Naming Conventions: well known initials are referred first, the definitions are written phonetically. Long form initials are cross-referenced as the three letter abbreviations or TLAs if the TLA is the common identifier of the phrase. If a TLA is a secondary identifier, then the full phrase is listed first. 

Most often TLAs are written in all caps for the sake of modest use of the US English, and limit mixed-caps if possible. Also plural nouns should not have an apostrophe as that is used for possessive nouns, (for an example the entire models of Cisco 7900s should be written without an apostrophe; or “TLA’s” should not be written that way in quotes because it’s not a possessive noun.) 

 The terms are color coded: vintage telephony is colored brown, enterprise or digital telephony is colored blue, carrier is colored red, general telephony, trivial, culture is in green

MCI – Microwave Communications Incorporated. Founded in the late 1960s for radio service for truckers in the midwest, they explored the idea of using long distance using the same radio network. But they ran out of cash and a man named Bill McGowan came in and brought in the modern day startup culture of eff-the-rules, just do your job attitude. McGowan would become the CEO during the time when AT&T was investigated by the Justice Department for the abuse of their Long Lines unit, prohibiting MCI to interconnect into the Bell System network.

Unlike AT&T, where the customer would only have to press 1, and pay a significant fee, MCI customers had to dial into a local number, a four digit access code then dial the 10 digit number, which then totals, which meant you had to dial more than 20 digits, especially if you had a rotary dial, which would make your fingers do a lot of exercise (maybe that’s why we have “fat fingers”!)

MCI was well known for their advertising campaigns on television showing a split screen of one person calling on AT&T and the other using MCI with a fake elapsed time, and on the bottom of the screen showing  clock of how many minutes they were on with the rates at the time. MCI enjoyed this because it showed how cheap their rates were

MCI was like the Apple in the day, no rules, no Bell System Practices, risks were tolerated, errors were not a problem and who gave a crap about quality, at least you got service was their attitude. The company rewarded their own employees with stock options, and basically fostering a corporate culture you see at Google these days.

The CEO had a massive heart attack in 2 years after Divesture using most of his energy to fight off Bell. After Bill McGowan had a heart transplant of a twentysomething man, he would only survive another six years and died in 1992. Under new management, MCI became mismanaged and by the early 2000s, the company’s accounting became into question. In 2002, the CEO at the time, Bernie Ebbers was found guilty for financial fraud, which lead after other mismanaged startup-like companies with even more sinister agendas.

The leadership of MCI had harmed America’s moral compass, enabling consumers to consume further, the introduction of the MCI Mail encouraged people to communicate less over the phone or send out a thoughtful paper memo.

MCI was probably bankrupt off and on but when Bill McGowan came on board, he morally bankrupt the company till the company’s final day. The need of Long Distance has became ill relevant , but this started the culture of me, me, me; free, free, free; or cheap, cheap, cheap.

(The mother of this writer had used MCI back in the 1990s when we were not living with my grandmother. Any LD calls after like 2000 was done on my mother’s cell phone and kept the POTS from Verizon for local calling, as a personal sidenote.)

MMJ – Modified Modular Jack. Designed by the Digital Equipment Company, this plug is different than typical modular plugs like an RJ-11 or RJ-9. The clip is positioned on the far right of the plug to prevent any accidental connection to a telephone line and vice versa. This was common back during they heyday of “dumb terminals” and DEC’s own Video Terminal series. Similar MMJs are used to plug in adjuncts so the user doesn’t plug in a phone line with phantom power into a port that actually gives itself a phantom power for sidecars, etc.

McGowan, Bill – A man who ruined what the telephone service should be in the name of profits. McGowan, was not the founder of Microwave Communications Incorporated, but was the financier of the company in the early 1970s when the company ran out of cash building out microwave towers in the Midwest for the use of trucker radios. When he found out the old AT&T was not granted a monopoly per se, he felt he could fight off Ma Bell like he thought one could “fight city hall”. By the early 1980s they used a similar network for long distance. In order to use MCI service, one had to dial a local 7 digit number to get into MCI, an access code then another 10 digit number, whereas AT&T’s Long Lines was a simple 1 and a ten digit number, but a bit more expensive. This got McGowan’s company all angry and used this as ammo to have a public battle against AT&T in the late 1970s. In 1982, on the announcement of Divestiture, he got his wish. A drinker, with a lousy diet, two years after the 1984 breakup, he suffered a massive heart attack. Gets a new heart and squanders it from a twentysomething man and dies in 1992.

Figuratively, McGowan did not have a heart at all. He dissed AT&T’s way of doing things, ranging from the infamous use of the Bell System Practices, to stating publicly that MCI was not a “cradle to grave company” that would only take care of employees in the form of stock options and didn’t give a damn if he had 1,000 other little McGowans ether wanting his spot in the company or make more money than him. MCI branched into other data processing services such as MCI Mail, and became a modern day long haul ISP by the mid 1990s. In the MCI Mail experiment, he felt that all company communications should be done in email  He often questioned the authority and didn’t have much of a personal life. MCI during the long winded lawsuit against AT&T was relocated from the midwest to Washington, DC to be closer to the political action. He had a long distance relationship (in the most litteral sense) of a woman and got married in the mid 1980s.

Because of his reckless diet, and other unhealthy things, because he didn’t have proper work/personal life balance, he died in 1992. The company itself died about a decade later after new regime came in and pulled financial shenanigans. The proceeding CEO Bernie Ebbers was found guilty of financial mismanagement which lead the wave of dishonest corporate behavior which lead to the Sarbanes Oxley laws in the early 2000s worldwide.

In other media appearances Bill McGowan almost embraced the consumer culture that lead into the 1980s to present, of a complete consumption nature. Well in 2025 this world is a dumpster fire!  The Curator concludes this deplorable man had encouraged a society to be less social, less considerate, less empathic, and lead into a narcissistic culture that was defined by the American consumer with cheapass Long Distance service, while AT&T was NOT far from perfect, at least there was an attempt to care for their employees and employees working for Bell weren’t waiting for a selfish “stock option” so they could pull their company into bankruptcy.

May he rest in many pieces!

Media Gateway – a hardware defined box to convert “cyber” signals from VOIP to old world signals such as PRI, BRI, ISDN FXO or FXS (analog) trunks. Despite the move to SIP trunking, there’s still a need for failures, fallbacks and those “storms in the clouds”. DSPs need to be installed to make this possible.

