As mentioned in the Vorstellungsrunde-Thread, one of my vices is collecting and working with obsolete payphones - but not just any payphones: It has to be Nortel Millennium devices.
A lot of information about those devices can be found on https://wiki.millennium.management/ - but here is the important bits to know:
- The phones cotain a Z80 processor and need to contact a backend server in order to receive/update configuration, billing rates, etc.
- Without the backend, it’s just a brick (unless you managed to get a so called “Demo-Code” ROM)
- The phone communicated through a Bell212A modem connection with the backend server
- The backend server is a (HP) Tandem server
- An operator could either dial directly into the Tandem and use the CLI for configuration or use the Telco Maximizer Windows application
Out of all the mentioned pieces of software, everything has been archived - except for the Tandem server application.
While getting everything else is fairly feasible by means of dumpster diving, semi-secret exchanges with other people interested in the topic, etc - getting the Tandem is close to impossible.
Nortel is out of business for a long time. Before they went under, they sold their payphone assets to a company called Quortech - which has also been dismantled; everything remaining has been absorbed by the canadian payphone operator WiMacTel.
When looking around - so far - we only knew of one remaining running Tandem server for those payphones: The one of WiMacTel in Canada.
That is until recently I met up with another Millennium-nerd who informed me that BH Telecom in Bosnia and Herzegovina did indeed also operate their own Millennium payphones in Continental Europe - and their own Tandem, too!
(It was already known that there were Millenniums built for the international market - Peru and Japan especially. But those were only known based on remnants in documentation - not because they have been observed “in the wild”).
Long story short: Someone on the inside at BH Telecom let us know, that they are scheduling to shut down their payphone service on the 22.02.2025 - and also decommission their Tandem server within the next 4 months.
Now we are getting to the meat of this post:
We would absolutely love to “rescue” this Tandem. If not the whole server, at least the software.
Of course, we don’t really need it - there has been a third party open-source backend been made available by other nerds… But I still feel strongly about wanting to conserve this for future generations as close as possible to the original “because we can”…
The issue that we’re facing right now: How to approach BH Telecom about this. Just two random nerds saying “Hello! I can haz Tandem please?” is probably not cutting it.
So we were hoping that by posting here, we could find someone who might now a “sponsoring instance” of enough public recognition that might push BH over the edge, since it looks more serious than just a random person asking for their hard- and software.
We tried contacting the https://www.racunalniski-muzej.si/ for sponsorship of this project - unfortunately with no responses so far…
So I am taking to this community, hoping that perhaps someone might know of another entity that we could rope into this project. Or - reaching for the stars - someone who happens to work at BHT and who can just wheel the thing out the door for us 