Those Were The Days!!??
Recently I just happened to be going through a closet (don’t ask why) and I came across a nearly new double-breasted blue wool blazer. Get out of town, where did this come from?! Then I remembered, the blazer along with the requisite gray flannel slacks, were provided to me by my then employer, Northern Telecom (NT), for demonstration duties at the 1987 International Switching Symposium in Phoenix. ISS’87, as it was called, was a major telephone switching industry event that included somewhat of a “coming out party” for Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) by major vendors such as AT&T, Siemens, and NT. For example, AT&T (the original one) was celebrating the ISDN pilot installation at McDonald’s “Hamburger University” headquarters facility in suburban Chicago. (“Do you want fries or BRI with that?)
Industry sponsors threw a lot of money at this event and its audience. One vendor had David Copperfield do his magic, another (Ericsson?) had an Arizona-style barbeque and rodeo for the attendees, and we had Henry Mancini play his music and conduct the Phoenix Symphony. IBM, owner of Rolm at that time, provided each conference registrant with a real leather briefcase, an interesting and no doubt expensive touch.
Months of preparation went into developing the demonstrations for ISS’87. One of them used an ISDN terminal adapter card for PCs that the Bell-Northern Research (BNR) lads from Ottawa had engineered and constructed. Since Calling Line Identification (CLID) was carried in the ISDN “D” (or signaling) channel, we were able to show screen pops of the “account data” belonging to the (“home”) telephone that called the number of the PC. Very hokey, very simple, but it showed how ISDN could integrate telephone and computer functions. Not bad for 1987, 23 years ago! There were other demos, of course, but the PC one sticks because of my personal involvement in it--developing the demo script, training the demonstrators, writing the hand-out material, and interfacing with BNR (you don’t know the meaning of “cold “ until you spend some January time in Ottawa). By the way, the PC demo was replicated a few months later as part of a technology venue in which NT supported Indiana Bell at the 1987 Pan Am Games in Indianapolis.
The ISDN adventure of the late 1980s was the first exposure to “converged communications” for most of us who were in the carrier or supplier sides of the telephone business. Moreover, it was challenging and fun, for many, including the author. Today, of course, communications convergence is all around us with the ever-expanding multiple dimensions of convergence-network, device, media, fixed/mobile, services/applications, and so forth. Needless to say, this has lead to the Unified Communications (UC) opportunity and it is basically independent of how one defines UC. ISDN excitement lasted for a few years (I’ve got the t-shirts, ballpoint pens and note pads to prove it), but fundamentally fizzled in North America. It was seen by many as “a solution in search of a problem” or in a play on the service’s acronym, “Innovations Subscribers Don’t Need”. But for those few years (perhaps 1986 to 1991) it was all the rage and poised to change the way people lived, learned and worked, according to one of my prized National ISDN t-shirts.
So-called “National ISDN” was a program of Bellcore (Bell Communications Research) at the behest of its owners the Bell Operating Companies who offered ISDN. Simply stated, the ISDN services from the telephone switch vendors (primarily AT&T and NT) were incompatible and were not interoperable. The feature sets varied by switch vendor and only that vendor’s ISDN phone, or one compatible with its specification, could be used . The National ISDN program did eventually publish switch-independent generic feature requirements and generic CPE guidelines, but by then the real window of opportunity for ISDN had closed.
Proprietary, non-interoperable solutions certainly helped the ISDN movement “shoot itself in the foot”. But there were other factors. ISDN was an offering of the “phone company” which as a monopoly never really had to develop marketing acumen, and on technology front, the phone companies were not especially knowledgeable on integration with computers and the data component of voice/data communications. In fact, the primary drivers of ISDN were telecommunications companies and carriers; as I recall there was not much interest or support from the computing industry with the exception of DEC and the aforementioned IBM. Also, ISDN, although only access or transport in scope, was relatively complex for users to comprehend compared to other Telco services; this complexity did not help sell it.
Communications convergence has come a long way since those ISDN days, and it continues to evolve rapidly in this UC era. I don’t know when, if ever, we’ll see UC suppliers providing celebrity entertainment and leather briefcases for the next Enterprise Connect event. Maybe it would be best to keep it low-key so as not to have the same “success” as ISDN.