ROLMphone

Follow up: A Brief History to the ROLM PBX

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I promise when we move to the big leagues away from WordPress, I’ll have a broader palette on subject matters! Meaning I can set the content and forget it!

A follow up from yesterday’s post from Andy in Missouri had contacted me at least several years ago, perhaps in late 2016, around the time of the Ugly Console theme.  As you have seen; he’s got a lot of insight of ROLM, the leading vendor of PBX systems in the country – only for a short time. Thank IBM and their uptight attitude towards a wild but hard working group of people out on the Left Coast, where some of their ideas was the seed to what would become the standard well into the Facebook days.

I happened to reach out to him last fall to ask about the Redwood; ironically Joe The UCX Guy had posted an abandoned Redwood around the same time, however it was just pictures of that system.

As you probably know, ROLM’s demise has been perceived failure on support of IBM to finance the company effectively and a lack of leadership made them fall behind in evolving technologies (such as It Still Does Nothing or ISDN?), resulting a sale to Siemens in 1991, and basically took their existing American clientele, and fused some of ROLM’s technologies with Siemens. ROLM is well known for their bullet proof PBX systems. Your local Sears Roebuck store is probably using a system that’s almost as old as I with sets older than your’s truly. The rest is an adaptation of an email from him discussing the differences of a failed small end system called the Redwood and their flagship unit, the 9751 and the CBX as in the Computer Branch Exchange.

Like the last post, any first-person reference implies to Andy and not me.

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Follow up: A Brief History to the ROLM PBX

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The Redwood, like the old Dimension, was barely a subject that could be found on a search engine. Within a week of reaching out to Andy last fall, because I knew he had knowledge on the subject; Joe the UCX Guy posted an abandoned Redwood with some pictures. Unlike his site, that since April 2019, his site, domain and everything is down; Andy from Missouri was able to provide some pics and a pretty detailed narrative. The subject may get technical and may go back and forth between the background of the workgroup-grade Redwood and the carrier-grade PBX. Parts of this narrative is part of that email with Andy, some may have first-person references, and that should not imply me of course.

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Phone of the Day: ROLM phone at the Local Bob’s Stores

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a picture of a ROLM telephone on a post at a local Bob's Stores in Nashua, New Hampshire

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.