AT&T Corp, 1983

Before There Were Ringtones There Were Rings

In celebration of our new exhibition, The Senses: Beyond Vision, this Object of the Day post explores the multisensory experience of an object in Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection. Today’s blog post was written by Cynthia Trope and originally published on March 7, 2013.

If you grew up in America in the mid-1950s – 1980s, you no doubt encountered the model 500 telephone or one of its variants in almost every home or workplace you entered. The model 500 became the standard desk-style phone in the U.S., with over 93 million units produced for homes and offices between 1949 and the divestiture of AT&T (the Bell System) in 1984. I have distinct memories of my parents’ harvest gold model 500: the resistance of the rotary wheel against my finger as I dialed; the steady ticking of the wheel as it rotated back; the weight and “thunk” of the handset as I dropped it back into its cradle after a call; and the insistent mechanical “rrring” of an incoming call.

Industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss began as a consultant to Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL) in 1930. Working with the company’s engineers, he sought simplicity and unity of form in their telephone equipment, resulting in the model 302, the first Dreyfuss design by BTL, in 1937. As demand for telephone service increased after World War II, BTL sought a new, sturdier design that would be easier to service (all telephones were leased at the time), and more comfortable for a growing range of customers.

The model 500 debuted in 1949. Dreyfuss’s care in designing a user-based object is evident in the changes he made: he modified the angular 302 body into a softer sculptural form in a lighter durable plastic. Unlike the 302’s numbers and letters directly under the finger holes, the model 500 had the numbers and letters in a ring outside the finger wheel for increased legibility and greater accuracy when dialing.  The new handset, known as the model G, was flatter than its predecessor, making it more comfortable to hold and allowing it to be cradled against the user’s shoulder, freeing the hands.

In 1953, BTL and Dreyfuss updated the model 500, producing it in several colors and replacing the black metal finger wheel with a clear plastic version that would complement any color phone.  The 1953 model also eliminated the long straight cord, replacing it with a coiled one, a feature used until the advent of the cordless phone.  Deeming the model 500 a success by the mid-1950s, BTL added a wall-mounted variant, introduced a touch-tone version in 1963, with additional models introduced over the next two decades. Production of the traditional model 500 ceased in the mid-1980s, but some of these durable phones are still available and adaptable for use today.

  The Senses: Design Beyond Vision is on view at Cooper Hewitt through October 28, 2018.

  Cynthia Trope is the Associate Curator of Product Design and Decorative Arts at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

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Digital Equipment Corporation Language Download PDF Watch Edit Not to be confused with Digital Research or Western Digital. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC /dɛk/), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline. Digital Equipment CorporationIndustryComputer hardware Computer software Computer servicesFateAcquired by Compaq, after divestiture of major assets.SuccessorCompaq (1998–2002) Hewlett-Packard (2002–2015) HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (2015–present)Founded1957; 63 years agoFounderKen Olsen, Harlan Anderson Defunct1998HeadquartersMaynard, Massachusetts, United States Key people Ken Olsen (founder, president, and chairman) Harlan Anderson (co-founder) C. Gordon Bell (VP Engineering, 1972–83)ProductsPDP minicomputers VAX minicomputers Alpha servers and workstations DECnet VT100 terminal LAT and Terminal server StrongARM microprocessors Digital Linear Tape Number of employees over 140,000 (1987)Websitedec.com Although the company produced many different product lines over their history, they are best known for their work in the minicomputer market starting in the mid-1960s. The company produced a series of machines known as the PDP line, with the PDP-8 and PDP-11 being among the most successful minis of all time. Their success was only surpassed by another DEC product, the late-1970s VAX "supermini" systems that were designed to replace the PDP-11. Although a number of competitors had successfully competed with Digital through the 1970s, the VAX cemented the company's place as a leading vendor in the computer space. As microcomputers improved in the late 1980s, especially with the introduction of RISC-based workstation machines, the performance niche of the minicomputer was rapidly eroded. By the early 1990s, the company was in turmoil as their mini sales collapsed and their attempts to address this by entering the high-end market with machines like the VAX 9000 were market failures. After ... https://www.instagram.com/p/CBcqtPTjFwC/?igshid=tehytwoac9uv

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The organization has had different enterprises in its 152-year history. It was established as a mash process and had for quite some time been related with elastic and links, yet since the 1990s spotlights on huge scale broadcast communications foundations, innovation improvement and permitting. Nokia is an outstanding real supporter of the versatile communication industry, having aided the advancement of the GSM, 3Gand LTE measures (and right now in 5G), and is best known for having been the biggest overall seller of cell phones and PDAs for a period. After an organization with Microsoft and market battles, its cell phone business was inevitably purchased by the previous, making Microsoft Mobile as its successor in 2014. After the deal, Nokia started to center all the more broadly around its media communications foundation business and on the Internet of things, set apart by the divestiture of its here mapping division and the securing of Alcatel-Lucent. The organization additionally entered virtual reality and advanced wellbeing (the last by obtaining Withings), and is the proprietor of logical research association Bell Labs.[12] The Nokia mark has since come back to the portable and PDA showcase through a permitting plan with HMD Global.