Media Server – a server that runs on a personal computer architecture, as opposed to the traditional processor networks that would use closed hardware that resembled partially of a PC – on the inside. Media Servers in the 2000s moved from the switchroom to the data center running on almost off the shelf servers from HP and Dell and now is sold as software and the customer provides the servers – off the shelf. Media Servers have the same reliability as a PC, as good as the technology allows. Reasonable reliability from a processor based PBX has gone down a point, and now systems can only run at 99.99% of the time.

Merlin – A Key phone system originally made by AT&T later Lucent and later supported by Avaya. The system looked very futuristic with a fancy headset and the only hard keys was the dial pad. Everything else used membrane and other integrated circuits.  Regardless of its sex appeal, it had its dissents. People bitched about how the phone only had a one way, listen only speaker, and one would had to get a $300 “adjunct” to do two way, another was the TUI, and getting used to the membranes, and the destandardized wiring.  AT&T fixed some of these issues by issuing a series of BIS telephones or Built In Speaker with the change to hard buttons. These original systems were still in use well into the mid 2000s, now they are becoming more and more antiques. Succeeding systems after was the Merlin Legend and Merlin Magix – but those systems worked much differently than the Classic Merlin.

In the mid to late 1980s, AT&T marketed various versions of the Merlin system. Of those were Merlin 206, a Key system that ran 2 analog trunks and 6 “voice terminals”;  Merlin 410, a Key system that ran 4 trunks and 10 terminals; Merlin 820, a Key system that ran 8 trunks and/or 20 devices. This model had interchangeable slots to mix and match modules if one wanted more trunks or more phones.

See also,  Avaya Voicemail

Merlin 1030/1070 –  AT&T marked a larger Merlin phone system along with the 206, 410 and 820 – as the Merlin 1030 – A hybrid Key/PBX system that could run up to 30 lines with a mix and match setup of terminals and trunks. This model would be the foundation for the Merlin Legend and Magix. The largest of the original series was the Merlin 1070. A hybrid Key/PBX that could handle up to 70 lines with a mix and match setup of terminals and trunks. This model would be the foundation for the Merlin Legend and Magix.

See also,  AT&T Merlin, Avaya Voicemail

Merlin II –  Approximately in 1987,  AT&T introduced Merlin II – a newer version of the Key/ PBX system made by AT&T with more modular boards, enclosed and not bare circuit boards. This system supported only one large PBX telephone, called the 7406, where AT&T attempted to support the Digital Communications Protocol outside the AT&T System 75. The “Classic Merlin” phones known under the hood as ATL was supported, at this time it was conflicting on larger systems as a “hybrid” telephone. The Merlin Legend was the succeeding model just 3 years later.

See also,  Avaya Voicemail

 Merlin Legend/Merlin Magix –  This system began the 1990s was next generation of key/PBX hybrid system made by AT&T, later Lucent, supported by Avaya. The system had significant improvements, such as digital switching and support for ISDN and later T1 support and some interoperability with their enterprise systems.  Caller ID was still a luxury.

This system was much, much different than the original Merlin. The telephone sets changed from the futuristic ones to a more solid form factor, though it had similarities what later became of the 8400 and 8500 ISDN telephones (though introduced in 1994). But what was really lame was the keys for the line and menu keys clashed with the color of the set! If you had a black set, these line keys were black and if you had a misty cream set, these same line keys were misty cream! The 8400 and 8500 had grey colored keys.

This aesthetic design flaw that was fixed after Lucent took over. The signature Merlin ring tones were eliminated with the Partner-like ring tones among the many oddities of diverting from the original Merlin platform. The system went through 7 major versions from 1990 to 1999, when the Merlin Magix platform was released by that time. The Magix system would be discontinued in 2006, to transition users to the IP Office system, to favor Avaya focusing on a consistent platform for all their offerings.  Something AT&T should had done 20something years ago. The Merlin Legend and Magix was common at all Wal-Mart stores prior to the move to Cisco in the late 2000s, however I saw a functioning MLX phone at a Salem, N.H. Walmart in 2015.

See also,  Merlin, Merlin II, Avaya Voicemail

Meridian – In the simple sense, it was a broad encompassing brand by Nortel beginning in the late 1980s to the end of the 90s that was mostly associated with their Meridan 1 PBX, but was used for it’s consumer telephones, the key based telephone system, Norstar, their Centrex offering service, etc.

Meridian Norstar – a common branding issue from Nortel in the early days of the Norstar, leaving customers confused, what was a key Norstar and a PBX Meridian 1?

Meridian 1 – A platform that began in the late 1980s, replacing the legacy SL-1 hardware and software package, that dated from the original SL1 PBX. M1 added on future abilities such as ISDN, T1 and later IP Telephony. Different Meridian systems ran on different hardware for the spectrum of scaleability. Option 11 would be used as a Norstar replacement, maxing to near 200 ports (similar to an Avaya CMC), Option 21 was larger peaking at 2,000 ports, Option 41, 51 and 61 would be used for moderate enterprises ranging from a thousand to near 5,000 and the Option 81 was the largest, maxing to about 20,000 ports. The Meridian software was common throughout the hardware

Northern Telecom SL-1  – Unrelated to the SL100, the Stored Logic PBX was Nortel’s first digital PBX, or even the industry’s first starting in 1975. Instead of moving parts, calls were made and placed on digital circuit boards and the telephones at the desktop acted as terminals because all the action was taking place in the switch room. This eliminated excessive wiring and enabled the systems to do data switching (popular in the late 80s) This system was depreciated when Nortel would roll out Meridian 1 in the late 1980s. It was not a surprise to see SL-1s still running into the late 90s.

Meridian SL-100 – This system was a different from the Option hardware of the Meridians, from research this PBX ran on DMS hardware, was used as a high capacity PBX known as a “tandem PBX”. Typical uses were in the government, or an operation that needed complete five-nine (or even six-nine) reliability. Max ports was 100,000.

