live to try to fill the Web of something other than the Political Correctness of Technology known as Information Technology or PCs. I stride to be 99.999% accurate and clear of all the exhibits and posts before it gets published.
*
Rant: Prokop, Nerdtel User, part two
Nortel is really the phone guy’s equivalent to a computer nerd’s system. Very techie, very nerdy and very cocky, and cares less about average users. I don’t like being around with a Nortel Nerd, they are just plain old jerks.
The evidence that proves this statement of over 3 years ago would be confirmed in yet another post I like to critique of Andrew Prokop, who works for Avaya and is helping dilute their brand name of being warm and non abrasive, to showoff, bragging and talking down to non technical people. This creates a stigma to the people who aren’t as nerdy and jerky like Prokop is.
Lets start in a recent post he did to No Jitter (it looked like it was a summer rerun, because some of the wording looked like another post he wrote.)
A lot has changed since I left college and entered the workforce. My first “real” job began July 5, 1983 at the company formerly known as Northern Telecom. My first desk telephone was an analog 2500 set. I did most of my work on a green CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) screen logged into a PDP-11 via a 9600 baud modem. There were no cell phones, e-readers, Google, or Microsoft Word. Heck, in 1983 there was barely a Microsoft.
Jeez, does this dude know English? You put the three letter acronym in the parentheses (especially if its going to be referred as a herein type of statement.) If you follow the traditional English logic, he would keep referring the monitor as “Cathode Ray Tube” in every reference after!
Can this guy be more bragging of how he logged into a system everyday? A-hole!
My job used to be a place I went to. If my car broke down, I didn’t work. If the roads were too icy to drive on, I didn’t work. If I had to stay home waiting for a repair person, I didn’t work. I suppose I could have sat down with a pad of paper and wrote PLM code (my first professional programming language) by hand, but that wasn’t very practical.
These days, work is something I do and not a place I go. I work at home. I work from airports and hotel rooms. I’ve worked at my kid’s baseball games and swim meets. Today I am working from the cabin in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota.
Remember when we used to take sick days? Now, I just prop myself up in bed and call it my office. No matter where I am, I have immediate access to email, instant messages, video, and enterprise telephony. The presence jellybean on my Microsoft Skype for Business client might tell you that I am available, but it doesn’t let on that I am working in a coffee shop in downtown Minneapolis.
Showoff!
Just to make a Friday evening reading not as painful to read, I can’t help that an IT guy degrades the TLA even more by stooping to the CrazI MySpacE PartIGrl, of mixed caps
We are all aware of the Target security breach. Hackers snuck malware into Target’s Point of Sale (PoS) devices that allowed credit card numbers to be stolen at the time of a shopper’s purchase. The malware was successful because it was able to situate itself between the PoS application and the device’s encryption software. So, even though the data was secure on the Target network, there was a point in time when it could be easily read and therefore stolen.
Dude, “PoS” is spelled in all capitals. (I have to check Harry Newton’s Telecom Dictionary, but I think he spells it Point Of Sale to be quite honest.) Unless you want to be anti American, and write like a European because you don’t like how Americans used to write, than that’s your right. But don’t expect someone to call you out when you do come off as non American.
I do suspect this guy is somewhere in the Asperger’s Syndrome spectrum disorder. it’s the groups of people you want to throw a manual at their head!
This post was to just discuss how I can’t stand cocky IT guys and their condescending attitudes, their lack of strong English writing skills and writing religion, as he worships to internet port 5060 as his god…another IT pro no-no. No Religion of any type!
Again part of this post was from a No Jitter piece he wrote on the alleged death of VPNs.
That’s it, good night!
Video: Nortel Ad – Circa 2000
I was on a walk in my town for the first time in many months (feels like years in this long summer that never ends.) I passed by a biker going against me on the sidewalk who had a T-shirt that said “What do you want the Internet to be?”
The T-shirt was by Nortel during the late 90s, the turn of year 2000. These ads ran from 1999 to 2000 when Nortel actually made their first major mainstream ad campaign that was outside the traditional trade papers. (I also bet The Beetles made some nice royalties beyond the typical SESAC dues!) This also followed after a major acquisition of Bay Networks, once located at the headquarters where Avaya is today in Santa Clara, California. Bay Networks had a large presence in Massachusetts (where the biker probably worked for or a friend of his or his spouse.) If you go on US Route 3 South before Interstate 95 Route 128 you’ll see Avaya’s offices there. Prior to the Nortel acquisition Avaya got out of most of their New England offices and or plants.
This campaign didn’t help much because the rise of Cisco (I think in retrospect, the “rise” was inflated, through a lot of backroom deals, long lunch hours with CIOs and other weird things that made Cisco go to the top.)
Sadly, even though I dislike Nortel 9 times out of 10, it was watching a Greek tragedy that destroyed the company; first having a top heavy headcount (always a bad sign), second was a very rough transition from a mainframe type of technology (TDM) to less hardware dependent business (IP.) For whatever reason Cisco was able to sell tons of boxes and make a killing, allegedly in the first decade of the new Millenium. (Cisco’s success outside of IP Telephony is yet to be challenged publicly outside of niche blogs.) Factor in Enron-like accounting scandals and the infamous bankruptcy, Nortel had a lot of issues.
I’m not sympathizing with Nortel, many legacy telecom companies were unable to make the same profits in an IP/Internet based world. Well not until the concept of “cloud” based services where they could get a reoccurring revenue stream. Services were cut among all companies and even in the last 15 years, hardware maintenance was still needed, but good luck if you had a major bug and dealing with the vendor directly.
It was interesting to see still see things, like the biker in the Nortel swag in 2015.
Rants: Nortel Admins, Nortel Types and Plain A-Holes
WARNING: Today’s post contains potential unfriendly and vulgar language. Reader Discretion is advised.
This site is a museum, a task to catalog history of telephony technology (and post the stuff you can’t find anywhere else on the web) to pass down to a dumb population who could care less about the time before they were born or understand where we got to today’s communication. And to accept the fact that the same device sat on a desk or hung on a wall for an a average of a generation, whether its right or not is up for discussion outside this site.
We have a zero tolerance for “bleeding edge of technology”, just because some new thing is in fashion, doesn’t mean its going to work right away, never mind be in vogue tomorrow.
One of the reasons why I’ve disliked Nortel was the they had a reputation for being Nerdtel, whom nerds would be interested in telecom. Just like in the PC world, you got those nerds, who will throw tons of TLAs down your throat whether you like it or not or just throw buzzwords without even being questioned. Some people in the PC industry also believe in Political Correctness, you get the “group-think” mentality if you don’t subscribe to the future of technology, you get a similar treatment of “you’re a racist” if you question an African American in power.