gnu@l5.UUCP (09/19/85)
At Sun I worked with a brand new fancy ROLM phone system. It had a whole 60-page manual of features as well as a card that sits under the plastic in the phone, next to the buttons. I was the only person I knew there who knew how to do a conference call. Most people had serious trouble transferring a call to someone else. This was after 9 months of use! I haven't yet seen a phone system "full of features" that wasn't harder to use than a simple old fashioned phone system. It reminds me of a strange talk at Portland Usenix; an AT&T phone wizard (Brian Redman?) got up and talked about how neat his home phone system was and how many things you could do with it. It didn't come with online help either, and by the end of the talk I'd had far too many ##7*, #*65*#2, and 7*#88s to remember what good they were. If any. PS: There's a serious bug in this ROLM pbx, which was their latest and greatest as of about 9 months ago (3000?). When you dial a busy extension, it gives you a busy signal AND gives the extension a beep-tone superimposed on the call in progress. The usual effect is that the caller hangs up, hearing busy, while the person on the line flashes, trying to accept an incoming call. The result is usually confusion if not killing the conversation in progress. I reported this to our trouble desk, which reported it to ROLM, but it never got fixed. PPS: Sun has a 3-pbx system that covers 5 buildings, interconnected via fiber optic and microwave links. It was the most complex installation of this pbx at the time, and may still be. We were led to believe that it would all act like one big system. They lied. For example, you can't forward your phone to a phone connected to another physical PBX. PPPS: Their forwarding also leaves something to be desired. You can forward all-the-time or forward on busy-or-no-answer but you can't forward "busy" separately from "no answer". This means if you have an office and spend a lot of time in a lab, you can't leave your phone forwarded. If you're in the lab, it's fine, but if you're in your office making a call, it dumps incoming calls on the lab. The ROLM people I talked to didn't seem to see how this was a problem or why other phone systems would do it differently. I think IBM got a bum deal...