[ih] CXC Rose Humanation Re: Speaking of Minitel: Here's an oldie NO one remembers

[Bill Ricker]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2022 at 3:20 PM Bob Purvy via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> In the late 70's / early 80's, a friend of mine worked at a company CXI in
>

CXC, although with their logo, CXI is a fair reading!

Irvine, CA. This was a real company, with maybe 250 people. I can't even
> find it with Google now.
>

Found it for you.  I get 9 hits at ARCHIVE.org with "Search text
contents."
(Sometimes one has to search the specific archives instead of trusting
Google to have *everything.*)

https://archive.org/search.php?query=%22The%20Rose%22%20%22Office%20Humanation%22&sin=TXT

Most of which are all the same ad in different formats (and 3 are
indeed in *Datamation
*as you remembered):
"Everyone in favor of office automation, raise your hand" (*with robotic
hands*).

but there's an article and one-third of a commentary column :


   - *MIS Week*  1984-05-23: Vol 5 Iss 21, p. 1 photo continued to p. 34


*Will ITT Distribute CSC's 'Rose' PBX?*NEW YORK—“The Rose,” a new
fourth-generation PBX from start-up CXC Corp. in Irvine, Calif., will
shortly put down some strong roots in the nascent garden of the U.S. office
automation market by acquiring a world-class distributor.
...
*ITT-CXC Accord Seen Near for 'Rose' PBX*
Hawk came East last week to introduce The Rose system, Release 1, to the
press. His presentation revealed that not until next year, as part of
Release 2, will The Rose acquire its real muscle—the token-ring local area
network with packet switch, distributed architecture and the voice
store-and-forward that will truly transform it into ‘fourth generation”’
class.
...


   - *Computerworld* 1984-07-04: Vol 18 Iss 27A, p.11

A year ago, a communications magazine ran a news brief on CXC Corp's *Rose*
fourth generation ...PBX. The article let readers to believe ... At the
same time *Business Week* published a laudatory profile of the company ...
...
CXC, which brands itself as “the office humanation company,” has equipped
its Rose with a plenitude of communicating bells and whistles. The Rose
consists of one to 64 small microcomputer- based switches, each controlling
192 telephone lines connected by high-capacity coaxial cable. The Rose is
said to include a proprietary local-area network integrating a 33M bit/sec
circuit-switched ring and a 16M bit/sec token ring over 50M bit/sec
broadband cable. The system is also said to include store-and-forward
messaging for both text and voice mail, gateways to external data commu-
nications networks and programmable applications processors.
...
Claiming that the Rose’s shipping dates have coincided with the firm’s
original business plan in 1981, Robert Hawk, CXC’s vice-president of
marketing, refused to acknowledge a delay in the product’s availability. It
had been rumored that development of the Rose was delayed because the
custom-made chips from International Microelectronic Products, Inc.,
another young company in California, were not yet available. When
confronted with this possibility during a meeting with reporters in May,
Hawk did concede that “chips had something to do with it,” an apparent
contradiction to his earlier assertion that no delay existed.

-- 
Bill Ricker
bill.n1vux at gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux