In February, I had made a series of posts on the subject of the AT&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.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BuBq73mh_r4/
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.
I mean literally too..
In February I acquired a Merlin 410 control unit, from an Etsy seller as this was a vintage equipment. I received this on President’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.
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.
By May, the system was working without much hassle. I still assume the system could blow up at any time, and still presuming the system is not fully operational.
To dig deeper on the Merlin, let’s go one by one what made this system special in the 1980s to the early 2000s
The system in itself
- The system works with a basic (or as my pal out in the 406 would say) “dumb mode” 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.
- My Feature Package II cartridge was not working properly. Booting the Merlin with FPII caused all my Merlin phones to basically “ring” in loops till I unplugged it. Opening the cartridge showed some corrosion to the Lithium Ion battery, that stores the phone’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.
- 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.
- To completely toy around with how it could handle rings from the “phone company”, I tied it up to my Definity and did a “Priority Call”, 1 half, 2 full rings and the Merlin didn’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.
- As we talk about Key systems, the Merlin mimics the 1A2 key systems, where if you go off hook, you’re going to the outside world. In today’s modern world of Voice over IP and SIP being the primary app for that driver, kids today…they don’t know anything! There is no such thing is a “direct outside line” anymore!
Intercom:
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’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 “party line”. 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.
The tone of the Intercom is also common on the store-bought AT&T branded telephones (models with a 85x made from the 1990s to early 2000s, made by the company that licensed the AT&T brand) that had similar intercom compatibility, but lacked almost everything else a Merlin had.
System Internals
- The system was clearly not digital. Very electronic for sure. 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’t be an issue.
- No real hardware troubleshooting guides, on the internals. A bunch of search engines on trying to repair a Merlin from the mindset of a “Authorized Agent” (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 “I found something called [The] Museum of Telephony. You should take a look :D” And I did take a look and found myself looking at a mirror on my browser!
- If the system did crap out, AT&T promised a 24 hour overnight of getting the new unit and shipping out the old one. Perhaps AT&T just e-cycled it making the Merlin one the first telephone systems in history to be “disposable”.
Once I have time to sit down and play with it some more, perhaps I’ll do a video or so.
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