The concept was to have a private phone network with using standard landlines with whatever telephone system. If an extension had more than 5 digits and the customer had multiple remote sites (think of retail) the SL 100 tied those together, as long distance was a still a thing. AT&T’s corporate network after Divestiture and before the 1996 break ups was on an SL100, but the surface phones were their own most likely the System 75 PBX.  The IP replacement is the Communication Server 2100, where Avaya supported for a few years after.

This tandem-PBX can be replicated with soft switching and network over VOIP

Microsoft – A software company founded by Bill Gates, Paul Allen in April 1975 originally sold programming languages until the release of the first Intel based personal computer known as the Altair. In 1980, Microsoft became the lucky vendor to market an operating system for the IBM PC (model 5150) to market the following year called PC-DOS.

Microsoft would then target the PC industry with another version of a shoplifted DOS they bought for $50,000 from Seattle Computer Products, and ultimately killed the operating system of the time CP/M and killed the creator of CP/M, Gary Kildoll years later. Microsoft was part of Apple’s software development for the Macintosh and started to shoplift the Macintosh Operating System (known formally as MOS at the time) and marketed Windows in 1985, Windows sat on top of DOS and was more of a visual facade for most home users until the release of Windows XP in October 2001, which became a full fledged operating system.

Specific to telephony…Microsoft is a company that reacts instead of responds, and had a long time fetish of killing the hard telephone for years. In the 1990s, Microsoft co-wrote the Telephony Application Programming Interface or TAPI with the hopes vendors would try to make so called “softphones” but it didn’t catch on, and when it did Microsoft was behind the curve.Nortel and Mitel made USB home phones with desktop apps that resembles today’s so called “soft phones” these phones would tie to Windows 98 instances with TAPI. Selius’ CallManager exploited Microsoft’s functionality of TAPI and NetMeeting which was why the first five versions ran against a Windows NT Server.

Concurrently to the year 2000 Department of Justice ruling against Microsoft’s bundling of software, the PC market peaked.  While Microsoft would enter in it’s new expectations of a slower growth period for nearly 15 years, Microsoft would brute force into enterprise beginning with Windows Server, their Active Directory, then their flagship messaging and collaboration tools such as Exchange and SharePoint rather than relying on the sales of Windows ME or Windows XP and later for so-called double-digit growth Wall Street tropes of the time.

Another attempt in killing the office telephone occurred with the introduction of the Office Communications Server or OCS. OCS flopped, so they renamed it Lync, and no one liked how Microsoft in 2008 couldn’t understand how the Internet Protocol worked, just as Cisco barely understood telephony. At the same time Microsoft attempted to make a poor implementation of a simple phone system called Response Point, and when Cisco got finally got the telephony hang of things, Microsoft burned through an $8 billion acquisition to Skype from private equity in 2011. In May 2025, Skype will shut down as a service.

Microsoft broke the signature Skype functionality with their own proprietary though Peer to Peer the same way KaZaA used as an illegal file sharing platform, that every Millennial will deny they used, as one of the founders founded both. By 2012, this switched to centralized protocol and this new Application Programming Interface lead them to Teams which is a competitor to Zoom. By the time of the SARS-Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 Microsoft for the first time brute forced into the desktop Unified Communications market, where an Asterisk instance is more capable than a Microsoft phone system.

The deskphones in the OCS days were litteraly soft phones that required a Windows PC to plug in, they moved to Ethernet at some point, and current “Teams phones” is basically a Windows Phone in a desktop form factor, a stationary smartphone since Microsoft couldn’t seem to break that market.

In it’s 50 years Microsoft is known for shoplifting ideas, “having no taste” or “original ideas”  and also brute-forcing enterprises with “third rate products” as the late Steve Jobs told Bob Cringley in his documentary Triumph of the Nerds. And for the love of Christ trying to kill the telephone

Microwave – short wave radio signals used in a form of a straight line. Basically a cheap satellite dish without having to go into space. Was used for the old AT&T Long Lines, now typically used for networking PBX systems, cell networks. Microwaves was used to deliver network’s broadcast signals to its affiliates likely though hub and spoke connections. By 1984, with the breakup of the Bell System and the lower cost of broadcast TV through space, the microwave TV side went away almost immediately. Today, most “live shots” in local TV news are done in microwave signals, replaced slowly with satellite trucks as a dish can now fit into a mini SUV an provide native HDTV quality, something a microwave can’t really do.

Microwave Communications Incorporated  – MCI. The company that started to make a crack against the old Ma Bell. See MCI.

Mitel -Mitel was an acronym of Mike and Terry’s Electric Lawnmowers, founded by Mike Copeland and Terry Matthews. two former Northern techs in Canada wanted to sell the idea of electric lawn mowers. The problem? The orders of the electric lawn mowers never came. Then came the long Canadian winter. The fallback? Sell phone systems. In the 1970s and 80s, Mitel had competitive solutions in the enterprise. Systems that were in fashion were the SX series systems and the Superswitches. They made hideous operator consoles that looked like the Japanese made sets.

Despite a “super” star status between the Superswitches, the Superset, the Superconsole and it’s menu key for the Superset known as the Superkey; Mitel was sold to British Telecom, which almost killed the company. Terry Matthews would buy back the telecom and trademark part of the company by that point being owned by a venture capital firm. Since his 2001 acquisition, Mitel (known as Mitel Networks from then on or about a few years ago) has done pretty well for a struggling business. Some people may not know the name because Mitel sold phones and services to mid sized service providers which were able to rebrand the phones of the service providers offerings, some would call “whitebox” in todays standards.

They also market digital and IP telephones, and also embrace innovation and change  but separates them from the crowds by not alienating their existing customer base. In 2014, Mitel acquired Aastra (a spinoff of Nortel’s analog and consumer telephone unit from 2000) and have since swiftly merged both offerings under the Mitel brand name. In 2025, Mitel has acquired Unify (formerly Siemens and ROLM) in 2024,  Toshiba (early 20s), ShoreTel (4Q 2017), Aastra (in 2014)

NEC – NEC is a Japanese IT company. It’s lineage of American telephony roots goes to acquisition of Nitsuko which bought TIE from Sheldon, Connecticut in the late 1980s. TIE systems were installed in many places, including the municipal offices and schools of town I grew up. Popular systems made by NEC (or its acquired assets) are Onyx, DS2000, etc. Native systems made originally by NEC was the shoebox/KSU called Electra while they made the NEAX PBX.  NEC and residential was never a product.

