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The PBX Scene: 1984-1990

Introduction

The first two editions of the BCR Manual of PBXs (1980 and 1982) were one-shot documents. But the deregulation of the telephone industry, coupled with the maturing of Large Scale Integration (LSI) of digital solid-state devices brought a burst of new companies to the PBX field with a variety of new systems. The only way to keep up with the deluge was to provide the Manual with regular updates on a quarterly basis. Actually, we put out the third edition in several sections during 1985, the first mailing consisting of the key descriptions of the most important PBXs while the remaining three contained additional system descriptions plus my detailed discussion of what PBXs in general were supposed to do, how you should specify what you wanted, and Jerry's catalog of where each system could be purchased. Later years just covered the updates.

Because Teleconnect had lost interest in my columns, and because I wanted to make the quarterly PBX mailings more interesting and useful, I decided to add a column, which I called "The PBX Scene," to the system, feature and function updates as they came out. The job was almost more than I bargained for. I had long since learned that a questionnaire filled out by someone employed by the manufacturer simply did not elicit the information I felt our Manual customers needed; thus I had turned to making a detailed study of manufacturers' literature, filling out the questionnaire for each system myself, and sending it to each manufacture for verification.

Many manufacturers were surprised to find out that what they called one feature, other people called by another name, that many "standard" features were actually implemented in a non-standard way from the point of view of the user, and almost nobody had the basic features and functions that my years of being a switching system designer, customer, and chronicler indicated were necessary.

I was all in favor of each manufacturer doing whatever he wanted, but my job was to let the customer know what he had done. Thus I had built up a network of people in the industry who knew what I needed to verify. In between consulting and doing seminars, I was in constant touch with these people; they would call me when their company came out with something new, and I would call them regularly just to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks. It took a lot of time.

But the industry itself was going crazy. Small companies were becoming large, large companies were expanding their product lines, mergers and acquisitions were rampant, and breakups (in addition to the Bell System) and bankruptcies were not unknown. To track this, I read a variety of journals such as Telephony, Telephone Engineer and Management, Communication News, Communications Week, Electronic News, Info World, BCR, Teleconnect, Telemanagement, etc., etc. For each article I read, I would make a headline which identified the journal, date and page, along with the key facts I wanted to refer to.

I did all this on the computer, using an early word processing program called Electric Pencil. Pencil was the only word processor I ever found that could be made to print out one sentence at a time; thus at the end of each quarter when I wanted to do The PBX Scene, I would go through my file using the "search" function, looking for key words like AT&T, Rolm, IBM, etc, one at a time, and printing out 3 months worth of my headlines containing that word. With these printouts, I could track the wildest series of events, whether technical or financial and, when I sat down to write the column each quarter, I had a great series of memory-joggers to remind me of what had happened.

It was fun, but it was also produced a more or less coherent record of the years from the last quarter of 1984 to the third quarter of 1990 when business customers were making their government enforced migration from telephone service to purchased hardware.

The PBX Scenes continue to show my efforts at trying to be a columnist. Several people have even found this collection to be useful and, I hope, interesting.

Note: these are the unedited versions, which include some material that was not sent out to the customers.

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