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In the beginning of the 1980s , there was a hype around a "managerial workstation". Managers needed to have a "workstation" to access mainframe computers and doing phone calls with feature phone features. An early adoption of voice/data integration
GTE did not have such a phone, and there was a group in GTE Telenet (offices in Reston, Virginia) "dreaming" about a very advanced voice/data switch called "OMNI Sx". (The sky was the limit).
They urgently wanted a market share, and asked Thomson (France) to design and manufacture such a workstation for them. Thomson designed and delivered it on schedule. They wanted to have a "state of the art" styling, and choose for a standard ATEA microtelephone, which we delivered to them.
Around 1982, managers usually didn't access mainframe computers, their secretaries did that job for them. I remember I have seen a manager demonstrating he could logon to a IBM mainframe computer by pressing just one button on this workstation.
The workstation had some kind of scripting language. By pressing the button he took the modem line, dialed the number of the computer, waited for a logon prompt and did sent the manager's userid and password. (So no security, since the password was programmed in the script)..
As matter of fact, it was a very simple voice/data integration. The workstation needed two analog telephone (or PABX) lines: one for voice, and one for data via a 300 baud modem.
The workstation had als feature phone like features such as storing numbers and names.
I obtained this workstation around 1990, and installed it at home. Until I discovered this thing was dissipating 35 Watts 24 hours a day...;-)
I have somewhere still a user manual, but I cannot locate it currently.
Last changed on 29/05/11 by Jan