Computer Consoles Inc. or CCI was a telephony and computer company located in Rochester, New York, USA, which did business first as a private, and then ultimately a public company from 1969-1990. CCI provided world-wide telephone companies with Directory Assistance (DA) equipment and other systems to automate various operator and telephony services, and later sold a line of 68k-based Unix computers and the Power 6/32 Unix supermini. In telecommunication, Telephony encompasses the general use of equipment to provide voice communication over distances. ... The NASA Columbia Supercomputer. ... Nickname: Motto: Rochester: Made for Living Location of Rochester in New York State Country United States State New York County Monroe Government  - Mayor Robert Duffy (D) Area  - City  37. ... The Motorola 680x0/0x0/m68k/68k/68K family of CISC microprocessor CPU chips were 32-bit from the start, and were the primary competition for the Intel x86 family of chips in personal computers of the 1980s and early 1990s. ... Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ... A supermini can be: A car size class used in Europe. ...

History

Computer Consoles Incorporated (CCI) was founded to develop one of the earliest versions of a smart computer terminal, principally for the telephony market. Due to the state of the art in electronics at the time, this smart terminal was the size of an average sized office desk.

Automating Operator Services

Due to the success of the smart computer terminal, and the expertise the company gained in understanding Operator Services, the company started development programs to offer networked computer systems that provided contract managed access time, specified as a guaranteed number of seconds to paint the operators first screen of information, to various telephony databases such as such as Directory Assistance and Intercept. The largest such system was designed and installed for British Telecom to provide initially Directory Assistance throughout Great Britain and Ireland. These systems combined Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 computers with custom hardware and software developed by CCI. In telecommunications, directory assistance is a telephone call an individual can make to find out a specific wireline phone number and / or address of a residence or business. ... In telecommunication, the term intercept has the following meanings: 1. ... BT Group plc (which trades as just BT, and is commonly known by its former name, British Telecom) is the privatised former British state telecommunications operator. ... The DEC logo Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the computer industry. ... The PDP-11 was a 16-bit minicomputer sold by Digital Equipment Corp. ...

Automatic Voice Response

To provide higher levels of automation to operator services, CCI introduced in the early 1980s various Automatic Voice Response (AVR) systems tightly integrated with its popular Directory Assistance systems. AVR provided voice response of the customer requested data, almost universally starting the prompt with a variant of the phrase, "The number is". Early systems were based on very small vocabulary synthesised speech chips, follow-on systems utilized 8-bit PCM, and later ADPCM voice playback using audio authored either by CCI or the local phone company. PCM is an initialism which can have different meanings: Phase Change Material Pulse-code modulation, a way to digitally encode signals representing sound and their video counterparts Potential Cancer Marker Communist Party of Mexico Plug Compatible Manufacturer Power-train control module, a computer in a car which controls the car...

Digital Switching

To provide even higher levels of automation, CCI started a very aggressive program in the early 1980s to develop a PCM digital telephone switching system targeted for automated, user defined call scenarios. Initial installations handled intercept and calling card calls by capturing Multi-Frequency and DTMF audio band signaling via the DSP based Multi-Frequency Receiver board. Later systems added speaker independent speech recognition via the Quad Digital Audio Processor board to initially automate collect calls. In telephony Multi-Frequency (MF) is an outdated, in-band signaling technique. ... Dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF), also known as Touch Tone® is used for telephone signaling over the line in the voice frequency band to the call switching center. ... According to the articles, Multi-Frequency Pulsing in Switching, AIEE Transactions, Volume 68, Part 1, 1949, pp. ... QDAP Printed Circuit Card, circa 1987 The Quad Digital Audio Processor (QDAP) was a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) based printed circuit card designed at Computer Consoles Inc. ...

PERPOS, Perpetual Processing Operating System

To provide better control over transaction processing, significant improvements in fault tolerance, and richer support for networking, CCI developed PERPOS, a Unix derivative that provided integrated support for real-time transaction processing, load balancing, and fault tolerant features such as hot and cold standby.

