we spray-painted them black right there in the tele- phone equipment room. At a typical cutover, a lot of people would be standing around looking worried, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and making periodic forays out of the telephone equipment room to reassure the customer: "Yes, at any moment now you will be back in business." There was a lot of naiveté during this time. This included the buyers, the consultants, and the interconnect companies. We were all making our way through uncharted territory. The telephone system functions were clunky and did not al- ways work. To successfully transfer a call without cutting the caller off was a major accomplishment. Just to keep this in per- spective, note that the first telephone system purchased by a com- pany (rather than renting) was often the first system that enabled the system users to do anything by themselves. It is likely that they had never dialed another extension or transferred a call be- fore. The systems they replaced were often cord boards where the switchboard operator had been responsible for handling all of these functions for them. Those were the seventies. Several decades have passed and the process of installing a new business telephone system has smoothed out considerably. At a recent cutover, the CEO announced that the change to the new telephone system had been a "non-event" and the business operations continued without missing a beat. 310 * The Telecom Handbook INDEX Index Symbols American Telephone & Telegraph, 299 110 blocks, 252 American Wire Gauge, 262 1A2, 12 AMP, 259 2-wire, 246 Amplitude Modulation, 239 2500 set (touch-tone), 12 analog, 242, 245 2B+D, 231 analog trunks, 26 3-digit outpulsing, 212 ANI, 89, 91, 115, 232, 279 4-digit outpulsing, 212 Annotated fax mail, 183 4-pair, 249 ANSI/EIA/TIA-568,, 264 4-wire, 246 ANSI/EIA/TIA-569, 264 42A block, 250 answer supervision, 116 500 set, 12, 16 API, 149, 166 6 pin modular jack, 250 application programming 8 pin modular jack, 250 interface, 149, 166 Application Service Provider, armature