e business, SO it took a few years for an industry to develop. The first of these interconnect companies were started by entrepreneurs who found existing non-Bell products to distribute. As this was happening, manufacturers stepped up to the bat to try to create new products that would surpass Bell's designs. Digital transmission of voice had been developed by Bell Labs in the early 1960s, beginning with the T1 transmission system. By 1975, the majority of the Bell System's short-haul interoffice transmission links were digital. T1 ran at a rate of 1.544 Mbps and carried 24 voice channels, each digitized at precisely 64,000 bps. A channel bank [5] at each end made the transition from analog to digital. In that year, all of the Bell System central offices were still based on ana- log switching technology; the flagship 1ESS Electronic Switching System had computer control but still used a mass of reed relays to actually switch the calls. The Great Telecom Meltdown But in 1975, digital switching entered the PBX marketplace with a bang, as new computer-controlled designed-for-interconnect digital PBX systems went on sale. A digital PBX converted the analog voice signals, from both the telephone sets and the telephone company's trunk lines, into bit streams and internally switched these streams. One of these PBX systems, the SL-1, was developed by Canada's Northern Telecom, a Bell Canada subsidiary that had essentially been spun off of Western Electric some years earlier. Another, the ROLM CBX, was introduced by ROLM Corp., which had previously been known as the manufacturer of mil-spec editions of Data General's then-popular minicomputers. The SL-1 used the same 64 Kbps digitization scheme as a T1 carrier, which had become the North American standard [6]. ROLM used a 144 Kbps scheme that was easier to implement with the semiconductors of the day, a decision that it no doubt regretted soon afterwards, once mass-produced chips implemented 64 Kbps digitization cheaply. Rolm and Northern Telecom soon challenged Western E