Power 5 and Power 6 computers

PERPOS was developed for a line of Motorola 68000-based computers called the Power 5 series, which CCI developed. They were a line of multi-processor, fault-tolerant computers, code-named after the Great Lakes. The Power 5 line also included single-processor 68000-based computers, code-named after the Finger Lakes, running a regular Unix port called PERPOS-S, which was originally a Version 7-derived kernel with a System III-derived userland; the kernel was later modified to provide System III compatibility. The Motorola 68000 is a 32-bit CISC microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor (formerly Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector). ... The Great Lakes from space The Laurentian Great Lakes are a group of five large lakes in North America on or near the Canada-United States border. ... The Finger Lakes, a major tourist destination in the west-central section of Upstate New York, are actually eleven in number, but only seven of the largest are commonly identified as such. ... Seventh Edition Unix, also called Version 7 Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix operating system. ... A kernel connects the application software to the hardware of a computer. ... System III was a version of the Unix operating system released by AT&Ts Unix System Group (USG). ... For information on the company called UserLand, see UserLand Software. ...

Later, Computer Consoles opened a development center in Irvine, California, USA, which developed a proprietary minicomputer, competitive with the Digital Equipment Corporation VAX, called the Power 6/32, code-named "Tahoe" after Lake Tahoe. It ran an internally-developed BSD port, and the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley also ported 4.3BSD to it, producing the release known as "4.3-Tahoe". A companion 68010-based machine, the Power 5/32, also ran the internally-developed BSD port; it was code-named "Walden" after Walden Pond. Location of Irvine within Orange County, California. ... The DEC logo Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the computer industry. ... VAX is a 32-bit computing architecture that supports an orthogonal instruction set (machine language) and virtual addressing (i. ... Lake Tahoe is a large freshwater lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains of the United States. ... BSD redirects here; for other uses see BSD (disambiguation). ... Computer Systems Research Group was a research group that was dedicated to enhancing AT&T Unix operating system and funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. ... Sather tower (the Campanile) looking out over the San Francisco Bay and Mount Tamalpais. ... The Motorola MC68010 processor is a 16/32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, made in the early 1980s. ... Thoreaus Cove, Concord, Mass. ...

Unisys corporation remarketed the Power 6 as the U7000 series. Targeted as a general perpose Unix - VAX killer, it suceeded for solutions where processing power was king. Universities requiring time-shared compilation engines for their students were particlarly keen. The machine suffered when applied to general purpose database application environments. Not least becuase the I/O subsystem over-relied on the central processing power (much as the VAX did) and thus used relativly dumb I/O processors. The power 6 running either version of Unix also suffered from the inefficent memory managment inherent in BSD 4.3 [see The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System s. Leffer, Marshall Kirk McKusick, M. Karels, and J. Quarterman]. The core of this was the use of a 1/2k page rather than a 4k page. Leffer et al. suggest they did this due to conserns about VAX support of 4k dynamic paging. The power 6 had no such problems, but no operating system to support it! The final issue with the Unisys 7000 series running Unix was the lack for symmetric multi-processing: All system calls would have to run on the "Master" processor, forcing a dual processing machine to reschedule a process from the "slave" processor for every system call. The neat result of this meant database benchmarks often ran faster on a single processor than a dual! Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS), based in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, United States, and incorporated in Delaware[2], is a global provider of information technology services and solutions. ... Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ... Marshall Kirk McKusick (b. ...

Office Automation

Due to the success the company obtained in network based data management, the company partnered with, and ultimately acquired, a small company in Reston, Virginia, called RLG, to develop a terminal-based integrated office automation system. RLG had had experience developing this kind of system for the US Department of Transportation. The office suite, called OfficePower, provided an integrated set of functions such as word processing, spreadsheet, email, and database access via a compact desktop smart terminal backed by a mini, or super mini-computer. Although the system software was ported to various Unix variants, most installations were hosted on CCI's Power 5 and Power 6 machines running CCI's Unix ports. Lake Anne Plaza in Reston Reston is an internationally known planned community whose goal was to revolutionize post-World War II concepts of land use and residential/corporate development in American suburbia. ...

One installation was at the US Naval Surface Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia; it consisted of two VAXes running 4.2BSD and a number of Power 5/20 machines running PERPOS-S. The VAXes were connected to each other by an Ethernet, but, at the time, it wasn't cost-effective to provide Ethernet adapters on all the Power 5/20 machines. The Power 5/20s were using 3Com's UNET as their TCP/IP implementation; it included an encapsulation scheme for sending IP datagrams over serial lines. Rick Adams implemented this encapsulation scheme as a line discipline for 4.2BSD; this was the origin of SLIP. The United States Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD), named for Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren, is located in Dahlgren, Virginia and is part of the Naval Surface Warfare Center. ... Dahlgren is a census-designated place located in King George County, Virginia. ... Ethernet is a large, diverse family of frame-based computer networking technologies that operates at many speeds for local area networks (LANs). ... 3Com (NASDAQ: COMS) is a manufacturer best known for its computer network infrastructure products. ... The Internet Protocol (IP) is a data-oriented protocol used for communicating data across a packet-switched internetwork. ... A male DE-9 serial port on the rear panel of a PC. In computing, a serial port consists of an interface on a computer system through which information transfers in or out one bit at a time (contrast parallel port). ... Rick Adams was an Internet pioneer and the founder of UUNET, which, in the mid and late 1990s, was the worlds largest Internet Services Provider (ISP). ... In telecommunications, a slip is a positional displacement in a sequence of transmitted symbols that causes the loss or insertion of one or more symbols. ...

