Back in 1999/2000/2001 The bone/grey coloured selsius ip phones that were 10mb hubs. The first ones had no lcd, the second ones had 4? programmable buttons and then later came the ones with one row lcd and a few more buttons, then dual row lcd & more programmable buttons. Think they were models like 10sp, 10sp+ and then along came the 12sp+
Then cisco call manager and the little cisco phones that were black and a single row lcd and a few buttons.
then the rest/current crop eg 79xx series phones. never amnaged to lay my hands on a wireless cisco ip phone.
The firmware updates and random problems like not being able to use a windows nt pc connected to the pc port because the switching gear in the phone could not deal with nfs packets or the packet size etc.
I really would have thought that the cisco would have moved ahead with the physcial ip phone design but they seem to have sat on their hands over the past 10 years - very dissapointing.
When call manager maybe 2.0/2.2/2.3 when beginnings of windows directory services integration was introduced everything seemed to become significantly easier.
Could only run the cisco call manager on particular compaq model servers.
Upgrading to the latest version of call manager required purchasing new servers and new isdn cards.
Worst memory for me was the packing up of the phones in to the store when the company went down the tubes.
In the 18 months prior would have purchased 120+ brand new cisco phones to replace the grey/brown ones.
Maybe $1500-1200 for the 7960? phones and $800 for the smaller ones 7910?. Ended up dumped in boxes.
And the warm receivers. Picking up handset receiver & putting it to your ear, felt like sitting on a warm toilet seat. Not nice.
