One of the more obscure hobbies that I have is collecting, restoring, and making old telephone systems work.

I have around 20 telephone systems and PBXs going back to 1980 however due to the rising cost of electricity (now 42c/kWh, up from 19.25c/kWh a year ago) I only run a subset at any given time.

Systems in the collection get their lines from two different "exchanges" depending on what features they support:
- ISDN systems get Primary Rate ISDN trunks from a Cisco ISR, which has 16x E1/T1 ports.
- Analog systems get their trunks from my NEC SV9100 PBX, which currently has cards for 104 analog extension ports.

Within the collection itself I have a lot of systems including:
- NEC SV9100.
- NEC NEAX 7400 ICS. A true PBX, and probably the most complicated system in my collection.
- Ericsson BusinessPhone 250
- Avaya IP Office
- Alcatel OmniPCX
- Samsung OfficeServ
- Panasonic NS700 and NCP1000
- Avaya Partner ACS (I had to import this from the USA as you can't get them at all in Australia!)
- And many more

All of the systems that support direct inward dialing (DID) are part of a common dial plan so I can for example pick up x2002 on the NEC SV9100 and dial 2420 on the NEC NEAX or 2201 on the IP Office.

Then of course there's the analog phone collection, which has a variety of handsets going back to around 1930 (an old Candlestick telephone!). Some of these need a bit of restoration work but when they're operational they're given extensions on one of the PBXs - generally the NEC SV9100 if they support tone dialing, or the NEC NEAX if they're rotary dial.

Lots of fun but lots of work!
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That is absolutely fascinating. I've never heard of someone collecting old phones. I remember at my local bookstore always looking at the back page (cover?) of the 2600 magazine where they would have pictures of payphones from various countries. I find stuff like this very interesting.

Do you have a webpage with any pictures of your collection? I would be interested in seeing what everything looks like. Are there many other collectors out there? Are the old phones difficult to find or fairly common?

... Real Programmers balance their checkbooks in hex

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Re: Re: Telephone Collecting
By: Sbaitso to Ewing on Sun Jul 23 2023 03:18 pm

That is absolutely fascinating. I've never heard of someone collecting old phones. I remember at my local bookstore always looking at the back page (cover?) of the 2600 magazine where they would have pictures of payphones from various countries. I find stuff like this very interesting.

Yes, 2600 always has photos of payphones in the back which are fascinating. I'm a lifetime subscriber of 2600 and have been reading it for most of my life. Coming across a copy in the local newsagent when I was around 12 is probably what helped kick off this lifetime interest in telephony!

Do you have a webpage with any pictures of your collection? I would be interested in seeing what everything looks like. Are there many other collectors out there? Are the old phones difficult to find or fairly common?

I do have a site under development but it's not finished yet. I'll post a link when it's up and running!

There are a few other collectors out there and I've become quite good friends with a few of them. Sadly as hosted telephony platforms become commonplace it's becoming harder and harder to find systems as they're just the same old boring handsets from Cisco, Avaya, and Yealink but within the collector community we often swap things around to get what we want - whether they be telephones, system cards, or even whole systems themselves.
--- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
* Origin: Mortal BBS - mortalbbs.com - Blue Mountains, AU (954:895/29)