On 12 June 1996, Nokia declared the offer of its TV business to Canada/Hong Kong. The TV producing plant in Germany stopped manufacturing in September 1996. The deal incorporated a manufacturing plant in Turku, and the rights to utilize the Nokia, Finlux, Luxor, Salora, Schaub-Lorenz and Oceanic brands until the finish of 1999. Some of these brands were later sold to different organizations.

Nokia was the first to dispatch advanced satellite recipients in the UK, reported in March 1997. In August 1997 Nokia presented the principal computerized satellite collector with Common Interface (CI) bolster. In 1998 Nokia turned into the picked provider to create the world's first advanced earthbound TV top boxes by British Digital Broadcasting (BDB), which was in the end propelled as ON digital.

In 2005 Nokia built up a Linux-based working framework called Maemo, which delivered that year on the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. In April 2010 Nokia presented its next lead cell phone, the Nokia N8, which would be the first to keep running on Symbian^3. However it was postponed for a long time which discolored the organization's image, particularly after the disappointment of its past leader N97 and harder rivalry from Apple and the rising Google.

Nokia Networks is Nokia Corporation's biggest division. It is a multinational information systems administration and broadcast communications gear organization headquartered in Espoo, Finland, and is the world's fourth-biggest telecoms hardware producer, estimated by 2016 incomes (after Huawei, Ericsson and Cisco). In USA it contends with Ericsson on building 5G systems for administrators, while Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corporation were adequately restricted.

The Real deal on TO THINK THAT I THOUGHT MY BUSINESS WOULD GROW , why do growing businesses often founder, when IT doesn’t grow with them? https://www.facebook.com/ITparable/

An Interview with Josh Greenbaum, author, and Helene Abrams, originator of TO THINK THAT I THOUGHT MY BUSINESS WOULD GROW (eprentise, May 2017)

Q.  What inspired your new book/video To Think That I Thought My Business Might Grow?

HA.  Throughout my career, I have been involved with hundreds of large organizations who have been influenced by the media, executive sponsors, or large consulting organizations to use technology to embark on huge, multi-million dollar projects to “reengineer” their business processes with promises of lower costs, faster response, better customer service, large returns on their investment, being more competitive, etc. More often than not, these projects were not successful; they took longer, cost much more than they were budgeted for, and most importantly, they did not get the results they wanted.  Also, by the time the projects were “finished,” the business or organization had changed, and the technology and the processes no longer represented the current requirements or allowed flexibility for newer initiatives.

JG.  The problems in To Think That I Thought My Business Might Grow are common ones businesses report time and again. I was inspired by the opportunity to tell this age-old story in an accessible way. Besides being an industry analyst and consultant in enterprise software, I have published lyrics and written short stories. When Helene explained her idea of a humorous book to explain these problems, I was thrilled to give it a try.

Q.  Is this a parable for business?

HA.  I’m not sure how much of a moral lesson this is, but it is definitely a story that businesses need to understand in order to succeed.

JG.  Things happen, such as mergers and acquisitions, launching a new line of business or opening a new subsidiary to go after an opportunity, that necessitate IT change. It's usually difficult to make business changes inside packaged software systems like Oracle®, one of the software products many companies use. In too many cases, problems develop because businesses put too much faith in technology without considering the ramifications for their business.

Q.  What are the common problems with IT that can make a growing business "a mess"?  

HA.  These problems are not just for a “growing” business, but for any business. 1) Not documenting the decisions made and the rationale for those decisions including the business reason, the impact of the decision, the configuration, or the customization involved. 2) Making IT decisions without getting the business involved early or training the business users before the implementation. 3) IT is attracted by new technologies and implementing the latest and greatest. This can be for their own personal career growth, because they think they understand the business better than the users, or just part of their personalities to try new technologies, bells or whistles.

Q. What happens when business users don’t understand the new technology or new system?

HA. Their energy is focused on the technology rather than on what they need to do to make their business better. They may extensively customize an out-of-the-box system to replicate what the users had before, rather than understanding the differences in how the new system works. Many times, the business wants to replicate the old system because they are comfortable with it, and they don’t thoroughly understand the features and functions of the new system before making their decisions.

Q. How could this be avoided?

HA. There's a lack of standard definitions and processes before implementing a new system - i.e., standard definitions of items, a standard chart of accounts, a standard calendar, a common organization structure, etc. Too often in the past, each division, location, or part of the organization did things their own way. That meant that in order to report or to implement a data warehouse or a business intelligence system, data needed to be extracted and manually transformed. It resulted in a “Tower of Babel.”

