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Seen at a K-Mart

What do it do?

Some kind of Centrex/intercom system?

TCS made an Innkeeper and a Storekeeper. It's about a 60 port PBX that used a 1A2 console and supported some number of trunks. Mr. Idiot tossed one in the landfill in 1998.

Well, you asked for the time, so let me tell you how to build the watch:

Tone Commander's flagship product was their ML8000 intercom system that was designed for use with 1A2 systems. It offered separate (private) talk paths, unlike most 1A2 intercom systems that shared one single talk path.

If a standard 1A2 intercom system was in use, it couldn't be used by anyone else. The ML8000 was purchased by many Bell companies as a substitute for the Western Electric 6A intercom (two paths) and the later 6B (Dialog) that offered more talk paths. Both were tremendously expensive due to the labor, hardware and space requirements. The 6B also required expensive modifications within the station sets with diodes, etc. What a pain.

The ML8000 was compact and could be wall or rack mounted in about a tenth of the space of a 6A and a quarter of the space required by a 6B system. In a single cabinet that was only about a foot wide, it could support up to four talk paths and 80 stations, flashing lamps, ringback tone, interrupted audible and transfer capabilities. A special station card even allowed single line tip/ring signaling. They also offered a trunk card that allowed outside line access, but it was clunky. There was a Burndy cable option that would allow it to plug into a standard Western Electric modular power supply (79B5, etc.), so no special power requirements existed. Not bad at the time.

This system was a huge success for Tone Commander. They took these profits to develop variations of it by adding more PBX-related features, such as better single-line set support. Unlike the ML8000 which required separate pairs to the station for talk path, lamps and ringing, which were also limitations of WECO's 6A and 6B, the Innkeeper and Storekeeper by TCS provided ringing across the talk path, meaning that standard single-line sets were fully supported.

These products were much less expensive than the then-popular Mitel SX100 and 200 systems, so for retail or hotel/motel environments, they sold like crazy for a while.

Then Mitel came out with the SX50, 20,and the 10. Those were much more sophisticated with comparable capacities and Tone Commander gave up the fight. They then focused on more of the telco product offerings, specifically Centrex and ISDN answering consoles. They were always in tight with the Bell Companies.

Melco tried to join in on Tone Commander's bandwagon with multi-path intercom systems for 1A2 as did San/Bar and Teltone, but Tone Commander stole the show for the short time that they were needed until 1A2 started heading out.

Thanks for the Bell lesson. As an independent telco employee in a small town, I missed the history and the standardization of the Bell system Practices (we had GSP's) but we were an acquisition of GTE. We didn't use Bell anything :-)

I still have the Melco 2-path intercom (KL-19A), the Mitel SX-5,10, and Super-10, and the San/Bar ksu. The Pulse-80, TCS-Innkeeper, and a lot of 512 KSU parts got purged in the 1998 closing of a storage facility. I just kept the small 1A2 stuff and all the electronic keys and PBX's. It's only been in the last 5 years or so that I'm getting serious about a total purge of parts, my goal being to cut it in half by the end of the year.