PBXes at home

[Ethan O'Toole]

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 
from an auction of a local ISP in Virginia Beach called Picus. I still 
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