Meridian Mail

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Meridian Mail was one of the early all-digital voicemail systems, running on Northern Telecom's Meridian Norstar digital PBX systems. The combination of the Meridian's power and Meridian Mail's feature set was one of the major drivers that have turned Nortel into the telephony powerhouse it is today. In the early 1980s Northern Telecom introduced the Norstar, a scaled-down version of their famous SL-1 all-digital switch. It was the first all-digital system suitable for small-sized offices, and became one of their major product lines. The Norstar was powered by a 16 MHz Motorola 68000, and used only a fraction of the CPU's power. Nortel executives were extremely interested in finding ways to use that excess power, as long as their customers paid for the privilege. Nortel asked their research arm, Bell Northern Research, to look for ways to spend those cycles.