________ ________ ________
2018-07-03 / \/ \/ / \
/ __/ /_ _/
Here's a little history lesson about / _/ / /
Australian phones. Back in 1988 Telecom \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
Australia partnered with AWA and Alcatel to / \/ \/ / \
develop a replacement for their existing / _/ /_ _/
Touchfone series telephones. The original /- / _/ /
Touchfone series were an upgrade to the \________/\________/\___/____/
already long-standing 800 series phones so
were relatively complicated and expensive to manufacture. The result was the
T200 or TF200 phone; a slim and modern but cheap to manufacture unit that
could be used as a desk phone or wall mounted and allowed for minimal
maintenance.
The T200 series boasted recall & redial functions and a ten-number speed
dial memory. The first models used used a plastic membrane keypad but within a
year a revised model was released, replacing the membrane with rubber keys and
adding a card insert to label the numbers stored in the memory.
Later models and revisions included the ability to switch between pulse and
tone dialing, call waiting and call conferencing keys, models with headset
jacks and models with lock-out keys and later a small LCD to provide caller ID
functionality and to replace the memory keys. There was also a bolt-on speaker
phone unit for the residential Touchfones and an Executive model with built in
speaker phone and an extensive memory.
A little while back I wrote about picking up a couple Touchfones and a nice
Cisco SPA112 ATA[1] and those initial purchases have quickly snowballed into a
small collection. Thankfully for my wallet, I'm keeping the criteria pretty
strict. I want the best specimen of each model, not piles of the same model,
I'm not interested in the original membrane TF200s and anything that looks
vastly different from those original T200 models, even if it has the Touchfone
name, although I am going to try and add the Aristel 413MWW which isn't
technically a Touchfone. They've either re-used some of the molds from the
T200 series phones for manufacturing or just styled it really close to the
original Touchfone T200 models. It looks like a parallel universe Touchfone
haha.
For the sake of record keeping, because I'm going to lump almost everything
into a box to store it away for now, and because it's way more fun being
obsessive about something when you share that obsession I've put a summary of
the collection up on baud.baby[2]. I've got the details of what's in the
collection already and the state of it, a summary of what I still need to find
to consider the collection "complete", plus I'll throw in any other phone-
related items or info I feel like sharing.
I'm also going to try to start using it as a kind of collection point for
any Touchfone related information I can dig up or create so stay tuned for
that if you're interested in one man's ridiculous obsession with a very narrow
piece of Australian telephone history.
[1]
gopher://baud.baby/0/phlog/fs20180326.txt
[2]
gopher://baud.baby/1/phones
EOF
