I promise when we move to the big leagues away from WordPress, I’ll have a broader palette on subject matters! Meaning I can set the content and forget it!
A follow up from yesterday’s post from Andy in Missouri had contacted me at least several years ago, perhaps in late 2016, around the time of the Ugly Console theme. As you have seen; he’s got a lot of insight of ROLM, the leading vendor of PBX systems in the country – only for a short time. Thank IBM and their uptight attitude towards a wild but hard working group of people out on the Left Coast, where some of their ideas was the seed to what would become the standard well into the Facebook days.
I happened to reach out to him last fall to ask about the Redwood; ironically Joe The UCX Guy had posted an abandoned Redwood around the same time, however it was just pictures of that system.
As you probably know, ROLM’s demise has been perceived failure on support of IBM to finance the company effectively and a lack of leadership made them fall behind in evolving technologies (such as It Still Does Nothing or ISDN?), resulting a sale to Siemens in 1991, and basically took their existing American clientele, and fused some of ROLM’s technologies with Siemens. ROLM is well known for their bullet proof PBX systems. Your local Sears Roebuck store is probably using a system that’s almost as old as I with sets older than your’s truly. The rest is an adaptation of an email from him discussing the differences of a failed small end system called the Redwood and their flagship unit, the 9751 and the CBX as in the Computer Branch Exchange.
Like the last post, any first-person reference implies to Andy and not me.
The Redwood was supposed to be a Key Telephone System, however, the software fit on what was called “the library card”. It was, more or less, the system’s processor card and storage for the system software. It’s unclear how this “card” would recognize the hardware, as RFID probably didn’t exist. The reason for the different “library card” was due to taxes and tariffs (one was cheaper than the other) as it’s unclear how this worked. Getting the system coming as a key system from the factory was an explanation given to me by the gentleman who gave me the system. As far as I am aware, these taxes wouldn’t apply to the customer…so the question could be pointed to this being related the taxes Rolm paid involving manufacturing of the systems?
The phone posted above is a Rolmphone 312. This set came later in Rolm’s life, I believe shortly after Siemens took over. These were typically seen on later 9751 systems, running newer software such as version 9006i. The 9751 had 3 major software variants: 9005, 9006m and 9006i. The systems running 9005 and 9006m had Motorola processors and were similar in operation to the model 8000 and 9000 CBX’s. The 9751’s running 9006i had Intel processors. The software on these was completely re-written was more or less a Siemens HiCom system. The pictured above was not on a Redwood (it only supported 100/200/400 series Rolmphones) nor a 9200 CBX (the 9200 was a re-branded Siemens system and used Siemens phones). More than likely, the system the phone in your picture was connected to was a 9751 running 9006i software.
The 100/200/400 series digital phones, like the ones in my pictures were mostly backwards compatible. Rolm didn’t begin manufacturing digital phone sets until late 1982/1983–after the model 8000 CBX was released. You could purchase digital line cards for an existing 8000 CBX, thus allowing it to use the new digital phones. The 7000 CBX (the original CBX) never supported digital phones.
#