sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems 1A2 and Comkey Telephones & Systems DST

Ed -

I had some friends who had a 416 in their office. As I recall their was no cutdown or cross connecting. The CO lines were brought into the "main" phone and the rest of the instruments were just daisy chained together.

I think I moved a phone for them once. That was my total exposure.

Sam

That's pretty much it, Sam. Two lines went in to each of the two master sets on the v/br and v/s pairs, MOH went in on the v/gn pair and all of the rest of the pairs were daisy-chained. There was an option plug in each master set that could be reversed to determine which one provided lines 1/2 and 3/4. Intercom codes were determined by a slide switch underneath a cover between the DSS keys. Mighty simple, yet mighty advanced for it's time.

Like I said, I never worked on them, but I did work on the ITT 76A & 36A system.

These were (as I'm sure you know)"1A2 Plus" systems. The 36A offered 2 or 4 channels of Intercom under one common button with flashing lights, dial tone and ringback tone. The 76A system offered Voice Announce & H/F answerback on the Intercom (to external desk speakers that connected to the set). It also offered multiple ICM paths, but you needed a separate button for each path.

I installed dozens and dozens (maybe hundreds?) of these guys. They were very nice and worked real well, building on the basic, reliable 1A2 platform. When the Northern Electric SL-1 came out and offered the advanced intercom features as part of the PBX package, it was the death knell for fancy key sytems.

Sam

Don't tell anyone, but I was wrong with my part number. It was 2991. Not a bad guess considering the fact that you guessed it even with the wrong part number!

That's not technical expertise - that's mindreading, plain & simple!

Come down next week and see me in the carnival. I'll be the guy in the turban...

On second thought - no turban.

How about a fedora?

Sam

Wow, Comkey... Well, I never would have guessed that. While I know what they were, I just barely touched a 416 once and that was about it.

The larger consoles had crossed my mind too. But, the fact that they were Plant Equipment also stopped that train of thought.

The faceplate hint was good (now that you told us what it was)! Although, while I had only ever seen the Comkey's ivory (I believe it was) color sets, I was not aware no other colors were made.

I considered Comkey system to be true plug and play, all parts could be replaced with simple flat blade screw driver to remove cover of phone,then unplug bad part and replace.I still have various parts in boxes.

Dr:

Oh yes, the phone bases themselves were ivory, but they had all kinds of funky different colored face plates to "customize" them. I recall teak (standard), walnut, black, blue, orange, blue, red and green. Pretty scary looking to say the least.


John:

People may laugh at the simplicity of this system, but when you think about it, the plug-in components made these a maintenance dream come true. The design was great from that aspect. Somebody was definitely thinking when they came up with that design which also flowed over to their electronic (MET) sets used for Horizon and Dimension systems. Sadly, we only have a few of them left under maintenance, but they are also one of the most trouble-free systems that I've ever encountered in all of my years in this circus.

Ed,

As I recall, the few that I had come across were all the standard teak you mentioned. Tey look decent. Orange, ugh!

I suppose the red and green may have been festive for those celebrating Christmas.

Doc

Ed -

When did they become available to Interconnect? When I saw them they were either a Phone Company only or an AT&T exclusive product.


Sam