________  ________  ________
   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