BT Inphone
 

I remember this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE3k1yHk5Fs

Was "Inphone" BTs marketing speak for a wider choice of phones, or for plugs & sockets?

Re: BT Inphone
 

If I recall it was for additional services etc. like call forwarding, but i'm not 100% sure

Re: BT Inphone
 

No, I thought it represented plug-in phones, using the then-new BT431A plugs we still use today, and which could be purchased outright (as well as rented on a monthly basis, as before). Telephones weren't nearly as cheap as they are now (£30-£50 for a basic model, ISTR), so it was envisaged that a single phone might be moved between rooms around the house.

Models such as the Viscount, Statesman and a one-piece model whose name I've forgotten, spring to mind.

N.

P.S. Typing BT Inphone into Google gets you pages about iPhones. A sign of the times!

Re: BT Inphone
 

I pretty much agree with Nick, though I only recall it applied to the "modern" designs rather than to the 87nn range (7nn 'phones but with a plug-in cord and 2000Ω ringer).

Re: BT Inphone
 

I think those were known as "Star Services".

Re: BT Inphone
 

Some Inphone pics found online:

Re: BT Inphone
 

And more:

Re: BT Inphone
 

I have one of the brown phones shown in the second picture of # 6, bought very cheaply from a charity shop some years ago. It only has pulse dialling ( no * or # keys) and is our bedside phone - we have rubbish mobile reception here, so are obliged to use a landline. Thanks for the info on its background.

Re: BT Inphone
 

That's a "Statesman" or "IXT" [ = IneXpensive Telephone!]. It used an IC instead of the expensive and heavy ASTIC (transformer) that its predecessors did.

The DTMF version was very popular in airports, hospitals, libraries, universities etc. well into the 1990s, usually in the ivory colour option, often wall-mounted.

I still think these have the most ergonomic keypad of any phone I've used. Big, clearly-labelled buttons with just the right amount of travel and tactile feedback.

There's an interesting article in the POEEJ about its design.

Nick.

Re: BT Inphone
 

The LD Statesman was the very first telephone I ever bought rather than being rented as part of the line contract.

It came in very handy on one occasion when the Monarch PABX at work went down. All the extensions connected to it were DTMF Statesmen which didn't work on the powerfail lines, as the local exchange was still LD only. When I took it in, I had the only working push-button telephone in the building, though some rotary-dial telephones had been provided to keep us operating until the PABX was fixed.

Re: BT Inphone
 

The brown Statesman was the principal phone used by British Rail on their own internal national (Strowger) telephone network - embossed with the BR logo (sometimes unkindly referred to as “the arrows of indecision”!). Presumably bulk purchased in their thousands from the manufacturer.

Re: BT Inphone
 

I'd forgotten that, Dave, thanks. Never seen one in the wild though; I'd have thought they'd turn up on eBay or at car boots, but not that I've seen.

Talking of who manufactured them, there were many different companies producing the same design (though the PCB inside and the mouldings are often subtlely different). GEC and Pye/Phillips spring to mind:
https://www.britishtelephones.com/t90xx.htm

Pic of the insides here, showing the single PCB with 2 ICs:
http://www.telephonesuk.co.uk/images...003_inside.jpg

The weak point seemed to be the cords, which weren't user-replaceable and didn't seem as robust as those fitted to the earlier 700-series instruments.

Re: BT Inphone
 

My parents had one of them [in a nasty yellowish-cream, the sort of colour 'white' plastic mouldings made decades later would fade-to as they aged] as their primary phone-in-the-hall back in the 80s.

They were renting it off BT - at some silly quarterly-cost. I replaced it with a 'first-generation' Binatone analog cordless phone [the type that used frequencies around 1.7MHz and 49MHz] when I realised that they were paying through the nose for the Statesman. I recall having to 'kludge' a 240V supply to where the phone-socket was. 2-core 3A flex stapled round the outer-door to the hall.

As to "inphone", that's not a branding I really remember: my 'work' QTH back then was closely-attached to a Government department (we shared their PABX) and we all had Ericsson phones!

Re: BT Inphone
 

I suspect Plessey also had a finger in that pie, since back in the late-80s GEC and Plessey merged their consumer-telecommunications efforts to form GPT.

[Plessey were, back then, involved in a whole slew of marginal businesses - I guess they were trying everything to find whatever could be profitable: I remember Plessey core-memories and semiconductor-memory boards, and a range of Motorola 68000-based computers running Unix, whose architecture was clearly more aimed at the front-end for a high-spec PABX rather than techie data-acquisition]. See https://www.cbronline.com/news/gec_p...x_to_system_x/ ]

[Unix is a trademark of Bell Laboratories]

Re: BT Inphone
 

Yes, I’ve got a Plessey one, with a slightly different case top moulding.

Re: BT Inphone
 

Here are a few "variations on a theme" from my collection of Statesmen:

Re: BT Inphone
 

The one on the far right is the colour I remember BT supplied to my parents in the 80s.

And just as yours illustrates, the handset curly-cord invariably developed a 'twist' or two, which could never properly be reversed.

Re: BT Inphone
 

What is less clear from the photograph is that the numerals on it are Arabic script.

Re: BT Inphone
 

That I hadn't noticed!.!.!

[I once had to deal with a 1980s "Cheetah" telex-machine with Cyrillic keyboard-and-display. There was much confusion]

Re: BT Inphone
 

we used to get these in for repair from factories, back in the early 1990's, quite a few had the company logo engraved or printed on them to dissuade employees from taking them home. Pork Farms sticks in my mind for example. We had alot in from a dried soup factory and they came in with keys stuck down when the powder had absorbed enough moisture to become a hindrance.

Pleasant times repairing them as they were nice easy jobs, I had SGS-Thomson, Philips and Texas send me their circuit design books (FOC) which covered most of the circuits found in the various versions.

The ringer ICs would fail (TMC or plessey??) sometimes and as they were obsolete I used to fit one from a different manufacturer and enjoy experimenting with the component values to give a pleasant modern tone.