In the 2000s, some customers used a Windows based softswitch known as Sphericall by Sphere Communications, this Midwestern company was bought by NEC in the late oughts and then was incorporated in their media server/gateway solution to protect their market in key and PBX systems.

NEAX – In order to fulfill the Equal Opportunity Policy (and being part Japanese), it’s probably best to define this PBX that’s made by NEC. Some NEAX systems are in the American markets. This is similar to Meridians or Auras with the multi ten thousand extensions. The most recent digital versions was NEAX 2000 and NEAX 2400. Sphere Communications made a software based PBX, and in fact NEC bought this company as well to build upon their software based PBX system.

Nelson, Lorraine – the woman behind the voicemail prompts most noticeably for Avaya Red’s AUDIX, as well as Partner and Merlin Messaging. In 2016, your humble curator had done a special profile on her. She also did marketing mimicking Audix, especially for a CNBC promo stating their then Larry Kudlow’s show would return after the 2008 Beijing Olympics ending with the infamous Please Wait.  (see Barbe, Jane and AUDIX and Avaya Voicemail)

Norstar – Northern Telecom’s key system for small business or enterprises. This was Nortel’s territory for most small shops in the U.S. Places like TGI Fridays, K-Mart, Staples, Kinkos, TJ Maxx are (or were) among the many users of the Norstar system.

The system was based on a modified version of the SL-1 PBX – the PBX of the rage of the 1970s and 80s by that point micro version of the large beast while both systems had shared common code. By this point, the ability to put that power in a small business (which was a big deal in the 80s) was unprecedented. At the same time their PBX systems, the Meridian became Meridian 1 and had much more feature. This also confused the branding and compatibility. Known as Norstar it was declared EOL by 2014 by Avaya, after the Nortel acquisition. The Norstar can run as an app running on hardware such as Avaya’s IP Office. Many places still use Norstars regardless of vendor support.

The Norstar came in 3 types, a non expandable, analog only 3×8 (supporting 3 lines and 8 extensions), a Modular Integrated Communications System or MICS (pronounced as an acronym) that supported up to 24 extensions and over 12 trunks, ether or could be interchangeable, but could not be expanded. That was solved with CICS (again an acronym) for Compact Integrated Communications System that supported multiple expansion units that went to a maximum of 250 plus ports. (extensions, lines or trunks.) The IP equivalent was the Business Communications Manager or BCM. BCM 50 was like the 3×8, BCM 200 was like the MICS and the BCM 400 was similar to CICS. Both were heavy duty PCs, closed off from the end user to provide mission critical telephony services, especially with the ability to do VOIP.

Norstar Meridian – a common branding issue from Nortel in the early days of the Norstar, leaving customers confused and giving VOIP integrators ammo to confuse customers in pushing potentially inferior services while not caring to know the actual facts in the 2010s.

Northern Electric – See Nortel (branding post AT&T’s 1955 Divestiture and before 1975)

Northern Telecom – See Nortel (branding between 1975 to 1998)

Nortel – Also known as Northern Telecom, Northern Electric and Nortel Networks. The company began after the U.S. Justice Department ordered AT&T to get out of the Canadian markets. Northern Electric was

a direct descendant of Ma Bell, though the rebels came out very quickly, their telephones looked like Western Electric, but with a artsy/progressive look. The company made another progressive move by renaming themselves in 1976 as Northern Telecom.  The company allegedly made the first digital PBX, the SL-1, they also owned the industry making the first digital central office switches, the DMS series. The company was renamed to Nortel in the mid 90s and became Nortel Networks after buying Bay Networks for a huge price. The company fell apart after the 2000 stock market crash of the dot-com bubble. The company started to pull strings such as financial shell games and declared inaccuracies of their accounting by the mid 2000s. They declared bankruptcy in late 2008, while they have finished their Going out of Business sale of their properties as of 2014. Their phone system division (including the Norstar and Meridian systems) was sold to Avaya and other properties were ether sold (such as patents) to companies like Apple while other units (such as carrier systems) were sold to Genband.

Network – a part in an old telephone where different wires throughout the phone would interconnect. Essentially this was an early form of a Central Processing Unit for the telephone.

Numbering Conventions – A telephone number is not an Internet address like how kids think of it today with Signal, Whatsapp or in general. It is still broken up by 3 blocks of numbers:

Example: 1 – (603) 100-9999

1 acts as the Country code, (603) acts as the area code or NPA, 100 serves the Central office code (in this example 100 is not used since it’s not in range) and 9999 is the subscriber’s number.

The style shown above is the traditional style, other ways to “share digits” to socially network, or place an ad in a newspaper or the Yellow Pages or pick up your future lover.

617/000-1000

In the age of the Internet in the name of style, using dots was another example

1.212.111.0000

Today given the abundance of smartphones and people communicating natively through text or emails, people just are so lazy to throw 11-digits a pile of numerical blur. It doesn’t help when technical people pander to the ITU standard and force it upon people. Both are disastrous mess

17745551212

Are you lazy?

NT – Northern Telecom See Nortel, a registered trademark forcing Microsoft to not refer to it’s enterprise operating system as such by the time Windows XP came to market.

Octo – A mark that has two vertical and two horizontal lines making something of 9 open boxes. Sometimes called a hash outside the States.

Octotherp – When AT&T’s board of directors were focusing on a name of a new key for the advent of Touch Tone dialing; they were siding on the name of “Octo”, then after some debates but the name had changed one of the members had burped after a lunch.  However, when Northern decided to verify the name, they went to some hack at the University of Waterloo and felt it was a mispelling because they felt it logically meant Octothrope, and that the thrope made more sense to the context of that key.

As a result, if goes Nortel, so goes the rest of the industry, and that’s how Octothrope became the standardized name. See Pound key

Octothrope – The interpretation from Canada of Octotherp, and is mostly known to the industry from the key to the right of the 0 of a Touch Tone set. See Pound key

Octel – One of the innovators of the modern voicemail. Octel developed one of the first major commercial voice mail systems that would be come tried and true technology. Others were yea-close, but wasn’t marketable. The company was later bought by Lucent and was spun off to Avaya, which stopped innovating the product and now runs essentially as an app in their proprietary Modular Messaging system for their PBXes. More can be seen on this post on voicemail.

oIP – over Internet Protocol.  The idea of type of packet/service that is getting transmitted over the open Internet. Just add a letter before “oIP”. Obviously VOIP is one example, VOIP can also be Video over IP. A lot of times, phrases are just known as IP instead like “IP Surveillance” The danger is that if everything at one point does go oIP, the vulernabilities of hacks can be significantly higher. While IOT is used for consumers, the idea of the Internet of Things for enterprises have existed for almost a decade as ether “IP [phrase]” or  [x]oIP.

