10 Feb
2000
10 Feb
'00
1:59 p.m.
Howdy,
At 05:03 PM 2/10/00 -0500, you wrote:
On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 03:59:26PM -0600, Bill Richman
(bill_r(a)inetnebr.com) wrote:
Well, I still work at Nortel (in hardware design, for 15+ years),
and had no idea that _anybody_ would ever be interested in the
Displayphones. Geez, we musta thrown out gobs & gobs of those
things years ago (yeah, yeah, how were we to know ...).
Now, I didn't work on the Displayphone hardware myself (my group
designs the DMS-100 digital switching system and it's successors)
but I know that at one time in the mid-late 80s there was quite a wide
deployment of them within Nortel for people to use to dial into the
mainframe computer. A lot of folks had them at their desks and
quite a few took them home. I think they had 300 bps modems
built in. As I recall, there were at least two different models,
the early model looked much like a miniature Hazeltine terminal,
the later model had the CRT display up on a stalk. I also
recall that it must have been very difficult or impossible to
do lower case on those things - you could always tell who
was writing their e-mails on a Displayphone because everything
they sent was in upper case only. You could program in
a list of names and phone numbers and have it autodial the
numbers. The models I saw used all hooked into a standard
POTS line. I do not recall a model that required what we
call a "P-Phone" (PBX-type) line, but I can't say for sure
that one wasn't made - all the ones I saw were POTS.
I also thought that it was possible to set things
like the data rate/parity/stop bits for the external
RS-232 ports through a set up menu. A buddy at work used one
at his desk until it died recently, I thought it was amusing
that when hisphone rang, the CRT on the Displayphone lit up
with a message "Excuse me, you have a call" or something like that.
It's been a long time since these things were a supported
product, so I doubt seriously I can get my hands on any
docs., but will keep my eyes open around work.
Alex Knight
Calculator History & Technology Museum Web Page
http://aknight.home.mindspring.com/calc.htm
Next time I'm at the location where
they're stored, I can try to find you a
number. They're RS-232, but they're a bit funky to get to work with
anything else; I don't remember the details, but it seems like they used
really odd settings - like 6 bits, mark parity, 2 stop bits. Also, the
attached phone only works with Northern Telecom phone systems, unless you
were to gut the whole thing and stick the electronics from a one piece phone
in them.
Hm, this part's interesting -- while I'm sure there *were* models that
were only PBX-aware, an old neighbour of mine used to work for Nortel
and had one at home, so now I have to find out if they were produced
in any quantity :-/