PBXes at home

A number of years ago I picked up a Lucent Merlin Legend system. It was around 1999, and Lucent wouldn't certify the system for "y2k" so this business switched over to a Nortel in a giant middle finger to lucent. The irony is the only thing that was "y2k incompatible" is you had to one time set the date on the 386 PC to 2000, otherwise it would roll back to 1970. Past that though -- it was good. The 386 PC ran a unix, and had a special interface card that presented 4 analog phone lines to the PBX. It had the full, awesome Audix (my favorite voice mail system) on it. The PBX came with an entire pickup truck bed of crap, for the price of $1200. IIRC I sold about half the phones and some line cards for $800, which made the system more affordable to me (and based on the price of the phones in those days, it made someone else's day too.) At the time I had 3 roomates, and it was very handy to be able to transfer calls around the house. In addition, there is an option to page all extensions. This was constantly used by roomates for tons of fun. And aggrivation. Some stories: We had music on hold setup, and there was a thrift store CD player in the coat closet that held all the hardware for this thing. The system had two carriers and about 6 boards. When people would call, if it was a telemarketer "track 2" was the crazy over the top rap hold music. That way when you transfer the call it sounds professional -- but not the hold music. I remember trying to go to bed, and the frigging roomates were paging my phone over and over. It was about 2AM. Given the house was a rental, the cabling to all the extensions and computers was run down the hallways -- no permanant modifications. I remember punting the phone down the hallway and slamming the door shut followed by tons of laughter. I eventually ended up with the better 486 computer that ran Audix. It came have the hard drives and the ISA cards that interface to the PBX. One day I would like to try to convert all the voice prompts and build an asterisk setup that uses the same voice mail menu format and clean voice prompts (versus the lame ones asterisk has.) MAP 5P I think is the name of the 486 computer. My roomate always begged to upgrade to the line card that supported caller ID, but all the phone lines were in my name. I always fought it, because I knew he would never answer the phone. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I swear I would hear voices downstairs in the house. It seemed like the place was haunted or something. Finally I was in the right place at the right time.... the MLX-10D phones (so bad ass, look them up) had some kind of issue with the rubber components decaying in them. The phones had quick dial entries from the prior owner still stored in a lot of them. Well, in the middle of the night I guess the phones would "false trigger" and dial on speakerphone random people. So it was their voices in the middle of the night coming out of speakerphones. I also had the MLX-20L huge secretary phone with two sidecars. It was killer. The Merlin Legend was a pain in the ass to program. I think there was windows software that sort of helped. I never messed with a Magix. The MLX-10D + the Definity equivilent were my favorite phones. The rings, the look of the black set with the LCD, etc. I speculate they run on ISDN, but am not sure. The original Merlin was stylish, and I had one for a period but it was just too limited. Cool ring tone though. Where does one find a working 5ESS for home? -- : Ethan O'Toole