There was a company that made a 2616 set emulator - about the size of a modem. You plugged it in and when you called the box, it spoke back the DN you were calling from. It could also call you back if you wanted. Company is out of biz.
I am trying to get some other company to make a product like this again
- who does not matter - just a company that could be convinced there was a market for such a contraption, and at a minimal cost.
If you can spare 3 mouse clicks, go here:
If you've got Symposium, you can do it with about a five line script. Of course, this thing is VERY useful if you don't
Not really out of biz. Digital Techniques was acquired by MCK. Which then became Verso and then went back to being MCK. Similar to the stupidity of the SonicBlue and GoVideo mess a while back.
Anyway, the reason the box cease production as a lack of components. Nortel stopped making one of the parts they used. And the team found they could not produce more and stay in budget. At least not at the time. With today's FPGAs, DSPs, and MCs I bet anything is possible.
I guess production would have ended anyway even with available parts because of the management changes.
I have one of those little boxes up at work. Still worth every bit of change we spent on it. And does not require an external power brick since it runs off of the power provided by the line card.
OK, I admit it - I have one too, but I'd like to add one at our next largest site :-)
I have no doubt I and countless other lurkers could find someone to make this box in a minimal config of "reads back your number" within a few hours just by calling any of a few other electrical engineer pals - plus 5 or 10 trips to Radio Shack. But I think a number of existing products made today could be tweaked to read back the number and maybe much more.
Hallmark sells 90 second songs inside a greeting card - they useed to sell cards you could record into. I have a gig of drive space on my keyring and my cell phone can ask me a question if it doesen't understand what I said. Seems to me someone could build a thing that would be as widely assigned to techs as punchown tools are. Just plug into and digital set jack and it can read display, detect too loud or too quiet, cinfirm "you sound better" or "you sound worse" ....and when misplaced, call and tell you where it's plugged in :-)
We too had one of these boxes - only problem was that it would go off line. Had to power cycle it and hope it came back.
Since we are running an Asterisk server we wrote a script to do just that. Works like a champ. Only expense was the digicard.
If you have a UNIX programmer you're all set......
Do you have a sample script that you have used to do this? Are you willing to share?
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