ROLM

~ the obit ~

Four engineers out of Stanford started ROLM in 1969 and named it after themselves, taking the first letter from Richeson, Oshman, Loewenstern and Maxfield. The first product was not a telephone. It was a militarized computer, the 1601, a licensed implementation of the Data General Nova built to survive being bolted into something that shakes. The Army called it the AN/UYK-12. Inside the company they called it the RuggedNova, which tells you what kind of place it was.

The pivot came in 1975 with the CBX, a computerized branch exchange. Until then an office telephone system was a switch, a piece of electromechanical apparatus that connected one pair of wires to another. ROLM's version was a computer that happened to answer phones, and once you accept that framing, everything the eighties office did with a telephone becomes possible: extension features written in software, and later PhoneMail, which is voicemail in a rack. They also built the handsets, the ROLMphones, so the whole path from the desk to the trunk line was theirs.

By 1980 ROLM had more systems deployed in North America than AT&T, which had spent seventy years owning that ground and never expected a Santa Clara startup on it. Fiscal 1984 revenue was around $660 million. IBM had taken a fifteen percent stake in may 1982 and was up to twenty three percent by september 1984, when it bought the rest in what was at the time the largest acquisition the valley had seen. Ken Oshman told his employees that IBM understood the need to preserve ROLM's informal style. It did not.

Nobody chooses their office telephone system, which is why almost no one alive has an opinion about a PBX brand. In Turkey the names on that equipment were Netaş and Karel, and I only know those because someone once opened the closet and showed me the box. ROLM is the least visible kind of dead company: millions of people used its product every working day for two decades by picking up a handset in a building somebody else outfitted.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

The CBX arrived at the right moment. Companies were putting terminals on desks and were starting to want the phone system to know things, and AT&T was fighting a regulatory war it would lose in 1982. ROLM sold against the Northern Telecom SL-1 and the AT&T Dimension with a machine that could be upgraded by loading software instead of by sending a truck.

The other thing it sold was itself as a place to work. The Santa Clara campus had a swimming pool and a recreation center at a time when that was genuinely strange, and it became a standard case study in what a technology company owed the people in it. That reputation is a large part of why IBM wanted the company and a large part of why the purchase went badly.

~ what IBM bought ~

IBM wanted into telecommunications and figured buying the number two PBX maker was the fastest route. What it got was a hardware business with a sales motion nothing like its own, sold through channels IBM did not run, into buyers who were facilities managers rather than data processing directors. Analysts later put the losses at up to $100 million a year. The founders left. The informality that had been the point evaporated on contact with a corporation of four hundred thousand people.

Siemens took the manufacturing operations in a deal finalized in august 1989, and by 1992 had bought out IBM's remaining half of the joint marketing company. The unit kept its Santa Clara base and kept selling to the installed customers, who by then numbered in the tens of thousands of systems.

~ the long tail ~

The name went away in stages through the late nineties, absorbed into Siemens Business Communication Systems and eventually into what became Unify. There was no shutdown announcement because there was nothing to shut down, just a badge change on equipment that kept working.

Some of those CBX systems stayed in service into the 2000s at universities and hospitals, running on parts from secondary dealers because the phones on the desks were fine and replacing a campus switch costs real money. That is the peculiar afterlife of infrastructure. The company can be gone for a decade while the product keeps ringing.

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