See AoIP  or IOT

Oryx/Pecos – The proprietary operating system for the AT&T (later Lucent and later Avaya Red) systems. The OS was developed in the late 70s from scratch as a fully digital telephone solution. Names of systems that used it included the System 75, some versions of System 85. Definity Generics 1, 2 and 3, and it ran on CPUs including the 8086, the 80286 and the Motorola RISC chips. The first PBX that used the OS was the System 75 released around 1984, the last system was the Communication Manager Release 3.0 (G3r v13) circa 2003 as Avaya moved to a software with a Linux backend.

The Oryx/Pecos was rumored for years that it was based off Unix or Unix-like. The system never was or is based of UNIX, despite AT&Ts fingerprints at the creation of that operating system. The mission of Oryx/Pecos was to design the system for real time telephony and nothing else. No 3rd party integration, no user access to the operating system directly, etc. Just to process, make and receive telephone (and data) calls.

The release of this operating system came with the System 75 and served as AT&T’s first digital PBX offerings, behind Nortel and ROLM (both were at the party in the mid to late 70s). Oryx acted as the kernel (hardware: switches talking to circuit boards, talking to phones) and Pecos ran the processes (software: phones contacting to the outside world through the switch or calling your coworker.) According to previous accounts, the name was derived at the street locations at the two development plants in Colorado and New Jersey. Most of all the enterprise systems were developed in Westminster (just out of Denver, Colorado.) Now its at some indiscrete location in India.

The system was completely closed to any third party developers to ensure the system could be as reliable as possible. The PBX can heal itself, and if you have special logins you can mess up the system. UNIX based systems were used to interoperate for voice mail, call routing, ACD like setups. Documentation is limited, in fact the only known geekey of all geeky technical discussion was in an 1985 Bell Labs Technical Journal around the time of launch. The Definity series of PBX systems (and systems using Oryx/Pecos) made prior to 2003 and after 1984 is End of Life, so any information on this system shouldn’t be a security threat. Just Sayin’. The Museum’s long term goal is to shed light on this once great PBX solution that Avaya should be proud of (but with the marketing bias) forces them to think only forward.

See Avaya, Avaya Red, Definity, DCP, Digital Communications Protocol

P2P – 1. Point to Point, the hard wired equivalent to Peer to Peer. 2. Peer to Peer, a device that talks to another device, today over an Internet without any assistance of a gateway or media server.

PPP – Point to Point Protocol.

PBX – Private Branch Exchange. Traditionally speaking a PBX isn’t just a system that resides on site. Its a system to handle more phones and use less trunks to handle better efficiency of telephony. PBX systems are designed to handle many types of lines, but it typically skews a single direction. If you’re a call center to a large airline answering customer’s booking, and you have sixty agents but want customers to not get busy signal’s; you typically install a PBX with about a hundred users, and design it to support double or triple the trunking.

Most uses of PBX systems are to handle hundreds to thousands of users enabling to call their peers in the same building without jamming up a line from the telephone company and pay a high cost for an inter cubicle call

The intent of owning a PBX is to better handle costs for telephone service, not to have an in house phone system for intercom calls. Traditional PBX systems since the 1970s and 90s have intelligence such as detecting a telephone number and routing it to a trunk group, so if a number is in the same area code, but technically long distance, the company won’t get charged a fortune if it was not set up in a PBX fashion.

Original PBX systems were switchboards that were in a business or organization, since any other type of switchboard resided at the telephone company. They evolved to central office types using crossbars or Step by Step switches. Modern electronic ones appeared in the 1970s.  Many can handle multiple lines per station, handle multimedia, link separate PBXs and run as one large voice network and provide call center services. Just like any other technology, a PBX has to fit their needs, and many vendors provide different types for different people.  The terminology has been blurred since smaller Key Telephone Systems have emulation modes to run as a PBX, and many VOIP punks think a phone system is in house – so therefore its a PBX, even when an Asterisk system can’t handle 10 users on one server!

See a special  page on PBX systems for more

POP – Point of Presence, the primary entry point from a customer to the Central Office.

PRI – Primary Rate Interface is a telecommunications interface standard used on an ISDN for carrying multiple voice and data transmissions between the network and a user. In the US it is based on the T1 line, carrying 23 digital channels (voice or data) and 1 signaling channel. Along with SIP and POTS, it’s a primary method to trunk between a PBX and the Central Office.

Party lines – back in the day before bridged appearances or call appearances or even a dedicated line, customers, i.e. neighborhoods would share a single line among the neighbors. The phone company would have “distinctive ringing” so the member of the respective household would know the call was for them. The disadvantage to party lines was the lines were hot, so if you would spread gossip someone could overhear even when customers were told to not eavesdrop on the other callers. Party lines were cheaper than having a dedicated line for the obvious reasons of using less copper and less of a burden for the switchboard operator.

Partner – A communications system produced by AT&T, later Lucent and later Avaya. Announced on September 13th, 1990 the system succeeded both the Merlin and the short lived Spirit system (even though that lasted well into 2000.) The system went End of Sale nearly 2 decades later, citing the lack of parts by the supply chain and Avaya’s push to VOIP to the mum and pop stores. Partner systems were well deployed in many chains and the sets still run to this day.

The advent of the Partner began a break in backwards compatibility. After realizing many enterprise customers were buying Merlin phones in lieu of higher priced 7400 sets, instead of purchasing a Merlin system then upgrading to a System 25 or a System 25 shop would get an small System 75, AT&T closed this loophole and isolated the boundaries between the large and small systems. This also included the Merlin Legend and Magix systems.

The protocol that made the phones talk to the switch was entitled Enhanced Tip & Ring. The ETR was referenced in the Merlin Legend and Magix systems for the only backwards compatibility. Ironically all Partner phones, the Multi Line System or MLS, the so-called “euro” phones had a similar 7317H model number, related to the Merlin phones. All Partner phones shared this singular model number from research.

