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.”
YouTube
Basics on the ROLM CBX
This film made c 1980 shows how the ROLM CBX works. The CBX stood for the Computerized Branch Exchange and it differed from other phone systems that signaled the devices and machines differently. ROLM didn’t care about “dumbing down” the content to make it easier to understand. Despite the cute character, the intent in these engineering focused companies was to keep it highly technical.
For whatever reason the company did very well until the suits from New York decided to go into phone systems and then destroy it within several years, just like what AT&T did to NCR in the early 1990s. IBM (yes that same IBM that believed people needed to be “computer literate” to use a large mainframe) really lacked the telephony and innovative literacy to help pull them out into their misery in the early 1990s.
Siemens would later buy them out and use ROLM’s brains and talent to replace their existing offerings and inherited many of ROLM’s designs, and other tangible assets that made ROLM what they were for a period of time.
*
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.
Video: AT&T Long Lines’ NOC Tour – 1979
Today, we are revisiting network operations from about thirty-five years ago. From time to time, this site had posted media from the old AT&T Long Lines, however on the day after a massive distributive denial of service attacked the Manchester-based Dyn; I thought it would be worthy to do another post. Produced by AT&T featuring the network operations center for their then Long Lines unit; this was high tech for the 1970s.
AT&T had designed a national network to process out of state or region calls and direct them automatically. But if disaster or overloaded situations occurred, this specific operations center would be able to redirect calls to another route. Communication between the central office and the Bedminster was crucial in case of possible outages or high call volumes, say around the holidays or disasters like earthquakes, etc.
Around this time #3 ESS switches were used around the Bell System. Not too long after #4 would replace the switching, and despite the 5ESS taking over central offices in some markets in the 80s, the 4ESS switching was commonly used for long distance, even up to the early 1990s.
Today Bedminster serves as a catchall as AT&T has evolved into different businesses since the Divesture and the death of long distance services.
* * *
Sadly, not all operations are designed like the ol Bell System only because the technology is so complicated and Internet networking was never thought of running like telephones, because telephony routing was so fixated (or static to used todays terms.)
While the Internet was designed and can do things like hop onto another network on it’s own – if the first or second hit didn’t work then you’d get to your services. With IP based networking; you can’t just issue commands onto a router and redirect the data traffic as easily. Often when a network goes down, the easiest way is to reboot it or do whatever you can do to fend off the attacks. Another problem is just the plain insecurity of the Internet. I’m not the biggest expert in IP networking but another problem is the war between traditional networks that are hard-coded (ala Cisco IOS) and newer networks that are more “dynamic” like what occurred yesterday. Not only that but the consumer equivalent to oIP, the Internet of Things is not helping matters. That’s a whole different discussion outside the realm of this site.
*
September 11th Tribute – “The Twins”
On this 15th anniversary of the most horrific and atrocious day in American history, your humble Curator would like to dedicate this day with the AT&T’s mini documentary of the construction of the World Trade Center around 1976 and the installation of switching systems. This video has been embedded in past posts around 9/11, but as a duty to remember, I am posting this again.
I hope you enjoy your day, remembering the day with some grief with happiness of being alive and (if you’re old enough) reminiscing of enjoying life before our world became vigilant of terror.
Here is the video:
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.