Phone-o-Graphy – Manchester NH Telephone Booth (with no Pay Phone!)
Phones of the Day
Phone of the Day: ROLM phone at the Local Bob’s Stores
This was taken at a local Bob’s Stores when the day after the New England Patriots won their fifth Super Bowl. (Roger That! Heh, heh, heh.) For this chain, ROLM is alive and well, to use the cliche. Because ROLM predates the Internet and modern day documentation, I have no idea what type of PBX or KSU it lives on. The set themselves is the 1990s generation, before they became German looking (possibly mid 1990s.) When ROLM was fully sold to Siemens, a few years later, they stopped selling their systems to America and incorporated ROLM features and their modernest designs. I’m not the expert in ROLM so forgive me.
Phone of the Day: Cisco 7841 – Local School
In 2025 I stand corrected. It’s the 7841 series set. In 2016, there was no 6841 yet. The following year. Cisco opened up their fancy phones to customers who had no intentions to use it against a CUCM. The 6800s was planned to replace the SPA series VOIP phones and fully deprecated the SPA by 2020.
But then the 7800s were open too. Cisco would then market both the key based 7800 and 8800 screen phones for Third Party Call Control or 3PCC or now it’s called something like Multiplatform Phones or MPP. Forgot Aruba was the brand for HP’s networking at that time.
I spotted this overpriced telephone in an elementary school during a late fall craft fair. It had a nice turnout, to the point I want to be a vendor and sell geeky fashion items! I say overpriced because this is located in a community where it’s ultra-conservative. The town I live in is extremely frugal in finances and keeps the government small. On the town government, the board would zero-out any proposals to their IT department, which is lead by a “coordinator” that grew up in the days before IP, Windows Servers, etc. In the world of compliance and technical adherence, they run the town side like a mum and pop shop.
The school district’s offices (a seperate agency) is housed in two ranch houses, near the local high school that are commercially zoned. This is most likely where their CallMangler (I can’t help to resist) is located. I’ve spotted a 7900 series in one of the offices when I walked by in that same school.
I’ve seen on the town side using Cisco 7940 sets and 7960 sets since I moved in 2010. The town to kinda leak my location is the largest single voting place that got national attention during the primaries last winter if people who don’t know where I live.
I do not follow municipal matters as much anymore, but a cutover to VOIP in the school system occurred sometime in the range of fiscal years 2011 to 2013 because the previous phone systems were end of life. I do not know the systems prior to because I didn’t attend school here. What’s ironic is there is an Aruba wireless access point shown here plugged on the PC jack. The town’s fire department had a consumer grade Linksys plugged into their PC port on their Cisco sets…
In the town I did grow up, we had TIE systems in the late 1980s-late 90s then went to Telrad in the school district. The elementary school that I went to got their Telrad in 2002. The Telrads were still there when I moved out of town in 2010.
Phone of the Day: LEGOLAND Discovery Center | Boston, Massachusetts
Located just north of the Boston city line, in Somerville, Massachusetts, the LEGOLAND Discovery Center is located in the Assembly Row neighborhood. Unlike the LEGOLAND in California, or Florida, this place is an indoors given the climate of Boston, hazy hot summers, and very cold winters (honestly more of the former than the latter in recent years.)
Anyways these sets of pictures is a workspace of lady named Megan, whom builds little things shown in the Miniland section of the attraction. According to their Facebook page, she is a certified through Lego’s Master Builder Academy. Things such as characters from The Lego Movie, Wally (and his galpal) from the Boston Red Sox, the four colored puzzle Autism Awareness, etc. I actually met this lady at the Red Sox game that was Lego themed on the 31st. See telephony related post. In fact I found out that this was her work space after I snapped the picture of the notorious Cisco 6921. She came up to me about a few minutes later asking if we met at Fenway. I felt somewhat flattered that someone could recognize me among thousands that come there.
As you can tell, sadly Lego is on the “dark side” of telephony…:(
I was only able to come because the indoor park is only open to adults if you have kids. On the third Wednesdays of every month, they open it to adults for only a couple of hours, despite them selling adult beverages and closing time is bedtime for a 10 year old. (Nine o’ clock.)
I had fun regardless and hope I run into these fine folks again next month. The neighborhood is a wonderful attraction with it being setup as an outdoor mall. Click below the phone to see more Lego related pictures of the workspace.
NEC Rotary Telephone – NH Telephone Museum – September 2016
On my way home from my vacation (after clocking nearly 1,400 mile round trip in Northern New England), I stopped by the New Hampshire Telephone Museum. This was found in their foreign section. I do not know the details of this NEC set, just wanted to post it for equal opportunity purposes.
Phone of the Day: Mitel Superset – Cannon Mountain Tramway
In New Hampshire we have mass transit. Not to get to work per se, but to enjoy natural beauties.
How you get to this tram, is to the Franconia Notch State Park, and the Cannon Mountain facility on Exit 32 B on I93. This facility I believe is still owned by the State of New Hampshire’s Department of Resources and Economic Development, known by it’s true acronym as DRED. DRED and several other state agencies (Department of Safety, the Liquor Commission and Department of Health and Human Services) had jumped on the Cisco bandwagon since the last decade. This facility has been unscathed as they probably use a Mitel SX system, I’m going to assume SX 50 given the low port density.
Phone of the Day: Zeb’s General Store – North Conway, NH
While I am on a (much needed) vacation, I found this general store in the heart of downtown North Conway, on NH route 16.
This general store is a quarter century old and 1991 was actually not a general store. The store itself is set to an old fashioned theme. Staff told me that they acquired antiques over the years to give it it’s classic appearance. Another store about 13 years ago not to far away in the rural area had changed owners and had modernized it, turned away locals and changed management. That’s a complete no-no in business. Don’t fix what’s broken.
Phone of the Day: Avaya Red 7400 Series Voice Terminal – Macy’s 34th Street
Yours truly was Live from New York yesterday. Put it this way, I saw more Avaya Red sets this time around than Ciscos. A couple Avaya Blues here and there.
I don’t know much of the history of the original Macy’s. Macy’s went under 2 decades ago, and was sequentially boughtout by Federated Department stores that went on a buying spree of regional department stores; then in 2005 made their big buyout of the May Department Store chain of brands. Between the Federated and May buyouts Macy’s was in almost every mid sized city than prior to. Most of the Macy’s around where I live used to be the brands of Jordan Marsh and Filene’s both using/used ROLM CBX switches.
What’s interesting is I’ve been to Jordan Marsh/Macy’s stores and they had resemblance to the flagship 34th Street store, while former Filenes still has resemblance of the pre-Macy’s buyout, but by default all first level stores has that signature all white look. More non telephony related subjects to this store I set foot for the first time on the above link.
Now from what I can tell Macy’s uses an Avaya Red PBX. This one appears to go back in the System 75 days. Now I didn’t see if this thing worked, because in Release 14 (branded as 4.x) of their enterprise PBX system, they depreciated the 7400s because the four-wire cards carried a lot of legacy code (from what I’ve read on the list serves, just dumping the 7400 DCP drivers gave Avaya some million lines of code removed.)
This particular model I forget, because AT&T made various models in the 10 year period, it may be a 7410 BIS set. Also, just because the 8400s released in the early 1990s, it was not a surprise to still have a part number (known as Comcodes or PECs) – I believe some models of the 7400 were still orderables in the first year of the Avaya spinoff (early 2000-late 2001.) If you were still on the 7400s at that point, Avaya did want you to go to the 6400 series (crap sets.)
More to come throughout the week.
