Telephony 101

The Age of “The PBX” – 1970s-2000s

clickfoLeave a comment

The PBX really became something of an on site telephony product by the 1980s, even though the concepts began in the 1970s. The advent of the integrated circuit along with programs, made these ol electromechanical relics to become obsolete. And I say “become” because it would be a long time coming for that to happen. ROLM out of the left coast, had developed military spec computers and dabbled into telephony, they had gotten into the business by the early 1970s. They became successful, then came Northern Telecom (later Nortel).

 

a picture from Andy of a ROLM digital telephone from the mid to late 1980s
A standard looking ROLM telephone from the mid 1980s to even today at some sites.

The Computerized Branch Exchange or CBX was obviously a registered trademark to ROLM and brought the concept of a box making and answering calls and users would have devices that they could use to answer or place calls. Want to call out, you hit a button like 9 or 8 like you did in a Centrex setup. The system could route calls per to what a number was pressed, and block it or rout it to another set of trunks to save money on long distance.

Northern had introduced the SL1 PBX in 1975 (but not to be confused with the X11 platform since 1988 and the Avaya fusion of the 2010s). The SL stood for Stored Logic, or just code living on chips with a programed software. The SL1 was not friendly to a manager of machines, but for engineers, as well documented on this site for a number of years. This plagued into the Meridian 1 days. At this time most electronic and digital PBX systems were not as simple to choose. the SL1 PBX for an example came in about 12 varieties, between software options and hardware choices. It wasn’t like an Option 11 could cover 500 users, with 60 inbound lines today. Lot of this had to do with the computing of the 1970s.

Mitel was one of the first companies to introduce digital desk phones that allowed multiple line and feature access. Their system was called the Superswitch, and the phones were called Supersets (this is where the “Superkey” comes from even in their current VOIP carnation.) They wanted to make a PBX phone a bit more functional than a 2/500.

For some of the readers… you’re waiting on Ma Bell. Well AT&T’s Western Electric division was in no hurry to go digital, in fact some antidotes indicated that AT&T had plans to go into digital telephony by the 1990s… planned as far back as the 1960s. AT&T’s first PBX that was electronic in nature was the Dimension PBX, and Horizon PBX. For some lingering Avaya fanboys, the cabinets of these things were no modern marvel, unless you thought one cabinet holding 50 lines was a great engineering feat. A PBX scale from users/extensions to lines made sense from an economic scale for years, but when the electronics came in, boy did it take real estate. To power a 10 button Multibutton Electronic Telephone required 8 pairs of wiring. a far cry from the ol 25 pair, but certainly  for what it could do was very limited.

Turn around for technology takes several years, by 1981 the researchers at Bell Labs started to develop a fully electronic telephone network that would make the Dimension/Horizon hot mess end. ROLM’s phone systems were mostly ol 2/500s and the fancy phones were for operators. Nortel had made digital phones as far back as the creation of the SL-1, but they made their phones mimic the infamous 1A2 Key telephone system (this explains why the Nortel Meridian phones have few line buttons, and are set up for a single phone number.)

Western wanted to be unique, and this uniqueness for users stood out from the competition, they opted for use Merlin-looking telephones, but instead of having 4 line buttons directing to the outside world, use the top left row to have by default 3 instances of personal line appearances to make the phone ring, page, etc. This would be considered “call appearances” and made these phones more attractive than the MET, which sent a bit of a mixed message in the technical sense. the MET had literally Multibuttons, but not multiple lines or appearances. One call to an MET phone at a time. Want to transfer? You had to press the Recall Button, and then press a button called Transfer, then hang up.. .and it had the infamous Red and Green color indications.

The transition away from “System 75 and 85” to Definity in a 1989 TV campaign in the mainstream media

By April of 1984, AT&T introduced the System 75 PBX, with 7400 Series Digital Voice Terminals, that were a bit superior to the MET and it took several years to fix user pet peeves with the quirks of the phones, but by 1995, the 8400 Series Voice Terminals really put AT&T on the mark leading into the Avaya years, and by 2020 Avaya became an also-ran company throwing the combined history of Nortel and Lucent and AT&T into a trashcan.

For the mainframes themselves, AT&T went to extra lengths to make the system be as efficient as possible, they developed the Information Systems Architecture (a nod to what became their enterprise/carrier services) developing a company standard of circuit boards and connectors and one large cabinet could hold 900 lines. But the System 85 was basically the Dimension PBX with with System 75 hardware. There was some differences in the Dimension-specific hardware. To run the PBX’s code, required it’s own cabinet, while the System 75 could run on a single circuit board.  But to put lines and stations was equal though.

For a number of years, hospitality only used electronic PBX systems to monitor, route and direct calls per to numbers dialed, did customers get the same treatment in offices? No, they stuck to 2 wired analog phones, and the front desk typically had a digital set. Other industries may had many average users having low button phones, and more power users had the middle line, and assistants had multi buttons between 20 to 34, while the executives had the 5 to 10 button set.

The fun facts of digital PBX systems is a) the computer is technically a “phone” per to the FCC regulations on Part 68 b) and the desk phones I call just “sets” because they are regulated as Part 15 in FCC rules. c) these “phones” cannot use the regular Plain Ol Telephone provider, and are not engineered to work at home or remotely without some box. This is why I do not call these devices a “phone” but due to FCC regulation in 2018 and 2020, they see them as “phones”. The “PBX” is a computer, and it’s there where it dials out phone numbers, your “extension” is a device that tells the box what to dial using your dialpad.

Obviously by the 1990s a PBX of the 1970s that used to take an entire corner was miniaturized and could fit into a plastic “shoebox” and by taking some code and adapt it to a microcosm allowed Electronic Key Telephone Systems do function more like a PBX than an an EKTS itself. This is where the blur of what is a PBX and what should a KTS be.

