ROLM
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ROLM Corporation was a technology company founded in Silicon Valley in 1969.
[edit] Products
The company first produced rugged mil-spec (military specification) computers which used Data General software. Over time, the company began to focus on digital voice, and produced some of the earliest examples of all-digital voice equipment, including Computerized Branch Exchanges (CBXs) and digital phones. Two of the most popular telecom systems were the ROLM CBX and ROLM Redwood (large-scale and small-scale PABX models, respectively). The CBX and Redwood were meant to directly compete with Northern Telecom's SL-1, AT&T Definity telephone systems and other computerized digital voice systems being developed at the time. The company also produced one of the first commercially successful voicemail systems, PhoneMail. Digital ROLM telephones were unique from other telephones due to the lack of a physical switchook button to hang up the phone. Instead a magnet was inserted in the handset and telephone set, and upon hang up of the phone, the magnetic connection disconnected the telephone line.
[edit] History
The company name was formed from the first letters of the founders names - Gene Richeson, Ken Oshman, Walter Loewenstern, and Robert Maxfield. The four men studied electrical engineering at Rice University and earned graduate degrees at Stanford University.
ROLM originally made flight computers for the military. Later, they branched into the telecom industry by designing the CBX. Even though it was the second digital switch on the market, it quickly outsold AT&T and became #2 behind the Nortel SL-1 switch. At one point, ROLM was poised to overtake Nortel as the leader in PBX sales in the US.
In 1984 IBM partnered with (and later acquired) ROLM Communications in Santa Clara. ROLM started to lose pace with Nortel due to product issues and they never recovered. The 9751 CBX, which has IBM's name on it, was a great product but when ISDN service became more affordable, IBM never really updated the 9751 to integrate correctly with ISDN. Nortel leaped ahead on that issue alone; Avaya and others gained ground and started to overtake ROLM. IBM's ROLM division was later half sold to Siemens AG in 1990. By 1993, Siemens bought out IBM's share in ROLM and the downturn continued. The ROLM name was eventually dropped in the late 1990s.
Currently, the Siemens Resale Services Group offers support for ROLM phone systems, including repair services for broken classic and later RISC ROLM phones and sales of refurbished units, as do many other secondary vendors. Many ROLMphones are still in use in large scale universities, institutions and some corporations (Entergy, Huntsman, the Arkla side of CenterPoint Energy, NASA, the Santa Fe side of BNSF railroad, etc.), which were large scale ROLM users from the early days and are still known for being very reliable, though Siemens no longer makes any updates or new models of the CBX and eventually will discontinue support by 2010 or when the new 4 digit area codes come into effect (last predicted to start in the early 2010s).
