{"id":3808,"date":"2019-10-05T23:43:56","date_gmt":"2019-10-06T03:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themuseumoftelephony.wordpress.com\/?p=3808"},"modified":"2019-10-05T23:43:56","modified_gmt":"2019-10-06T03:43:56","slug":"follow-up-att-merlin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clickford.net\/telephony\/follow-up-att-merlin\/","title":{"rendered":"Follow up: AT&#038;T Merlin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In February, I had made a series of posts on the subject of the AT&amp;T Merlin. There was a meaning behind this. One was I had acquired two BIS and a 34 button set in the fall of last year.<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/BuBq73mh_r4\/<\/p>\n<p>The other was I was in the process to acquire at Merlin unit. I was building all this up to a big post sometime in the mid winter, that turned up to be a big smoke.<\/p>\n<p>I mean literally too..<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"merlin 410 fail\" width=\"636\" height=\"358\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/b0T02Kh6CR0?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>In February I acquired a Merlin 410 control unit, from an Etsy seller as this was a vintage equipment. I received this on President&#8217;s Day. The video rolling was originally going to be an unboxing, and as a result, it quickly became a documented situation to prove beyond a reasonable doubt I received this $88 item defective.<\/p>\n<p>The following day, after the house had some bad fumes for part of the previous day, I then took it to the garage and it fumed up one last time.<\/p>\n<p>By May, the system was working without much hassle. <strong>I still assume the system could blow up at any time, and still presuming the system is not fully operational.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>To dig deeper on the Merlin, let&#8217;s go one by one what made this system special in the 1980s to the early 2000s<\/p>\n<p><em>The system in itself<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The system works with a basic (or as my pal out in the 406 would say) &#8220;dumb mode&#8221; if nothing else is inserted in the Cartridges. It will work in a squared-key mode which means all of the four trunks would appear on the most left hand columns, A through D starting above the Intercom button to the top. Transfer, Conference, or attempts at programming any key would be prohibited.<\/li>\n<li>My Feature Package II cartridge was not working properly. Booting the Merlin with FPII caused all my Merlin phones to basically &#8220;ring&#8221; in loops till I unplugged it. Opening the cartridge showed some corrosion to the Lithium Ion battery, that stores the phone&#8217;s buttons, and other systemwide settings for a minimum of 10 minutes. Whether or not I can replace it with a modern one that you use to power solar lights outside is unclear. Any high miliamps could probably fry out the board.<\/li>\n<li>Despite the Merlins having the potential to have 8 different ring patterns similar to the 7400 DCP sets, it cannot under any Merlin below Plus.<\/li>\n<li>To completely toy around with how it could handle rings from the &#8220;phone company&#8221;, I tied it up to my Definity and did a &#8220;Priority Call&#8221;, 1 half, 2 full rings and the Merlin didn&#8217;t register that, and just did the standard ring. However when I do that to my rotaries or other sets, it can do that without problems.<\/li>\n<li>As we talk about Key systems, the Merlin mimics the 1A2 key systems, where if you go off hook, you&#8217;re going to the outside world. In today&#8217;s modern world of Voice over IP and SIP being the primary app for that driver, kids today&#8230;they don&#8217;t know anything! There is no such thing is a &#8220;direct outside line&#8221; anymore!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>Intercom:<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Again the Intercom in the moment in time meant something different. And internal calling on a PBX differs to one that is on a key system. Pressing the bottom button on the most left column of a Merlin activates this feature. In fact, for the Merlin it&#8217;s to page another Merlin phone and if the user wants to talk like a typical internal PBX call they just pick up the handset. Also, the Intercom appearance is shared across the system, and this basically a &#8220;party line&#8221;. If a user wants to but in, they could if the default settings are set up that way. And you can only have one intercom call per call, per system, per user.<\/p>\n<p>The tone of the Intercom is also common on the store-bought AT&amp;T branded telephones (models with a 85x made from the 1990s to early 2000s, made by the company that licensed the AT&amp;T brand) that had similar intercom compatibility, but lacked almost everything else a Merlin had.<\/p>\n<p><em>System Internals<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>The system was clearly not digital. Very electronic for sure.<\/em> The system is filled of a lot of electronics, and someone with a electrical engineering can be a good troubleshooter when the system went up in fumes like what happened to me. If this was say a fully-digital system like Norstar, unless you are really good in integrated circuits and figuring out hardware issues; then perhaps that wouldn&#8217;t be an issue.<\/li>\n<li>No real hardware troubleshooting guides, on the internals. A bunch of search engines on trying to repair a Merlin from the mindset of a &#8220;Authorized Agent&#8221; (that predated the Business Partner moniker of Avaya Red VARs) was to no avail. In fact the friend of mine who has the electrical engineering background told me in quote &#8220;I found something called [The] Museum of Telephony. You should take a look :D&#8221; And I did take a look and found myself looking at a mirror on my browser!<\/li>\n<li>If the system did crap out, AT&amp;T promised a 24 hour overnight of getting the new unit and shipping out the old one. Perhaps AT&amp;T just e-cycled it making the Merlin one the first telephone systems in history to be &#8220;disposable&#8221;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Once I have time to sit down and play with it some more, perhaps I&#8217;ll do a video or so.<\/p>\n<p>#<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In February, I had made a series of posts on the subject of the AT&amp;T Merlin. There was a meaning behind this. One was I had acquired two BIS and a 34 button set in the fall of last year.&hellip;  <\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link\"><a href=\"https:\/\/clickford.net\/telephony\/follow-up-att-merlin\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[164],"class_list":["post-3808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mycollection","tag-att-merlin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clickford.net\/telephony\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clickford.net\/telephony\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clickford.net\/telephony\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clickford.net\/telephony\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clickford.net\/telephony\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clickford.net\/telephony\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3808\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clickford.net\/telephony\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clickford.net\/telephony\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clickford.net\/telephony\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}