Question About ROLM PBX Telephones ?

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Q. ROLM was originally an IBM CBX / PBX voice switching venture that was in North America's arrival was purchased away from the German company SEIMENS. IBM made many advancements and improvements to the systems proprietary operating system and architecture (Americanizing it). IBM later sold the ROLM CBX / PBX product back to SEIMENS for a handsome profit.

A. SEIMENS then revised the o/s and architecture with it's own German touch. Their new systems struggled mightly to hang on as third most distributed voice switching platform in North America. Consumers and system administrators were clearly NOT impressed with what had been re-engineered or otherwise taken back to a Version 1.0 release. The early versions of HICOM (SEIMENS revised ROLM) lost much of the market it had locked into for years. Loyal customers were no longer loyal to the ROLM name. A terrific interactive ROLM User Guide still exist and serves those who still run on the american~ized ROLM 9751 9004 & 9005 platforms. That web-site is http://www.9751.com That wasn't exactly how it happened. I was a BIG ROLM customer in the late 1970s and early 1980s, beta tested their LCBX, and supervised a bunch of them later. Interesting story, actually. The company (the name was formed from the first letters of the four founders' surnames, btw) was founded in Santa Clara 1969 or so. Its first product line was a range of mil-spec computers based on Data General's then-popular Nova 16-bit minicomputers. The FCC had just authorized PBX competition in 1969, after decades of monopoly. A few years later, ROLM needed a new PBX for itself and didn't like what was on the market -- most systems in 1973 were either electromechanical crossbars or wired-logic relays; the earliest electronic PBXs were not very well made. So they designed their own, creating a new product line. The first ROLM CBX came out in 1975. Within a few years, it went through several major software releases, adding lots of features. The early machines supported regular electromechanical keysets by means of an electronic deskside adapter -- it was not terribly successful though. In early 1979, with Release 5, they introduced a real electronic phone, the ETS-100. It had nice feature buttons and primitive Caller ID, showing the 4-digit calling extension number. That was a *real* shocker to callers -- I had one of the first on my desk at BBN, where I was in charge of the new LCBX. A few years later, they introduced the Rolmphone series. The original CBX suffered from a short-sighted design decision. In 1975, there were no cheap 64 kbps codec chips. So to save money, they designed the system around a 144 kbps codec, which could have much cheaper filters (12 kHz sampling instead of 8 kHz meant it could have gentler rolloff). Line cards came in "interface groups" of three boards: One line interface, one coder, and one decoder. A 3-cabinet system could hold about 800 lines, depending on the mix of trunks. It was huge by today's standards, but more compact than the electromechanical switches that it replaced. Norther Telecom came out with its SL-1 at about the same time, using standard 64 kbps coding. Well, by 1978, 64 kbps codec chips were mass-produced and cheap, so the SL-1 kept getting cheaper to build, unlike the CBX. By 1983 or so, T1 trunk interfaces were becoming available, and ROLM's design needed *six* boards and half a shelf to do one, recoding 64 kbps to 144 and back! And the new Rolmphones were 64 kbps too. ROLM was in crisis, but kept it quiet. Along came IBM, who bought into the company around 1984, buying it all a couple of years later. They paid too much ... the whole design had to be redone. Not only the 144 kbps codecs, but the main software too was obsolete. The original CBX code was very tight (bit-bummed) embedded code, hard to maintain. The multi-node VLCBX, shipped around 1982 (about two years late), had an improved code base, but was still no gem. IBM had its work cut out for it. They updated the CBX into the 8750, and came out with a new 9750 with more backplane capacity. Redwood was the baby version. But the "integrated voice/data" fad (VoIP is the same basic idea, albeit in reverse) was over, and IBM discovered that they didn't need a PBX in their product line. So they sold the whole thing to Siemens (at a big loss), who eventually phased out the native ROLM products in favor of designs based on their German HICOM systems. ISDN was a big deal in Germany and HICOM was designed from the ground up for ISDN. It wasn't a huge hit in the States and indeed Siemens/ROLM declined in market share.

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