5963 computer grade dual triode production dates 3513

The only thing that was wrong after five years was the politics!

"Oops, we should be closer to our good old buddies at AT&T than we thought." ;-) That of course usually happened about the time that a new CEO took over... and had *nothing* to do with technical, operational or accounting concerns.

Actually at the time it was possible to unmaintain a switch right into obsolescence in 4 years. By the late 80's, and then accelerating in the early 90's, there were so many technical changes in the functionality required, that if regular upgrades were not performed on time it would all of a sudden become a *major* emergency to install many upgrades all at once. The reason is because the software is of course upgraded regularly, and does not support hardware that was declared obsolete back farther than a specific interval. I'm not sure that my memory is correct, and I definitely can't remember the intervals, but every three minor software upgrades was a major upgrade, and I believe they only supported systems backwards for three major upgrades. If I remember right, that would mean without the proper upgrades, in 3 years NTI would not support the switch.

Hmmm... no support when the system is 5 years old??? Sounds exactly like somebody didn't manage the regular upgrades properly. Note that the AUTOVON system was the only one to get away with doing that! But NTI had a totally separate support system for AUTOVON, and they wouldn't let the two systems even rub shoulders. Dealing with the AUTOVON support system in Richardson TX was significantly different that dealing with Raleigh (east coast) or San Ramon (west coast). They would let us do things like monitor what they were doing, because we were a civilian contractor. But on military switches they typically checked *regularly* to make sure nobody was printing out what they were doing. They were absolutely hiding all knowledge of how the switch worked from the military.

The primary motivation for these upgrades in the late 70's and early 80's had been simply better hardware, bug fixes, and continuing efforts at improved software. But in the mid 80's things changed, and ISDN, equal access, and then SS-7 all caused huge, and mandatory, software and hardware migrations. One other change, strictly of Northern Telecom's doing, was when they restructured their licensing to "encourage" LECs to implement a network topology using one main switch, with a million dollar software load, and many remotes with relatively inexpensive software loads costing less than a quarter of a million each. Every company with multiple full featured switching systems immediately converted as many as possible to remotes, served by a single front end.

--