PBX Sim

Year: 1999

Download: PBX Sim (Compact Pro archive)

In 1997, I bought an old old Northern Telecom Pulse 120 PBX out of the basement of the local slimy motel. This monstrous system was built on the eve of the microprocessor era, constructed entirely out of individual logic gates and shift registers. I had a passing interest in "the phone" before I bought this system, but dragging it home triggered a whole new direction in my interests.

This project is the result of that interest. I envisioned a PBX simulator game, where the goal was to build out phone system capacity as a virtual business grew. I imagined being able to make simulated phone calls through networks of trunked PBXen. Sadly, I got as far as working out some basics for UI and got bored.

So what is available here doesn't do much; you can drop equipment on the screen, wire the equipment together (there are rules about what can be connected to what), and it calculates costs for the wire used. You can move things around, and delete them. And that's it. But it gave me a good understanding of some UI implementation concepts related to creating editors.

Finally, the sounds. This is the part of this program I still enjoy the most. Most of them are paralinguistic sounds (is that the word?), except for the sound made when running a wire, which is the sound of a 66 punchdown tool.

IDE: CodeWarrior IDE 4 (CodeWarrior Pro 5)