Month: July 2017

My Collection: Avaya Red 8410D Voice Terminal

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It’s that time of year, a start of a new [fiscal] year and now it’s time to take my recently repaired DSLR camera to take photos of all the equipment that I have collected.

To start, this is the 8410D Voice Terminal I got when I received my Definity switch in 2015

It supports up to ten call appearances, and depending on your vintage of the PBX, it can support up to fifteen features (the ones that active in green lamps) as down triangles on the 2 line display when pressing Menu. When AT&T marketed these terminals in the 1990s, the Menu functions was encouraged to the users to take advantage of the multi call appearances.

These sets can work in 2 wire or 4 wire environments, requiring a respective circuit card. There is no need to tip DIP switches or do any other setups, if the wiring and the card matches to the right set. You can plug this into a 4 wire then move it to another desk on a 2 wire.

The traditional wiring environment for four wires required conductors on the 1 and 3, and 4 and 5 pins. Later models that used two wiring only needed conductors on the 4 & 5. These sets could work on the original System 75 PBX with intervention of the administrator to mimic the 7410 set, while maximizing the potential with the display and Menu/feature button assignments.

The 8400 series while been discontinued by Avaya for a number of years, is still compatible with current PBX hardware if you use 2 wire boards and sets. Meanwhile 4-wire boards became unsupported in CM 4 (or the 14th release of the Definity system.)

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Vintage Video: AT&T’s Production of Consumer Telephones

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This is one of my favorite classic AT&T video of designing, testing and producing AT&T telephones post Divestiture. I don’t recall posting this before, but this is kinda cool.

What’s strange is most corporate video moved from film to video such as Betacam, but AT&T was still on film till the end of the 1980s.

Today’s modern world of consumerizaton means disposing things in shorter time because plastics and printed boards are similar to a Michael Kors bag, because technology is a fashion. We have to replace it to be “secure” to be on “the latest and greatest” because the latter will always enable strong “security” – in the sales and innovation units of course! Nortel types tend to vintage shame. I find it unprofessional for people to vintage shame.  I do not agree with things of this nature. I also don’t have a problem if a phone is old as I am, if it works, why are we shaming people?

Telephony 101: Key Telephone System (KTS)

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The first on site customer systems was the PBX, but later on in the 1920s into the 1930s, brought a specific solutions to customers, called the Key Telephone System.

The “key” to this was to have hard wired lines for users who wanted to get to someone directly. This also fused with Intercom systems, acting as a separate “service” for the time. Intercoms for this context was a private circuit to enable telephone calls to work within the system. Most often, the Intercom line was on the fifth button of say a 564 telephone.

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Telephony 101: Key Service Units

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In the 1960s, customers of Key Telephone Systems or KTS units, were able to add onto their phone system, such as adding private lines, private trunks, modern intercom and other features alike.

An Automatic Electric KSU with the cover open
(Found from a PDF catalog I found online.)

 

Key Service Units acted like apps/appliances/snapins/plugins of yesteryear. Most often KSUs lived in a shoe box sized unit, a 66 block, a couple fuses, a 3 pronged power cable pigtailed directly to some hardware, and a unit to place features in a circuit breaker sized device. These would be tied to the 66 block where then wiring could be terminated for other goodies like overhead paging, music on hold, link the Muzak service in, etc.

This is also where the trunks from the central office would feed into, and the telephones that would connect.

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POTD: Avaya 4610 *One-X Quick Edition* IP set

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Back in 2013, I acquired an Avaya 4610 IP set. However, not to long after the acquisition, I’ve found out that this was a special version. A very strange one to say the least. I would’ve retuned this to the eBay seller as a “Not as Described” claim but I don’t like pulling that unless I really have to.

For a period of time from 2006 to 2008, Avaya marketed (albeit with limited fanfare) a peer to peer IP phone system called the One-X Quick Edition. To be honest, I never understood the brand.

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