Here is a special something I have teased on the social media platforms. I found this ol relic on eBay in late July. Was this a corporate phone to Big Blue? Does it work? Can it work in dumb mode?
I’ll share video to followers especially ones on Pateron. That video is in the process of getting cut up on my Avid workspace, should have a final cut soon!
This is not confused to another 7970 that was in production prior to. As of 2025, the aging 79x0s do not age well and the set is physically broken.
This Cisco 7970 is different than one that I’ve shared previously. A close dear friend of mine had given this to me a while back. I don’t remember which to be quite honest the last four years has been a blur and at the same time vaporized.
The phone was given to me because her day job is a job trainer for people with developmental delays. I used to work for her and the company as well*.
The client had found this Cisco 7970 at a yard sale and thoguht to look like everyone else, he could literally Bring Your Own Device to the company. But as you know they can’t hook up any Cisco set that they don’t own and in order to hook it up, a license on their end would be required.
As a result the attraction was lost, and the set was given to me for the Museum.
This set is very old, firmware is just over 15 years old to the time of recording and it’s very likely this could’ve been a corporate phone likely at a New England Cisco branch office. I cannot confirm.
*To show how long ago, they were using a Cisco CallManager 3.1 that was still running off Windows 2000 Server edition. In the late 2000s, Windows 2000 was the default operating system in many enterprises. Windows XP SP2 was only 3 years old. SP1 was End of Life and the original XP was already EOL’d. (I tend to obsess on the technicality of the lifecycle of Windows XP, arguementively the last best Windows NT grade operating system from Microsoft.
Obviously their systems have been refreshed and I have been told they are using OS X Yosemite at the desk. (When I was there I was using a pre Compaq era HP workstation with Windows 2000 Workstation. Same with the Cisco CallManager.
Hello Direct is a Nashua based reseller of mostly headsets and POTS accessories. Early on, they competed with Polycom with headsets. In fact I do have one that is in my pile of junk. Their own products had 3.5mm plugs and jacks, while Plantronics had their RJ-9 connections.
Acquired in 2016, this analog conferencing set for handsfree, full-duplex calling that predates the Polycom by a decade, was made by Nortel and was marketed in the late 1980s.
Today’s Phone of the Day is a retake of the CallMaster IV terminal for the use of Avaya enterprise grade PBX systems. These are not telephones, and they are not attendant consoles and while there is an apparent resembelence of the Call Director, these sets would not be used for “answering centers” since Voice mail had taken many of those roles anyways.
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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Update: 02-23-15 at 9:20 pm We’ve gots some problems… Presently tried to follow all the instructions but the board appears to be booting up but the ASA and even TUTTY (Putty + AT&T Terminal) clients are stuck in the BSOD. According to historic documentation, the LEDs are working as they should after boot, so maybe something failed at the connector side. I sure hope I didn’t “break” it…
So I got another surprise gift from Jason that was sent on President’s Day. I just received it a couple hours ago. This Definity AUDIX board is an integrated voice mail system for the Definity platform. These are no longer available and were designed in small environments. It was on the market for most of the 90s and probably up to 2001. The replacement would be an external PC or now a Modular Messaging running on a server class PC or an Aura virtual appliance. The beauty of this tiny board is it gave customers in small sites the power of the bigger AUDIX system. And hopefully I can hear the AUDIX lady once I get into the thing!
So much for that cutover back to the Cisco huh?
This sudden surprise came to me from Jason, the same one that gave me his old G3 PBX. This time it was a Christmas present for me. I really appreciate it. I got less than a 36 hour notice a package would come via UPS to my doorstep, to find out he had an extra Mitel system.
Without going into details, the system arrived Wednesday, the 2nd. I got a completely full fledged system capable of voice mail, auto attendant, analog trunking and what seems to be a dozen IP phones.