Plantronics – Plantronics was founded in the the late 1960s to create modern headsets that would replace the outdated 19th Century metal headsets. Plantronics headsets could have ear pieces to inside the ear, dual ear pieces, soft headsets using “voice tubes” and became even AT&T’s point of choice for headsets and even resold them within the Bell System. These modern headsets were used from air traffic controls to even the intercom system for the Cable News Network’s control room. Plantronics headsets were designed to work on any system that used the “phone jacks”, those 1/4″ers.

Their signature headsets were on the market for decades, Supra, the headphone styled headset, Encore the over the ear, Plantronics also made consumer grade headsets as well.  There was noise canceling and the infamous clear straw like known as the “voice tube” The company did move with the times to Bluetooth to mobile devices, with the 2.5mm plugs, etc. Plantronics by the teens also got hip with the kids as smart kids refer to tech brands by the company’s publicly traded ticker symbols such as PLT as they traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Plantronics by 2019 was making many USB Type C headset for computers and non telephony devices, as a result became the lucky bidder to buy Polycom by this point. After the merger the parent company remained as Plantronics, but both the headset and telset business became Poly with a new “propeller” logo. The company in turn was sold to HP (the printer and PC business) by 2024 still under that brand.

Point to Point – a standard for hard wiring devices such as legacy modems, phone systems, trunks, etc from one place to another. It is the hardwired equivalent to Peer to Peer. PTP or P2P is also how dialup networks operate.

Point of Presence see POP

Poly – The current brand that was once formerly Polycom and Plantronics. (see the respected references.)  The merger occurred in the late 2010s and is owned by HP (the printer/PC company ironically.) The merger resulted in keeping Plantronics as the holding company, with the public facing brand as Poly with new logo. The website moved the dot-com in Polycom.com in between their words (poly.com).

Polycom had about over a generation disrupting conference calling and later became the defacto standard of Voice over IP equipment outside of Cisco and Mitel and Plantronics had more than 50 years making headsets that replaced the metallic headsets the 1/2 century prior to. Both companies were the more healthier of interconnect in a contracting market.

Polycom – Polycom is best known for the conference room telephones with the triangulation shaped set sometimes called “starfishes”. Polycoms were popular in remote conferencing for “full duplex” communication. Prior to Polycom, vendors like Nortel and AT&T had some conferencing abilities (like AT&T’s Spokesman) but it could only work with a handful of people, larger rooms wouldn’t work; and listening was horrible. Papers shuffling or people talking over each other would take several seconds for the far end to cutting each person off (or just the person themselves.) Per to FCC regulations, only half duplex communications can be used on a PSTN.

If you wondered why your grandparents always shouted on the phone, was the way analog telephones could only carry one voice at a time, unless you wanted to be cut-off. By the way, most landlines prior to the mid 1990s was still analog in nature at the last mile, despite ESS being used, that was used at the core of the central office as the “brain”. Your neighborhood most likely was still on electromechanical.

Whether it was your POTS or PBX system, Polycom found the hack to make full duplex work by developing the SoundStation –  providing high end acoustics with external power provided on the user end and plug-in ability to use external sound systems in larger setups, and external microphones for large 20 person plus conference rooms. Along with algorithms to handle the sounds in the SoundStation’s range, this became an overnight success, by the mid 1990s, most Fortune 500 conference rooms would have these equipped. Polycom made SoundStations for proprietary protocols for Avaya (dating the tail end of AT&T IS, Nortel, Cisco) and made a desktop version called the SoundPoint. In the late 1990s, they acquired Picturetel, that did video/voice conferencing. By the early 2000s, Polycom went into VOIP and sold SoundPoint IP, generic SIP based IP sets, that act as IP Centrex terminals.

Polycom was primed for a sale, trading on the NASDAQ under PLCM for a number of years, it was highly rumored to merge with Mitel, but plans got aborted by late 2017, not too long after they merged with Plantronics. The merger created a new unified brand called “Poly” with a new “propeller” logo, but Plantronics was the holding company until its sale to HP (the printer and PC company) in 2024. One of the unique mergers and acquisitions where a brands were unified while the parent company would be a former brand.

Pound – slang for the hash, octotherp or octothrop key

“R” Handset – the proprietary style of  the handsets used by AT&T for the 7400 and Merlin telephones made from 1983 to the late 1990s (for refurbished sets)

Rotary dial – the precursor to Touch Tone dialing, featuring a dial that would allow a user to make a telephone call automatically by rotor controlled wheel (known as a dial). The user pick up the set and take their pointer finger (or an equivalent there of) and move the wheel to the right, by doing this it would make clicking noises to indicate to the remote end what number s/he was dialing. If one dialed 1, it would click one way, dial 2, would make another type of click. Western Electric made this line called the 500 series from the early 1950s to the end of the 1980s.

It was allegedly invented by an undertaker so his wife wouldn’t be awake ringing to an operator.

ROLM (or Rolm) – A company founded in the late 1960s originally to make computers specific to military standards. They later would go into the phone system business. Taking the reliability of their military grade computer systems, they built and sold a CBX or a Computerized Branch Exchange. Their CBX was their answer to a “solid state” fully electronic PBX system. By the mid 80s ROLM was at the top, until Big Blue came in. IBM acquired ROLM in 1984 and quickly vanished in the marketplace. The #1 fight of PBX market share quickly was assumed to AT&T and Nortel. IBM did not like their laid back, creative (read: innovative) style. As the IBM PC was starting to eat their own due to clones disrupting their business, one of the first things IBM did was to kill ROLM’s PC telephone Basically an office phone with a 10″ CRT display with a full keyboard and floppy drive. They feared their PC would eat away from IBM’s market. Layoffs would occur near the end of the decade and thanks to the computer guys running the show, they missed out on ISDN and Signaling System 7 and when they did get to it it was ridden with bugs.

ROLM should also be credited for the innovation of modern day voicemail. The telephone sets came with integrated voice messaging such as message waiting lamps and the designation strips showed the user how to navigate the voice mail prompts out of the shrink wrap so to speak.

