atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems 1A2 and Comkey Telephones & Systems REAL TRIVIA

I know what you mean about the "Grey Whale". I agree that it was "close" to 1A2, but it was really more similar to Comkey since it used T/R/A and L with common grounds.

I agree that GTE was a great company, but you have to admit...They sure had some ugly phones.

Ed -

Ugly phones -Did they ever! Great switches and awful phones. Their KV set used LEDs instead of 51A lamps, but for some reason, the dial was off center! Any customer that saw it threw up their hands and wanted a 2564 set.

Go figure.

Sam

Sorry if I'm sidetracking a little here, but I think the pieces are starting to fit together regarding my curiosity about the GTD-5. I know that AG Communications eventually fell under the ownership of Lucent. So, AG Communications was initially the result of GTE selling it's switching division to AT&T?

Ed and silversam, did you ever 'get' to work on the TIE 2040/3060 EKS? Company I worked for in KC put in 13 (how ironic) of them. What nobody told us until we started howling about how hard it was to get parts was, it was dropped as a current product 2 weeks after we put in the 1st one! The only real problem we had with them was crosstalk. You had to have a o-scope to find the culprit(s). You clipped on each station card, (1/phone about a foot square) and replaced the card with the highest 'jitter' voltage on a specific pin. And you replaced cards until the crosstalk was gone. The power supply on the system in the ladies room had to be left in place when they traded up. It kept the room warm in the winter! The P/S put out 27 volts + and -, at 10 amps! 108 pounds! Ah, da gud ol' dazes! John C.

John:

The only work that I ever did on this system was MAC work, as in station relocations at my family's office. Most of it was straight-forward except for the intercom code matrix. The first conductor was related to the first digit dialed and the second conductor was the second digit. The whole show rode upon the yellow pairs on the second binder coming out of the "KSU". Other than that, I don't remember it being much different from the general 1A2 architecture.

I never heard of any crosstalk issues, in fact the system that they had was pretty reliable. The interconnect that installed the system (practically unheard of in 1974) actually hired me to refurbish phones and clean the warehouse. I never saw a single card or set come back in as defective in the year that I worked there after school.

Years later, I took some of their extra sets and rigged them into my next employer's 1A2 equipment using the "T/R/A/L" concept and they behaved just fine.

Mike -

Absolutely. My division at GTE was GTECS (Communications Systems). We supplied PBX's and Private Networks. GTE really wrote the book on Private Networking (going back about 25 years). Our flagship product was the GTD-4600 (or GTD-4 as it was originally called). Very reliable, very flexible, very, very good at networking. We had private networks in for Westinghouse, IBM, GE, Kodak, Xerox, Cape Kennedy, Warner Bros., NASA, Irving Bank, CSX, Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, Lenox Hill Hospital, Fireman's Fund,State Governments of Missouri, New Mexico and Illinois, etc. Anybody who was anybody who had a private network wanted the 4600. I was cerified as a Test Engineer (switchman) on the product and then went on to run some of the private networks as a Site Manager.

When Corporate sold everybody off the big question was were we going to go with the CO's (to ATT) or with the Interconnect/PBX division (Fujitsu). We lost and went to Fujitsu.

The GTD-5 was an excellent product that just got cut off in it's prime. I was told from a reputable source that one of the reasons that GTE decided to divest was the cost of CO manufacture. The GTD-5 was "mature" and now just needed routine enhancements. The estimated cost for dseveloping the GTD-6 was reported to senior management at 1 Billion dollars. They decided that was too much.

As long as I'm babbling on here; VOIP is big news these days. The last enhancement to the GTD-4600 was PD-200 - Packet Data Switching through the Voice Switching Matrix of the 4600. Essentially IOVP (Internet over Voice). I saw a demonstration of it and it worked like a champ. Unfortunately when Fujitsu inherited the product they shut off all development and manufacturing and pushed their own F9600.

Sam

John C -

Sorry, I never worked on the EKS for TIE. 1030's, 2050's and some little mickey mouse product that had about 4 CO lines and 8 or 10 stations. It came in a sealed box that you screwed to the wall and the phones and lines plugged in with modular plugs. Programming was done from the first station.

I did do a lot of work with the early Iwatsu systems. They were very much like the early TIE and Shimcom T,R,A,L. Almost 1A2. They had one model (maybe the 714?) that was 7 CO lines and 14 MANUAL Icm stations (you had 14 pushbuttons on the set to ring other station users. There other model had a regular DICM.

Sam

I chuckle to think of all of the fights around the dinner table on Sunday night at Grandma's house, I worked for Bell, she worked at Automatic Electric. The biggest argument was over the GTD-120 PBX that was marketed by Illinois bell as the 100E , they were never maintained right by us, and were always breaking down. And she used to tell me that Western Electric couldn't get the Dimension right so they had to supply us with a real system...

Just makes me laugh all over again.

The GTD-120 was more reliable than the Dimension? That's a new one to me for sure.

Ed -

The GTD-120 was a nice little system and as I remember, it was the first small PBX to offer a direct T-1 Interface (This about 1982). Any system not maintained well will give you grief (Illinois Bell probably didn't send enough guys to school, have enough spare parts etc.)

The real problem with the GTE PBXs wasn't the PBX - it was the phones.

We put an OMNI digital PBX with Electronic Phones in for Apple Computer. It worked fine. One day we got a call that no one could access their phones. We came out and discovered that a secretary, who, having been given notice went around and as her last act on the job put a password into each phone (a cute feature, rarely used) and then locked them all.

We discovered we couldn't get in to the password from the system console! The password was stored in firmware in the phone and was not accessable at all! Disconnecting the phones required waiting a couple of months for the set to die quietly!

We had to replace ALL the sets.

The next revision of software took care of that problem, but it seems we were always playing catchup with the instruments.

Sam