The Redwood, like the old Dimension, was barely a subject that could be found on a search engine. Within a week of reaching out to Andy last fall, because I knew he had knowledge on the subject; Joe the UCX Guy posted an abandoned Redwood with some pictures. Unlike his site, that since April 2019, his site, domain and everything is down; Andy from Missouri was able to provide some pics and a pretty detailed narrative. The subject may get technical and may go back and forth between the background of the workgroup-grade Redwood and the carrier-grade PBX. Parts of this narrative is part of that email with Andy, some may have first-person references, and that should not imply me of course.
First, the big question: PBX, or Key system/KSU? The answer is both. At the time, the tariffs/taxes on key systems were lower in some states, so the Redwood shipped in a key system configuration. One button = one phone line/trunk, and any/all phones could ring. The customer could also replace the included Library Card with a PBX Library Card. In PBX mode, all calls ring to the operator (unless in night mode), and could either then be transferred to an extension, or parked on an extension. Instead of selecting an unlit trunk button to make an outgoing call, users would dial an access code (9, usually) to automatically select an available trunk. With a PBX library card, the system could also be operated in a hybrid key system/PBX configuration. In PBX mode, the system used a Rolmphone 400 as an attendant console (Redwood did not support the traditional Rolm attendant console).
The Rolm systems you still see in retailers today are most likely to be traditional Rolm CBX systems. The CBX had 4 generations: the original CBX (later called the 7000), the 8000, the 9000, and the 9751. More than likely if you walk in to a Macy’s or Sears, it’ll be a 9751–the last of the traditional CBX line. I know the Macy’s I worked at (a former May Co. owned Famous-Barr store) in college had a 9751 model 10. I supposed it’s possible some older Sears stores have a 8000 or 9000. Sears adopted Rolm systems very early, in the mid/late 70s–before the digital Rolmphone even existed. However, in the late 80’s and early 90’s Sears was booming and would have had the cash to upgrade to the 9751. Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell which CBX a business has by looking. They all (except the 7000) used the same Rolmphone models and operated more or less the same way.
It’s very unlikely any of the Rolmphones you see in a store today are connected to a Redwood system. There are 3 reasons for this:
1. The Redwood, unfortunately, is not Y2K compatible. Redwood was not a financial success for Rolm/IBM/SIemens, and support was dropped fairly quickly. No software update was issued to fix it. My Redwood system is set to 1980 something instead of 2018.
2. Depending on how the system is configured, it my not be compatible with the current North American dialing plan. In a PBX configuration, dialing the outside access code (9) automatically invoked Automatic Route Selection–you could not turn it off. Unfortunately, ARS configuration on the Redwood required you to select from a pre-populated list of allowed area codes and exchanges. Since the beginning, area codes always had 0 or 1 as the middle digit. This is no longer the case when the late 80s to early 90s came along. So, if dial 9-1-636-NXX-XXXX, I get reorder tone because the system thinks I dialed a 1 before a local carrier. I’m in an area that still allows 7 digit local calls, so this works for me for local calls in the 314 area code, but if I have to make a 10 digit local call to the 636 or 573 area code, I’m out of luck. This is why in the attached pictures I have a long distance button–it directly selects a trunk I have reserved for non-local calls, thus skipping ARS.
3. Redwood didn’t sell well. There weren’t many of them out there to begin with.
You can also easily spot a Rolmphone that is on a Redwood system. Redwood used a slightly different button layout, so the iconic Rolm brown and cream colored desi’s wouldn’t work. Rolm/IBM made a special grey and maroon desi for the Redwood. I hacked together desi’s from a CBX–I don’t have extra Redwood desi’s so I didn’t want to waste them.
Not a bad idea!
Obviously Redwood did not sell well. Compared to other key systems of the time, it was expensive to purchase and expensive to operate. Rolm was very dominate in the large system market (beating out AT&T and Northern Telecom at times); but unlike AT&T which had Merlin and System 25, and Northern which had Vantage and then Norstar, Rolm didn’t really do smaller key systems. Whereas the other 2 competitors had purpose-designed hardware and software (though Norstar used some of Nortel’s SL-1 code), Rolm tried to adopt a fair bit of the CBX design in to Redwood. In the end, this drove up the per-station cost for Redwood–and it didn’t even end up sharing common hardware aside from the Rolmphones themselves! It also required a lot of hardware per trunk or phone. For every 4 trunk cards you needed an additional control card. You also needed a control card for every single Rolmphone card!
If you look at the inside of the door, you’ll see a diagram with brackets drawn between slots. This indicates where the control cards go. Also, the first trunk card only supports 1 trunk, and the others only 2 trunks per cards! On a AT&T then-System 75 or Nortel Meridian systems at the time, each trunk card supported 16 trunks! The Redwood, only 2, and required a control card!! For an 8 line system, you would need 7 cards! It’s also a very power-hungry system. I’m not sure what wattage it pulls, but I know it gives off a lot of heat and the power supply humming is very loud. My lights dim when I turn it on.
All of this said, however, it was very featureful for a key system of the era. Call parking, ARS, hybrid operation, Direct Inward System Access, even the ability to re-number your extensions and trunks–you wouldn’t see these in a Merlin, and Norstar wouldn’t even get call parking until later on in its life. (For these systems, these were truly hardwired ports and they were coded that way.)
Unlike key systems of the time, all programming was done via serial port on a DOS PC running the Redwood terminal emulator. Unlike it’s bigger CBX siblings, programming was all menu driven–no command line. Also unlike its bigger CBX siblings, Redwood did not keep the same tone plant. Instead of the very distinctive Rolm dialtone, Redwood used standard North American dialtone. The phones’ ringing was also a bit different. Instead of double ringing for outside calls and single for internal, Redwood did a single standard ring for inside, and a high pitched single ring for inside.
Finally, the later releases of the Redwood software (3.x) supported basic voicemail–which was definitely not ubiquitous at the time. However, when I say basic I mean really really basic. You would put your voicemail ports in a “department” (i.e. hunt group) and designate that as a voicemail department. The only thing this did for you was allow the analog ports in the department to turn on message waiting lights via a dial code. Redwood could forward/no answer calls to the voicemail department, however it was not capable of sending the extension dialed to the voicemail system. So, the voicemail system had no idea which mailbox to connect you to. Voicemail for internal/transferred calls was therefore impractical. Essentially, all you could do is use a voicemail system as an automated attendant that performed supervised call transfers. This was precarious and only sort of worked. Although Rolm did make an analog Phonemail system that would integrate with Redwood, the Rolm tech who gave me the Redwood said he had never seen a Redwood with voicemail “in the wild.”
I hope this answered all of your questions. Right now, my Redwood is not powered on. I just moved in late August, so things are still in boxes. It also has a dead battery so I would have to re-configure it from scratch….however, when I do finally get it back up and running I will be sure to send some videos.
Let’s hope a year later, there are some videos
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