atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems NEC Telephones & Systems Old NEC Systems

Smoom -

Thanks. I worked for UCS back in the '70s and that's what we did. A lot of X-Bar in Hotels.

Also hospitals and stadiums, but that's another story.

Sam

Lee -

Absolutely! With old technology, there was always a way to make it work. With the new stuff out there, if it isn't in software, it ain't happening.

Sam

I used to work for a company that had rewritten the admin software for the 12 series so that we could do work from a PC. For those of you who remember doing a cross point check on the 12s, you should see the system light up when you run it from a decent speed pentium laptop!!!!

Fortunately I no longer have to work on them, although I do believe I still have the gear stashed somewhere.

R4-

Sounds wild! I don't even think that the TRS-80 was out when I did 12s.

How about programming the old PBXs- Neax 21s and OKI Discoverys in Binary & Hex. That's what we thought a computer was in those days.

Sam

Not nearly as old, but the 1st NEC2400 I had to deal with, our company had an NEC APC. (Advanced Personal Computer) 8 & 1/2 inch floppies! Stick 'em in the drives, turn on this 1-piece monster that had a 3 foot by 4 foot "Footprint" and the drives took off. Ker-chunk, ker-chunk, ker-chunk. And 10 minutes later that computer running CPM (!) was ready to go to work, at 300 baud. Finally got taken out by THOR. Bought a DOS computer (486), scrounged up some DOS 2400 software and got nowhere. Finally the NEC helpline tech said, 'wait a minute, did you say you are running blabla release?' "Yep" 'Well there's your problem, it was written to run on an IBM XT, Maximum hard drive space 20K. How big is your hard drive?' "80K" 'You're going to have to partition it into 20 and 60. Call back if that doesn't cure the problem.' So several quarts of midnite oil later, after I had hosed the computer 3 times and bailed myself out, I'd finally learned enough about DOS to partition the drive, load the software, and actually did some remote programming! Then I had to go see the Doc about putting my shoulder back in place after I threw it out patting myself on the back! Next time I'll tell you abou the NEC 1648 I had in my house in KS. John C. (Not Garand)

Sam,
UCS did all of the hotels on Hotel Circle in San Diego and my company took the contract to replace the sets in the rooms. Oh, what a pain that was.

DN27 - UCS was owned by American Motor Inns (who had a Holiday Inn franchise). The story I heard was that they were paying a fortune to the Phone Companies for monthly rentals and decided to try Interconnect. They liked the idea, but didn't like their original contractors, so they went into business for themselves. Of course they specialized in Hotels. Then they started doing Hospitals (a very similar business model).

I ran the Bronx VA Hospital for them. It was a brand new building - we put in a NEAX 31 - there were 11 in the whole world. It was a switch that had a CPU (8K of RAM!) and used a x-bar matrix for switching (a 4 stage matrix - not the usual 3!). The switch was a real powerhouse, redundant everything, but technology had passed it by. The hospital was about 3,000 lines - mostly 1A2 since there were no patient phones.

After that they got a contract with Gulf & Western to do their Business system installs - mostly OKI Discovery IIIs and 1A2. I did that for them for a while and then moved on.

Funny thing about the NEAX 31- There were very few of them, but they had attained an almost mythic image within NEC at the time. I remember attending a class at NEC and the instructor asked us which switches we had been trained on. When I mentioned the 31, he said "Ah, NEAX 31, Number ONE PBX - ICHI-BAN" and then bowed to me in front of the class! Pretty wild.

I worked for UCS in the late '70s. They were very nice people and I've got nothing but good things to say about them. I understand that they were bought out by Bell South when they went into the Interconnect Business. I don't rally now what happened after that.

My only complaint about them, was that they paid us (in NYC) out of the First National Bank of Roanoke, Va. In those days the banks made you wait about 3-4 weeks (17 business days?)to clear an out of town check. We almost starved till we found a bar that would cash our checks for us.

Then all we had was the problem of driving home......


Sam

John C-

I remember getting a 30mb hard drive and having to partition it into a 20 & a 10 because DOS 3 wouldn't recognize anything bigger than a 20!

When I was with GTE, we were standardizing on DEC Rainbow computers running CPM. Then we tried XENIX machines. Then I became a big proponent of OS/2.

I still think OS/2 is better that Windows, but who cares. I'm here typing to you on an XP machine.


Sam

Interesting note about the 1st IBM PC's. They would boot either IBM DOS OR......... CPM. That's right boys and girls, obsolete, underpowered CPM! CPM could only directly address 64K of memory so that was what IBM figured was a good starting point.IBM wasn't too sure if anyone was going to jump on the DOS bandwagon with all the, at that time, CPM software available, so they made it dual bootable. DOS 2.11 is the point where that stopped. CPM was actually a pretty 'robust' o/s and there was a lot of software for it. Some of the current word processors and spread sheets were ported over from CPM originally. They've been enhanced a LOT since then, needless to say. I didn't use it to speak of, but I understand that most programs were made to 'overlay' the o/s, because there were several different versions that were brand specific. So, you bought the software and the 'overlay' that was specific to your version of CPM. And, apparently the 'overlay' wasn't critical, it just enhanced the operation with your version. John C. (Not Garand)

My father worked for UCS in all the hotels in San Diego when I was kid.