I decommissioned a Nortel POE switch I had for over a year to get a Cisco POE switch (since you know its best to have “Cisco all the way” – especially when I’ve made an aggressive move to use VLANs.) Simply put, to reduce manual labor of programming VLANs on Cisco Phones, it’s best to use a Catalyst Express 520 and enable CDP at the Cisco router so the PC traffic can talk to the other 12 ports and the VOIP talk to the other 12 ports. Makes life a lot easier especially when I’m introducing internet hosting to the network (next year’s project.)
The package came on the day that it happened to rain for the first time in years (sarcasm implied.) The UPS folks were too lazy to put the system in the proper baggy, and the package was damp, and the control unit (on the bottom) was about to break open. Factor the raw cold air, I left it downstairs for a few hours.
Using an old laptop bag for packaging material is pretty genius! (And you can’t have too many laptop bags!) On the bottom is the rack ears, which I may actually bring the Mitel over to the server barn (i.e. a small rack in the family room.)
A bunch of Mitel IP phones, I had some extra handsets, wonder if they can work on the headset jack for “training” uses, you know, hehe?
The basic Control Unit, without digital boards (in the front panel.) I’ve yet to open up the system because I believe its screwed shut, and I just found time to blog on this – as I haven’t gotten into the inside – yet.
Not sure if I have the formal OK to post this image from a private email from Jason, here is an inside of his he took for me to see.
This looked a little artsy.
I did get more handsets than telsets, and the box could’ve held about 12 Mitel IP sets. Mitels are cool in the design because the way they made it low profile. The sets are heavily curved, so a 7″ deep set of a modern Mitel equates to a 8″ of a traditional boxy telset. (These in fact remind me of the Merlin style believe it or not.) This also comes from the same vendor that made some really odd looking sets in the late 80s, ones I haven’t taken photos of. Mitel also made some really odd looking first gen screen phones. I don’t have a picture handy, and I think it’s best to try to let it rot and not put it on the Web.
Setting up the Mitel was really easy, given the dependency on an old version of Internet Explorer (the admin is about a decade old when IE 6 ruled the world – don’t blame me for vendors creating apps just for Microsoft!) and navigating through its prompts I was able to create a dial plan, figured out how to set up the phone’s line appearances, etc.
I got a few 5330s, their screen based sets. They are similar to Avaya’s 960x series, to not fully alienate traditional desktop users. The main information is on the top, and the lines and feature are below the solid black line. Page up through 3 pages and you can have up to 24 features and lines. (From my experiences, you can’t go beyond 4 call appearances -sometimes called “Multicall” on Mitels, but there maybe a loophole with bridged appearances.)
(You wonder how come I have “Send Calls” on the screen? Simple, you can rename feature keys or anything for that matter, which is good if you cutover from one vendor to another and try to mitigate retraining… wait, IT guys ask what is “training”?)
A caveat I learned was the blue button known as the Superkey does not work like other Mitel sets. For these 5330s, you have to program a feature button also known as a Superkey to change ringers, and other settings – for me it’s a little weird. Hardware specific on the 5330s is done on the actual blue key – which to others could be mistaken as a Superkey.
Despite other oddities, the system compensates it with very feature rich functions on the sets themselves. If you don’t get through to another user, you can activate their MWI by pressing your VM access key while ringing – which is kinda cool.
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This is an incomplete post with more pictures and video to follow.
That $1 telephone I mentioned earlier was this guy (or girl)
If you know the history of Western Electric telephones from the late 60s, the Princess was basically marketed to women. This would be the first “chick phone”, way before the days of the RAZR, and other girly phones I have forgotten since the last decade.
The thing is so beaten up. The base is cracked, the bottom surface is breaking off and it doesn’t have the “Princess” logo on the bottom like other sets.
This is the same green colored phone similar to the 500 set that I got around 2008.
I went to the Londonderry Flea Market (formerly known as Londonderry Gardens at the time) and found a vendor who had scrap phones for sale. I was able to get a couple bagfuls for about $25 and another telephone for $1. Not bad.
In this picture, I got a ringer. It looked like it came off a 564, which I did buy a set with it’s own ringer. I wanted to use this set of bell to make my own ringer to alert me outside a call is coming in.