PBX is history!

In a momentous decommissioning ceremony on 7 April 2004, Judy Green and Dolores Boyd of SCD's Network Engineering and Telecommunications Section shut down the Private Branch Exchange (PBX) at the NCAR Mesa Laboratory. The PBX functioned as the central phone switchboard for the Mesa Lab for 21 years.

Similar PBX switchboards routed phone traffic at Foothills Laboratories 1 and 4, Jeffco, and the old Pearl Street facility.

Judy is holding an 8" floppy disk containing software for running and backing up the system. (In the early days of PBX, "floppy disks" really were floppy!)

Judy and Dolores first started working at NCAR as telecom operators in the late 1970s.

For the full story of the decommissioning, and a brief history of UCAR's phone system, see "End of an era for the Private Branch Exchange."

Photo: Lynda Lester, NCAR/SCD