Newsletter No. 14

CUHK Newsletter No. 14 Jan.1991 O Siemens ， how long shall we stay with you and put up with you ？ Time and again we explain to our friends and relatives that we've not been chatting endlessly over the phone with our stockbroker or some insurance man, that it is due to no fault of ours our phone is always 'engaged during office hours’ and that we've been trying equally hard to ring them, though in vain. Few really understand. Here in Hong Kong in the nineties, not many people have had the opportunity to experience the workings of a telephone system as ancient as the one we have on campus. Ten Years of Abundance Named Siemens ESK 3000 E PABX, the system is nearly as old as the campus itself. First installed in 1971 ， it had its day in the seventies, being the most advanced among its contemporaries. At a time when the University had a total staff force of under 1,500 (including some 500 minor staff), its 72 trunk lines (36 for incoming and 36 for outgoing calls) and 1,000 extension lines were more than adequate to serve the University's telephonic needs. Ten Years of Want But very soon it's a system past its prime. The University underwent rapid expansion in the early eighties and a much enlarged staff force means a greater demand for both extension and trunk lines on the campus. These the Siemens PABX was unable to provide without very costly modifications. As a makeshift, which finally turned out to be a decade-long arrangement, more party- lines were installed so that some new comers would share extension lines with old staff. And instead of providing more trunk lines to accommodate the increased number of incoming and outgoing phone calls, a gadget was fixed to the system in 1983 to directly connect incoming calls that managed to get through to the relevant extensions. (Prior to 1983, all callers had to dial the main exchange number first and the telephone operators would connect their calls to the required extensions.) The effect might not have been intentional: out of hearing, out of mind; the frequency of incoming telephone calls became nobody's concern, let alone the adequacy of merely 36 trunk lines for such calls. So when similar systems in other organizations were one by one replaced by newfangled networks with larger capacities and novel functions, the Siemens PABX remained unchallenged on the campus. The heavy black telephone sets with dials continued to squat stubbornly on each and every office-desk, unwilling to give way to their posh push-button cousins. Meantime only those with the greatest patience and persistence would succeed in the scramble for trunk lines to make one brief telephone call. But the University continued to expand. By January 1987 ， the number of full-time staff had grown to 2,440, and the Siemens PABX had aged to such an extent that signs of senility became too apparent to ignore. Vehement squeals that warned you not to make any further attempts to dial when it was overworked deteriorated to whimpers. It started to hiccup, lisp, and stammer. By fits it lost its voice altogether and became totally irresponsive to outside stimuli. It's time the system be scrapped. 6