Q.  How does the solution to implement a new IT system often compound the problems?

HA.  Making the business better is more often a data issue than a technology issue. When there is a focus on the new or different technology, often the perception is that the data problems will go away. However, if the data is not consistent, complete, or correct in the old system, just moving it to a new system isn’t going to fix the problem.  

JG.  Business people struggle to understand how business intersects with technology and how the changes in their business intersect with the new technology. Tech people struggle to understand the impact their work has on business changes. This leaves a gap in knowledge that makes it difficult to fit the new system to the business, and without that knowledge, technology cannot serve the business appropriately.

Q. What's needed?

HA.  Consistency – a single source of data with a common definition throughout the application. Completeness – all the relevant data is in one place and is not pieced together, aggregated, or integrated from several different places. Correctness – the summary data is derived from an original source or transactions. The ability to cleanly roll up from the transactions to the summary and drill down to the detail, without manipulating the data.

JG.  Teamwork between IT and the business side is essential. This is an important way to ensure that the right data is being used in the right way for the right reasons. Q. Why is manipulating data a problem?

HA. The process of manually extracting, transforming, and loading data (used for data migration) is custom code, and can introduce coding errors and inconsistencies. It also doesn’t “fix” the bad data in the source system. It is resource intensive, and impossible to see the results until all the coding is done (often months or years). Governance is not put in place to make sure that the users are not creating their own silos or duplicating data that is already there.  

Q.  Who do you consider the audience for this book?

HA. Anyone who runs an IT department, budgets for one, or for whom technology decisions are driving the business decisions (or who thinks that new technology adoption will improve their business).

Q.  What do you mean by "finished but not done"?

HA.  When you first implement a system, you base the setups or configurations on the current state of the business. No one has a crystal ball to know what the next five years will bring in terms of business or technology changes.  

Q.  How does this occur?

HA.   I was Oracle’s first Apps consultant in 1988. After Oracle, I went to Deloitte & Touché and E&Y (large system integrators – SIs). We would implement many huge Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) projects, sometimes for customers who had 100+ sites. We would implement at the first site, go live, and then go to the second site to implement. By the time we got to the third or fourth site, something had changed in the business – either there was a merger, acquisition, or divestiture, or they had to comply with new statutory or regulatory requirements in a new market, or the technology changed (i.e., at some point, there was the bandwidth for a company to operate globally).

Q. What did these customers do?

HA. Their only choice was to do a full reimplementation. That means that they had to hire an army of consultants, rethink every decision, and start from scratch configuring the system. Then they had to manually migrate the data from the old environment to the new one which involved writing extensive extract, transform, and load scripts, leave behind most of their history, and spend huge amounts of money all over again – sometimes the cost was the same or more than the original implementation. Q. What's the solution to your mantra "finished, but not done"?

HA.   The original implementation was finished and working, but the organization was not ever done, because the system (Oracle EBS in this case, but it was true for all other ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] systems as well) did not align with the business. I thought that there must be a way to allow for ongoing changes in the business without starting over again, so I came up with this software.

JG.  (Joking) Technology is always perfect, the problem is the people who have to use it. When the implementation of new software has been undertaken without bringing the right people into to process, project “mediocrity” or outright failure is the norm. Tech has to be matched with what the business needs. This is difficult and honored more in the breach than in the observance.

Q.  In what ways might companies use your book/video to enable managers to make better decisions?

JG. One of the biggest problems is stakeholders on both sides who fail to understand what the other side needs and wants. This lack of communication and empathy is at root of many of the problems that companies face when their IT projects go south. I think this book shows what happens when that communication doesn’t exist, and what happens when it does.

Q.  Do you think communication is often lacking between departments and managers?

JG.: There is a reflex to throw tech at a problem and SIs make good money on it. SIs, by rote, are following a script from 25 years ago that mandates that tech can solve all problems, and if you just work harder and put in more hours you can solve anything. But more technology cannot guarantee success if IT isn’t working with other teams in these projects.

Q.  How can a company resolve essential problems, and embody concepts such as "Agile," "Responsive," and "Hyperconvergence"?

JG.  Agile is being able to iterate change rapidly in order to meet changing conditions. A business seeks out and tests new opportunities, finds what could help it recover from failure, and moves on. The pace has of business has increased exponentially, and responsiveness, knowing or anticipating the next new thing customers will want, is essential to business success; this is as much about adopting a new mindset as it is about adopting new technology. But when new technologies – and new business processes – are implemented, they need to work in sync together. This is what hyperconvergence is all about.

Q.  What's the take away from the experience of your book and video?

JG.  IT doesn't have to be implemented the way we always have done it. It’s essential to build consensus across the silos inherent in any business. If technology and business don’t work well together, neither can be successful.

  For Further Information

Contact: Susan Weinstein

Publicist, To Think That I Thought That My Business Would Grow

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