Telleyphones on Telleyvision

AT&T Deathly Commercials (AT&T Merlin)

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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.

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AT&T Commercials: System 25 PBX

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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: MTV LA Operations

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If you are not addicted to MTV’s Catfish, well you are ether sane or you live under a rock. The TV series exposes people misleading themselves on social media that is supposed to be a platform of full-name, and authentic, which often shows how Facebook can be known as Fakebook.

The series was based on an indie documentary, that became an offspring for MTV’s programming in late 2012, which the ratings soared during the infamous Tao story that circulated in early 2013.

The format of the program changed a couple seasons ago, kinda. You now see the very start of the show of the Skype calls and the follow up Skype calls at “Catfish Headquarters” known as the LA offices of MTV. In a 2016 episode featuring Andrea Russett, a famous YouTuber, who had her likeness used as a catfish tool, the hosts Nev Scuhulman and Max Joseph returned back to base and Nev was pretending to answer a flood of telephone calls on decommissioned Cisco 7900 series sets. (Oh and there’s some Linksys SPA sets mixed in… interesting.)

It was flipping hysterical.

This was obviously an upgrade because in future episodes, the two dudes are at said “HQ” and in the very open office environment, you can see the newer 8800 or 7800 series Cisco set in the background. I don’t use plural because they don’t use the set that much.

One upon a time, Viacom, the parent of MTV, was a heavy Nortel shop, one of their managers told Network World around 1990 about how they preferred to have the Meridian 1 PBX for the ability to have features programmed on hard keys. Obviously Viacom had went through radical corporate changes and will possibly go through some more into 2019. These Cisco phones were sometimes caught on MTV programs and had been seen for at least a decade if not more.

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Telleyphones on Telleyvision: Halt and Catch Fire

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This is one of my favorite cable dramas on TV. This series, Halt and Catch Fire (first runs during the summer on AMC) is a fictional drama set in the 1980s where a mainframe computer company took a risk of getting into the PC business and put the company out of business because the PCs totally canalized the fictional Cardiff Electric. (A contributing factor was the characters hacking into a bank which resulted the FBI to seize all property.)  The main character, named Joe has resemblance of a non technical, but salesman like demeanor of Steve Jobs.

The other main character is a woman, named Cameron who is a gifted coder who was the #2 to Joe. She helped reverse engineer the IBM PC’s ROM BIOS. (In fact the way it was portrayed in the series had resemblance of Compaq’s successful attempt.) If I remember correctly, the Season 1 ended, Cardiff goes belly up, then begins working for “Southern Lines” – a spoof of Southwestern Bell – it showed her working in an office with white painted walls with the blue and yellow stripes resembling the Bell System!  With other dramas on TV, there was a love interest and in season one they had an on and off again relationship.  After Cameron realized that the phone company was covering up the fact the central offices could handle data up to like 300 bauds, her next ideas was to start up a new venture. In Season 2, she broke up with Joe out of revenge and created a bulletin board service/online game startup.

This one had more of a telephony taste, and of such here are some images from Season two grabbed off my iPad last summer.

Not to sound like a TV snob, but I like fictional shows that don’t mix real with fake. Don’t get me wrong, I love Silicon Valley, the problem is when they mix the narrative of current real big businesses with fake startups and the lines blur so badly, an average viewer may get confused of what’s real and what’s fake. Worse is integrating real reporters from blogs like Re/Code, Techcrunch, etc. The writing in Halt takes place a over generation ago and mixing anything fictional is clearly stated if you know enough of the history of PCs and or mainframes and they keep the real people or companies to a minimum unlike Silicon Valley, which is why I like watching these types of series instead.

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The blue box is a Paradyne modem. Above would be some circuit boards for telephony

 

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The PCs on the left were used to host the services. But users on the far end were using C64 machines. Supposedly in one episode, a “software PBX” was mentioned, but I cannot confirm myself if there was even such a thing in the 1980s before say the Asterisk around year 2001. You can see the ol 500s and Trimlines on the bottom

 

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Joe goes to a new company pitching the idea of cloud services or utility computing before it got its name 30 years later. His pitch was to max out their own internal IBM mainframes (which was featured in the series) and use “timeshares” and rent out the unused resources to customers. Remember IBM really did invent virtualization in the 70s but because Joe is a dimwit, he brought this company down due to poor planning of his idea. The series reflects the phones of the day, here you see a BIS 22 set (I believe this was made around 1987, this season’s timing was circa 1984.)

 

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Cameron is shown in the background, but to the table in front of her is a 500, 2500 and I think a Trimline too

 

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For the wiring guys and girls, there was scenes of 66 blocks, and other early networking gear. This capture I got was a bunch of modems allowing the Commodore 64s to get in to the bulletin board and play games. This character Donna, was the wife to an grumpy engineer who fought with Joe over style and substance, and technical vs non technical.

Phones @ Work: Garbage Time with Katie Nolan

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I spy some Telleyphones on the Telleyvision!

Garbage Time with Katie Nolan is taped sports-talk program that runs on Fox Sports 1. What time does it air? Well, the time varies because the network is heavily dependent on live sports events (who knew, isn’t that why ESPN was created?) I gave up the lost cause by turning my set on FS1 at 9:30pm Eastern Time after running into the soccer games or any other sport I wasn’t interested seeing live. I like the talent because good looking people with intelligence is hard to find on TV. Anyways the program with heavy substance* is an Emmy nominee and a new “season” is supposed to be running on a more decent time, according to promos recently running on Fox.

*because cute brunettes from the Boston area cannot sustain a career because they know what they are talking about!

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The New York produced program is not at the Fox studios. Outside of their cable news networks and flagship TV station, everything is produced or originated in Los Angeles. I believe Katie Nolan has control over her content, and most likely it’s produced third party studio. (There is a clip somewhere showing the very small studio. I bet My home office is bigger than her “studio”!)

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Because of this, you can see this studio operation using Allworx and not any Avayas you see at almost any Fox-owned property (Fox is still religious to being an Avaya Red operation.)

The screengrabs were from about the last 6 months or so living on my iPad. I just finally got the chance to upload them.