Regardless IBM would sell the assets to Siemens, whom of which would continue technical support. Many local Sears Roebuck stores, NASA offices, and some of May Department stores (now owned by Macy’s Federated company) had these ROLM PBX system till closure. These systems are literally bullet proof and a major thunder storm or a severe surge would likely kill a ROLM PBX. I do not know a lot of ROLM systems, so there are some resources out there to learn more.

SEP – In all Cisco IPT setups, these initials acts as the identifier for Cisco IP Phones known as the Selsius Ethernet Phone. Selsius was a company that made basic office telephones connected to IP networks. (They made similar sets like the one here, but the difference was it was tied to an IP network.) Cisco acquired this company in 1998. Selsius also wrote the Skinny Call Control Protocol (IP Port 2000) and at least the first two versions of a software PBX known as CallManager, the idea of a PBX running on a Windows NT server. Despite the acquisition 18 years ago, the initials lurk around a generation later just like how you see NeXTSTEP identifiers probably in OS X El Capitan.

Session Initiation Protocol – known by its acronyms as SIP. SIP and Skype are similar, the former being open and lightweight and the latter being closed and bloated.

SIP is pretty old in age wise, as it was developed in 1996. It became a standard as RFC 4543 in 1999. SIP’s basic premise is being an application over the Internet Protocol like the Web.

It is one of the popular variants of VOIP. SIP basically acts like an instant message client – literally that also included the ability to use voice and video. It basically became an instant standard to make inexpensive VOIP telephones and basically SIP phones is the modern version of the 2500 tip and ring set, on IP that is. Making a telephone call on SIP is much like going on the Web and getting a stock quote or reading up on the latest gossip. Similar to the Web, SIP requests, pulls and spits out information. SIP also uses servers similar to a Web server to place calls to send messages like an IM or fax or even video. It’s a deskphone that functions like a cell phone.

SIP has evolved quite remarkably and now has gone so far to displace traditional digital trunking. It has been used for also push to talk radio services like what Cingular offered in the mid oos.

SIP is an application, so basically if the network administrators properly give open ports for 5060 and 5061 (the secure port) and make sure all routing is going to the right places, the real responsibility is to make sure the SIP server is well configured on the server side (accessing it via GUI or TUI) and the system being locked down and designed with proper capacity to prevent jitter (such as giving the server as much RAM as possible and limit calls to what the server can handle.)

By 2015, most unified communications  or UC)providers and manufacturers of hardware have since settled on SIP. In short you can have an Avaya phone running on an Asterisk and a Mitel SIP set running on a Cisco UCM or have any of those sets running as a modern Centrex phone by a SIP trunk provider (basically a PBX in the cloud.) See more by clicking here

The “pure” or “Open SIP” acts like a basic landline, if that’s what you want. If you want it to work like an office phone, it needs extra code and extra scripting to mimic. However SIP enables the ability to reverse engineer because the codes SIP spits out in it’s logs, and if you know what it queries, you could reverse engineer it’s deployment files to work with Asterisk or other SIP systems. Since no one wants effort, they result in settling with Poly, Grandstream or Yealink

Smartphone – A smartphone is a computer running very lightweight versions of computer operating systems designed to do tasks on a small device. The BlackBerry was one of the first commercially successful smartphones for the good part of the first decade of the 21st Century. The BlackBerry would then be eclipsed by Apples iPhone (literally running Mac OS X as a modified version) and Google’s software based Android operating system.

SoundPoint – the longtime brand of desktop conference devices by Polycom (see Poly.) The brand included originally landline phone, the 220, and later IP phones.

SoundStations –  the three sided “starfish” or “propeller” looking phones made by Polycom (see Poly) in the early 1990s, the later models had a more modern plastic design, wireless capabilities. Models had the ability to have expansion mics, the ability to use a stereo amplfier in larger environments, and Polycom made SoundStations that were compatible and acted native for the proprietary PBX systems. These were and are not cheap, but they are still popular.

Starfish set – Most likely referring to a Polycom telephone, known for years by it’s shape of a starfish.

Station – Another word for a Telephone that connects to a network, whether is a phone service from your local carrier, or a PBX, or something along those lines. It’s the lowest level device in the telephony network.

Step By Step – a form of an electromechanical switching system. It was used mostly from the 1960s to the early 1990s (smaller markets.) By that time most switches were replaced with electronic and digital switching.  Also known as SXS. You can see this class of switch in action by clicking here See Crossbar, as that was also used during that time period.

Switchboards – One of the most oldest terms that is still widely used to this day. Switchboards back in the beginning acted as both the carrier switch and the operator console. This technology would not go away until the telephone’s 100th birthday, in some cases it was still used by AT&T for international Long Lines up to the early 1990s. Each customer would have a dedicated line hardwired to the switchboard. To get the operators attention, one would hand crank their set (mostly mounted on a wall) to then create an electrical signal. Early boards had a metal thingy pop out like it was blown out, later sets had actual lamps. The operator would take one pair of cable to that customer and the customer would asked to be patched to another customer. She would then take the other pair of cable, then hand crank or use a knob to create the ring (if it was a party line, “distinctive rings” would require a different pattern. Remember, this was human controlled so the operator had to have some perfection to the rings.

Long distance telephone service was around in those days, but would take a long time to reach to other switchboard operators. It was not abnormal for a customer to request to talk to another customer on the other side of the country at a said time so the operators start to prepare routing the call to be ready by then.

As electronic switching became the norm, and the move to automated dialing with electromechanical switching, the need for an operator to be on site 24x7x365 was not necessary. Such use has been well featured in the 1970s show aired on CBS called The Waltons. I learned a lot about this when visiting to the NH Telephone Museum in 2015.

Telephone – also known as a phone, smartphone, deskphone, “voice terminal” a handset outside of the US or I am old fashioned I shorten “telephone set” as a “telset”

Telephone Pole – In the United States, they are wooden poles that are about 100 feet apart from each other. The poles are owned and maintained  by the telephone company, hence the emphasis on name. Any damage must be reported to the telephone company and it is their responsibility. As the mainstream media in the name of political correctness wants you to know its a “utility pole”;  despite a pole carrying electrical, cable and telephone lines, media outlets should refrain from this inaccurate word and should be damned if they say “utility pole.” (See Utility Pole, Insulators)

Tip and Ring – this the type of conductors used for telephony. In other parts of the world its just A and B.  This goes back to the days when the telephone company required an operator to place the calls. The tip was for grounding, and ring was what provided a direct current. Back in the day, for reliability, it would peak at 130 volts to ensure the call would to be clear.  Wiring was important for 500 sets for party line service and for the set to ring properly. The phrase is mostly outdated.

