Over my career in the computer business I’ve had numerous opportunities to work with telcos (telephone companies) to solve technical problems which occurred more frequently as computer services began to be offered remotely over telephone lines.
Most of the issues arose were because we were trying to merge two systems designed to perform two entirely different functions — one to carry an analog signal (voice) and the other to carry a digital signal (zeroes and ones).
Most telco technicians in the field had received little or no training; nor were they familiar with the hardware and software needed to connect a computer to a telephone line. Often their customers — the computer guys and gals — were more technically aware than they were on how to tackle this problem. This knowledge gap not infrequently led to some unpleasantness between the parties. I recall one situation, however, when a telco came through with flying colours. It was when Simon Fraser University was in the process of switching over from punched cards to online video terminals that would support data entry, word processing and interactive programming. A hardware product had been ordered which would allow a user to dial a number and be automatically connected to the service required on one of two mainframe computers. This was a decade before the pc arrived on scene.
The product on order had been developed by a Canadian company, Gandalf Systems, new to the marketplace. It was scheduled for delivery to SFU well before the start of the fall semester, so we were beginning to promote the virtues of the upgraded services, packing up keypunches and cancelling standing orders for punched cards. Then Gandalf advised that the delivery was delayed by several months which put us into a bit of a bind, to say the least. BC Tel (now Telus) came riding in to the rescue when their sales rep for SFU located somewhere in a BC Tel warehouse an old-fashioned telephone switchboard which at one time was standard equipment in many organizations around the world to route telephone calls to local handsets.
So working with our techies it was set up to route digital services to on-campus users. We hired students to staff the switchboard 24/7, manually switching digital service requests exactly in the same way telephone operators had been handling voice calls since Bell started building telephone networks. And there was a bonus — the switchboard came encased in a beautiful walnut wood cabinet which looked quite spiffy in the computing centre’s reception area until it was replaced by the Gandalf unit some months later!
The Vernon PC Users’ Club meets the second Tuesday of the month at 7 p.m. at the Schubert Centre in the cafeteria. Call Betty at 542-7024 or Gina at 550-6126 for more information.
