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POTD: Jacob Javits Center, Upper West Side, Manhattan

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The Jacob Javits Center, located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the urban outskirts of New York City, is where conferences are held. Much less space than say the Las Vegas Convention Center. It’s comparable size like Connecticut’s or the ones in Boston. Unlike Vegas, people are rude, uptight and do not take any selfies with showgirls. They will tell you explicitly to “not tag” them.

This was taken in October at the fall NAB Show, the convention for the National Association of Broadcasters. Unlike my visit in April, there was nothing to write home about.  In fact I spent more time outside the Javits Center

This Guest Services desk shows a Cisco 8800 series VOIP set. However, throughout my visit, my first time ever visiting the city beyond twelve hours – I saw sets that weren’t just Cisco in various businesses and organizations.

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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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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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POTD: Local Papa Gino’s

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Sadly, where I live, Avaya or Nortel isn’t “alive and well” unlike another site I follow. Nortel has disappeared in my state in public and private entities in lieu of Cisco years ago and Avaya Red has slowly disappeared too.

On a Christmas Eve tradition before I was born, my family would order pizza out at the local Papa Ginos, that is local chain with more than one hundred stores around the Greater Boston region, basically in four of the six New England states. It’s reputation is fresh quality pizza of with quality ingredients. Over the years Papa’s has had exclusive marketing deals with the local Boston teams such as the Red Sox and currently the Patriots.

The chain has used AT&T products going back to the days of Western Electric. This location I had frequented growing up had used one of those 10 line 1A2 wall mount Key telephones till a cutover around 2001 to a Partner ACS system. The only ComKey I’ve ever seen in production was another store nearby, and that had cutover to a Partner circa 2001 or 02.

I’ve been to mostly the New Hampshire stores, and D’Angelo the sub shop, is a sister brand to Papa Ginos. I don’t recall them using any phone systems, the one nearby me, that I took a few years back with an Avaya van uses POTS phones.

But today, just the next block away from that same D’Angelo, I noticed  this phone. Nope, its not a 9600 Avaya IP or 9500 DCP set. No, worse a Polycom VVX 310 set. (I haven’t been here for a while, some days I normally walk here because it’s not that far away from my home.)

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Ugliest Attendant Consoles, part five

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NOT MY OWN PHOTO. No URL to trace where I found this around 2010.

Of the worst attendant consoles to exist on this planet, the vintage Northern Telecom would win hands down.

Joe the UCX Guy had featured this console and used it during his days while he attended Purdue.

These switchboards or consoles were tied behind a central office switch such as DMS series or the carrier grade PBX – the SL100 (which I believe is different than the original SL1.)

In short, central office services are much less feature rich and thats why it has little functionality.

But why in the hell it’s so honking big is beyond me. It’s one of the many consoles of those days that required a 25 pair Amphenol cable to function.

Ugliest Operator Consoles, part three

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(I guess I stay up late looking at my own screengrabs)

The Japanese are no angels ether. I guess since digital PBX systems were derivatives of the design of mainframes, the consoles that used to manage mainframes, were not based on CRT in the beginning. Heck even the first PC – the Altair, was filled of complicated LEDs and switches.

This console most likely is used for the NEAX PBX system (the equivalent to the M1, the G3, or SX systems.)

In the late 90s, early 2000s, they too got their act together, and had a sleek console with the user in mind.

Again not my pictures, was taken from an eBay listing.