I had a 10-year-old NEC PBX. Two analog trunks, eight or 10 digital phones, and a bunch of outlets wired for analog phones from the days in which guests needed to access their corporate networks through a modem connection. The voicemail card failed. To replace it would cost a couple of thousand dollars. I went… [Read More]

Let’s get some background and terminology out of the way first. What the heck is a PBX? The letters stand for private branch exchange: private because it is located on the customer’s premises, branch because it connects to the public switched network on one side and phones on the other side – it’s the end… [Read More]

Back in the early 80s, when was working for Rolm, having left engineering and begun a two-year tour as general manager of Office Systems Division, I used to spend a lot of time speaking at conferences. We had a lot of circuit switching data communications products and the promise of future centralized packet switching products,… [Read More]

I’ve complained before in this blog about the terrible reliability of the New York Times readers, both on the PC and the iPad platforms. I praised the Wall Street Journal for their great iPad reader. That was then. For the few weeks, neither the New York Times nor the Wall Street Journal iPad app worked… [Read More]