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.
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.