What Happened to ROLM Phones? Why ROLM Phone Systems Disappeared

ROLM was a familiar name on 1980s American office desks, printed on the telephone and on the switch that made it ring. Within eight years of its peak the company was bought, renamed, and sold abroad. Four Rice University engineers founded ROLM in 1969 to build ruggedized minicomputers for the military, then bet the company on digital telephone switching. The CBX arrived in 1975, when ROLM had roughly 100 employees and about $6 million in revenue. Sales reached nearly $660 million in the year ending June 1984, and that September IBM agreed to pay about $1.25 billion for the rest of it. Chapters in this story: • How did a military computer maker end up running America's office telephones? • What did a ROLM system cost once parts and software were counted? • Why did the 1984 Bell System breakup damage ROLM instead of freeing it? • Where did voice and data converge, if not inside the telephone switch? If you came back from lunch and saw the message lamp lit on your desk phone, you remember PhoneMail. Share what you remember in the comments. Subscribe for careful histories of the names that used to sit on American office desks. Sources: Final Test Report, ROLM Corporation EPABX Installation at Field Station Augsburg, Germany - U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Engineering Installation Agency, 1979: https://archive.org/download/DTIC_ADA07309... Telecom Technical Services Inc. v. Rolm Co., 388 F.3d 820 - U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, 2004: https://static.case.law/f3d/388/cases/0820... Memorial Tributes, Volume 17, M. Kenneth Oshman - National Academy of Engineering, 2013: https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/184... Form 8-K reporting the death of M. Kenneth Oshman - Echelon Corporation, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2011: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/31... #ROLM #ROLMCBX #PhoneMail #PBXHistory #OfficePhoneSystems #IBMHistory #SiliconValleyHistory #TelecomHistory #1980sOffice #ComputingHistory Disclaimer: The voiceover used in this video was generated using AI.