Time Division Multiplex – TDM. Also known as Digital Telephony. TDM transports voice, video and data into bits of code and transports it to a large multimedia network. Think of a PBX for an example as a Grand Central Terminal and imagine that the PBX is coordinating the traffic between the various subways of voice, a commuter rail of data and buses of voice. The information is almost entirely data, and unlike analog systems where things are encoded by actual electrical waves, it is being encoded through various processors and signaling chips. If you make a call on a PBX, what really is happening is your voice turns into bits of data turned back into what appears to be “voice”. The PBX acts as the middlemen to ensure the data is a a set speed limit of 64 kilobits a second.  TDM is not IP specifically, though many multimedia applications are based on TDM. TDM was flawed in the beginning but has become a “tried and true” technology, part of it because of its reliability, and lot in due to the hardware dependence with having reliability. TDM also brought things like the Caller ID (that spits out data like whose calling), E-911 (similar to the former), Digital Subscriber Lines, to ISDN and lastly the Internet Protocol.

Trunk – a type of telephone line used to connect a telephone system to a central office, or from one central office to another. Think of the trunk being the freight train, and the “station” being a passenger train. This type of line is not carried over to the user, a switch at the telephone company or a PBX in an office would then be the “connecting stop” so to speak.

Undertaker – A man who used to burry bodies invented the rotary dial to prevent the wife to know he was making calls late in the night.

UniSTIM – an IP protocol developed by Nortel (ahem, Avaya) to internetwork their IP telephones. The protocol has been reversed engineered and such phones can be used on systems like the Asterisk. Newer sets like the 1100 and the 1200 can run via SIP, from what I know.

Utility Pole  – This is an inaccurate phrase used by the mainstream media in the name of political correctness. Despite a pole carrying electrical, cable and telephone lines, the poles are owned and maintained  by the telephone company. Any damage must be reported to the telephone company and it is their responsibility. Any media outlet should refrain from this inaccurate word refer it to what it is a “telephone pole”

Unify – a brand following a spinoff of Siemen’s communications business. Most of Siemen’s American growth was the acquisition of ROLM in 1991 from IBM, 7 years following a failed acquisition because IBM was still stuck in the stubborn 1950s clashing with the Boomer lifestyle. While ROLM never really recovered, their remaining installed base seen in the ROLM entry was still loyal. The spin-off occurred in the mid 2010s with a Mitel acquisition by 2024

VOIP – Voice over Internet Protocol. Also known by the mix caps as VoIP. Basically it’s to carry any type of voice conversation over the standardized TCP/IP network that was used for virtually all data uses.

VOIP is a very broad terminology that means a lot to many people. VOIP can be as simple as a “Digital Voice” line by your cable phone company that uses your cable modem but processes the calls as VOIP at the “headend” while other providers give you other boxes to make calls on an analog telephone over an IP connection. It is also used as a commercial two way radio using IP instead of digital radio signals and it can also be used as an intercom or even some fast food joints to take customers orders at a drive thru to a central contact center then presses some buttons heard by the customer back to the joint to make the order. (Saw that on a History Channel Modern Marvels episode.)

VOIP had a bad reputation in the beginning given how data people had no clue or even interest in voice. Traditionally data transfers on the Internet didn’t matter what order it went, but when real time communications became a standard it wasn’t friendly. When I’d say “I pahked the caahh in the garahge” the other person on the other line with bad voice quality may have heard me say “garrahhge the cahh… in the…. I pahked.” Latency to this day is a problem and often it occurs in Skype calls when someone has too many apps running or is doing too many things at once on a wireless connection. VOIP in itself is no different than TDM, where the minimum voice traffic peaks at 64 kilobits a second – the problem is on how the “packets” are being transmitted.

Net Neutrality gives all online businesses, large and small, a chance to reach customers and succeed. It also protects important free speech rights online by prohibiting Internet providers from slowing or blocking sites or messages they don’t agree with.

Voicemail or Voice mail – is a specialized computer or service that stores voice messages in a computerized audio format designed to playback at a later time. The history is not well appreciated. Voicemail is often compared to as a business answering machine, but that’s not true. Voicemail is often been used by people dialing into the system to leave messages, often longer form that at one point people would actually talk instead of writing memos or emails. Voice mail actually predates to the early 1900s going back to records. Yes LPs, for people to talk and send messages to. The inventor of the 8080 computer, the Altair had recorded thoughts on a cassette recorder and mailed it to his friend to cut down on LD costs.

Some have said that voicemail is dead, due to entitled Millennials refusing to use their dated office phones, so many even state in their greeting that they don’t check it; and when Coke Cola Company announced in 2015 to dump voicemail for their employees (translation: a legacy Nortel shop) this brought a media sensation of a company-really-trying-to-cut-costs shtick.

Voice Terminal – “A pretentious AT&T term for a Telephone” says Harry Newton from Harry Newton’s Telecom Dictionary. ATT would counter and say “A voice terminal can do a lot more than a regular telephone”, quoting loosely on an AT&T Merlin documentation. I say AT&T wasn’t crazy or strange to use that term, only that they (and their predecessors got lost into describing this.) A terminal is a device that requires communication from a central system. A computer terminal can be plugged in on one jack and be in a Cisco console session, plug it into another jack and be on a Linux TTY session. This same logic can be applied to telephones.

See Telephone

A visual representation on how “voice terminals” could be set up can be viewed here.

See Avaya Red, Avaya, Definity, Communication Manager, DCP, ATL, AT&T Merlin

Wireless – A type of cordless communication that requires a radio network (such as a “main base” and “repeaters” to extend the signal.) This is used indefiently for cell phone service and “cordless” telephones in enterprise setups. Cordless uses a single radio signal to make or receive calls (P2P or 1 to 1).

Women –  While Big Blue or IBM was treating women like garbage and like used furniture, AT&T employed many as they had attention to detail, and fine motor skills. AT&T wanted to show their progress going as far back as the 1960s in many of their Western Electric films.