Accomplishments

CCI actively participated in various telecom and public standard bodies such as ANSI. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is a private, non-profit standards organization that produces industrial standards in the United States. ...

CCI actively participated in the development of Unix and the C programming language. Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ... Wikibooks has a book on the topic of C Programming The C programming language (often, just C) is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie for use on the Unix operating system. ...

CCI was a pioneer of design and deployment of real-time, transaction processing computer systems.

CCI was a pioneer of design and deployment of true fault tolerant computing systems.

CCI was a pioneer of design and deployment of distributed database access.

CCI was a pioneer of design and deployment of distributed file system access.

CCI deployed the largest multi-processor, shared file-system, Unix based (PERPOS) system of the era in British Telecom in the late 1980s. The design concepts of the system were years ahead of its time.

CCI was a pioneer of design and deployment of voice response to the public telephone networks to automate traditional operator based services.

CCI was a pioneer of design and deployment of speech recognition to the public telephone networks to automate traditional operator based services.

CCI was one of earliest commercial entities connected to the Internet as cci.com.

CCI controlled over 90% of the world market for equipment to automate telephony Directory services at the time of acquisition by STC. Standard Telephones and Cables Ltd (later STC plc) was a British telephone, telegraph, radio, telecommunications and related equipment R&D manufacturer. ...

Acquisition By Standard Telephones and Cables

STC acquired CCI effective January 1, 1989. At this time CCI was organized as two major business units: one in Rochester ("CCI - Rochester"), which manufactured telecommunications equipment, and one in Irvine ("CCI - Irvine"), which manufactured computer hardware and software for office systems. In reality there was a third operation which was a financing group that held the commercial leases for equipment typically sold to telephone companies. At the time of the acquisition the lease base was rumored to be valued at over $700M US dollars. Standard Telephones and Cables Ltd (later STC plc) was a British telephone, telegraph, radio, telecommunications and related equipment R&D manufacturer. ...

Also at the time of the acquisition, CCI was involved in a dispute with General Telephone and Electronics ("GTE") over GTE's failure to supply CCI with certain "computer chips" for a new generation of computers being developed by CCI (the "GTE litigation").

After completion of the acquisition, CCI - Rochester became a subsidiary of an STC operating unit known as STC Telecom. Shortly thereafter, CCI - Irvine was sold to another STC operating unit in the computer business, known as ICL, for net book value of the assets. CCI - Rochester was kept under the jurisdiction of STC Telecom, which was also in the telecommunications business. International Computers Ltd, or ICL, was a large British computer hardware company that operated from 1968 until 2002, when it was renamed Fujitsu Services Limited after its parent company, Fujitsu. ...

Acquisition By Northern Telecom Ltd.

STC Telecom was acquired by Northern Telecom effective March of 1991 and became part of the company's European operations. Effective January 1, 1992, CCI was transferred to the Northern Telecom U.S. entity, and was eventually merged into this business unit. At that time, CCI was dissolved and Northern Telecom assumed its assets and liabilities. Nortel BCM 200 coupled with an IP phone Nortel Networks Corporation TSX: NT NYSE: NT, formerly known as Northern Telecom Limited and now known simply as Nortel, is a multinational telecommunications equipment manufacturer headquartered in Toronto, Canada. ... Nortel BCM 200 coupled with an IP phone Nortel Networks Corporation TSX: NT NYSE: NT, formerly known as Northern Telecom Limited and now known simply as Nortel, is a multinational telecommunications equipment manufacturer headquartered in Toronto, Canada. ... Nortel BCM 200 coupled with an IP phone Nortel Networks Corporation TSX: NT NYSE: NT, formerly known as Northern Telecom Limited and now known simply as Nortel, is a multinational telecommunications equipment manufacturer headquartered in Toronto, Canada. ...