By the 2000s, most VOIP vendors that had no experience in legacy voice really amped up PBX systems as opposed to Key systems. Everyone thinks a PBX, is anything that’s on site and can route a call is what everyone wants…

#

Why Private Branch Exchanges was overrated (*Prior to the 1970s*)

clickfoLeave a comment

The Private Branch Exchange… the No Frills Approach for Saving Money on your Telephone Bills!

In the wayback of time, in the days of electromechanical switching, and you had say a 500 users… what was your options?

There was two options. Centrex and a PBX. What was the difference? One was off prem at the phone company and the other was just an identical copy of a switch, just a bit modified for an on premise environment. I should also state, that back in those days, it was not abnormal for PBX systems to be in sites less than 200 phones. The role of a PBX at the time was to have less cabling going in, allowing users to call each other by a 3 to 4 digit numbers, and be able to access to the outside world… but in those days most of the PBX was done by humans…

an image of a western electric operator station taken at the NH Telephone Museum in 2015

The operator switchboard was basically the “PBX” while in the switchrooms, was all the switching of the time whether it was crossbar or Step by Step. There was not that many features, and that didn’t come till the days of ROLM, Northern’s SL1 and AT&T’s Dimension.

There was “Cordless switchboards” that resembled the Call Directors, but it was done in a similar fashion, a call would come into a bank of lines, and the operator would buzz the extension to then patch them in via buttons. But a cordless switchboard was still a very wiring intensive devices, with many, many pairs of wires that had to be tied directly to the console.

So what about outbound calling? Before the days of electronics, a user would “dial zero” and ask to dial out, the operator would patch that caller, and either s/he would dial, or if the operator was nice, would dial the number for that caller.

The cost of a PBX, to users to lines was still cheaper, but was mostly seen in hotels, and some businesses where handling calls were important. The 1970s that brought the ability to have multiple phones and few lines coming from the telco, also brought features like station IDs (internal caller ID), Automatic Routing Selections and Automatic Alternative Routing, and anything where a computer could hear the tones and or rotary pulses where the PBX could dial for the user, rather than an operator. This moved the dialing into an electronic mainframe, but the operator still had a role to play, to answer calls, to juggle calls, and to monitor the health of the electronic PBX, sometimes outside of the States it’s called “Private Automatic Branch Exchange”.

A lot of these PBX systems were phased out with the advent of electronics by the late 1970s, but there were holdouts up to the 90s. The White House had zero electronic systems until the Clinton administration that by the mid 1990s had installed then an AT&T Definity PBX; that only had a shelf life of 3 Presidents dual terms. By 2017, the Trump Administration had prided for having a “very secure” phone system that was a Cisco, which had been a secondary system since the latter end of the Bush administration.

If you are a Gen Xer and older, you could tell a system was a PBX or Centrex by telling it’s telephone.

Standard one line phones were common in PBX setups even in the days of electronic.

If you did see Key phones, most likely it was because they were the power users, and needed direct access to lines without operators or codes. While some say the 1A2 concept was dated by the advent of electronic systems, this was critical in places where calls couldn’t get dropped because a transfer failed. In the advent of VOIP, the physics of how a call can be captured or be answered or a line can be captured… and that can be blamed to the lack of listening to customers in the world of IP… but that happened many years later.

Why Key Telephone Systems Had Relevancy For So Long

clickfo

The Key Telephone System is becoming as obsolete as landline telephones and is becoming ill relevant like the rotary dial telephones. It’s being replaced not just with “the cloud” and Voice over IP; it’s the overall methodology how VOIP works today. The other factor is technical “professionals” who often trash customers for retaining older ideas and if anyone insists what they want they’ll be gaslighted as “stuck in the past”.

But this type of telephone system was the earliest type of system that had buttons, had the ability to buzz, ring, lock out another line if the other telephone was busy (privacy modes), and other dodads like Music On Hold and paging.

It’s easy from a historical point of view, that plain ol dial sets in offices were tied to PBX systems and multi button telephones were tied to Key Systems. Of course this is prior to the 1970s before these became electronic devices. Earlier key systems were known as “1A” series, followed by “1A1” and “1A2” systems as the years went on, these were originally developed by Western Electric, but was cloned by other vendors.

Continue reading →

Telephony 101: On Voice Mail

clickfo

Some people love voice mail, many just hate it. Many are apparently so egotistical, they think it’s not worth listening to 2 minutes of a voice based message than a generic email.

People also think email is better, but do you know the history of voicemail?

if the answer is no, lets go down memory lane of Voice Mail.

Voicemail is often assumed to be an electronic answering machine on a server. While it’s true, its origins was almost similar to sending a letter or an email, just with spoken word.

The first indication of such language was in printed publications in 1877. A famous man named Thomas Edison with an invention called the phonograph. For the Gen-X audience and older, this is basically a record player. Millenials are probably familiar to just be cool for the latest trend. While it was well known for songs, the ability to record spoken word, as a way to replace letter writing had the possibility. The “voice mail” language was in the lexicon by the 1910s.

While the answering machine was invented in the 1960s, the ability to install these would be so cost prohibitive, and worse, a wiring nightmare. In the early 1970s, Motorola introduced pagers that provided one way voice messages that would be answered by an “answering center” (this in 2017 is completely archaic with the advent of digital telephony, automated attendants, in fact the size of these answering centers were the size of contact centers, which was not existent at the time.) These pagers used UHF signals and were often used for volunteer fire fighters, etc. In this sense, this could be considered as a voice message.

Continue reading →