 when compared with analog systems? The real benefi- ciaries were the manufacturers. Digital semiconductor prices were falling rap- idly, a trend that has continued for more than three decades and shows no sign of stopping. Manufacturers with foresight knew that a system built out of stan- dard digital parts would become cheaper to build as time went on. By the late 1970s, large analog PBXs were already costlier to build than digital ones; the crossover point was clearly trending down. But this was not a selling point. Digital switching had the "cool" factor about it, to be sure, and that did not hurt with investors, but that goes just SO far in a corporate setting. But the late 1970s was also the time when "office automation" was a hot buzzword. Computer terminals were starting to show up on office workers' desks. Word processing moved out of the steno pool and onto secretaries' desks, and it was starting to show up on knowledge workers' desks too. More and more The Great Telecom Meltdown offices were being wired for data, which at that point usually meant 9,600 bps serial-port terminals, if not IBM-style coaxial cable-attached terminals. Com- puters themselves usually sat in a data center, SO there needed to be a way to get there from the office. Digital PBX vendors thus seized upon this as an opportunity to increase their wares' apparent utility. Computer data are, after all, digital. So why not pass off the digital PBX as a way to connect desktop terminals to their host com- puters? At first it was vaporware. Then the first integrated voice and data (IVD) PBX features began to arrive. Northern Telecom was a pioneer with its SL-1 Add-on Data Module (ADM). This attached to the side of its proprietary tele- phone instrument, providing an RS-232C connection for a computer terminal. The other end of the call, in the data center, typically required a shelf full of tele- phones, each with an ADM, next to the target computer. ROLM followed up with its own data appliqué. But the real excitement came when start-up comp