I received this from Graham Neathway, employee # 15 at Mitel...
Birth of the 8804 SuperSwitch
The following is a section from my memories.
Graham Neathway
About this time I convinced Bob Durance to join Mitel and he worked with me on the development of the first series of pbx hardware. Albert Hum also joined from Consolidated Computers as the first software engineer in Mitel. Albert’s task was to write programs so that we could prove out the hardware that we were developing.
The Motorola 6800 was the heart of the system; however it was not fast enough to look at all the tasks in the PBX. In order to monitor all the modules I developed a scanner, which was, in fact, a variant of the keyboard circuit that I had developed at Consolidated Computers. We now built the first system. It was called the SR80 and was capable of servicing up to eighty internal telephone circuits. A total of three systems were built; one for the RCMP and one for the Canadian Navy and one unit to keep at Mitel.
When the first systems were completed and operational, there was a great feeling of satisfaction. We had developed, in less than a year, a system that Northern would have taken many years over. Our elation was soon to be short lived. I remember Bob and me sitting down and looking at the finished unit and asking ourselves, “Who would buy an eighty line PBX from an unknown company such as Mitel, when they could buy a Northern system?” Our cabinet was six feet high and was therefore no smaller than Northern and I doubt whether it would have been much cheaper. Its only benefit was that it was software controlled compared to the hardwired Northern SG1. How could we reduce its size and cost?
Most of the integrated circuits in the SR80 were of the CMOS family. This provided us with ICs that operated at voltages up to fifteen volts and low power; also there was an analog switch circuit, the 4016, which we used for controlling the speech paths. For each of the line circuits we used a block of fifteen CMOS ICs.
One of our potential suppliers of these ICs was a company called Siltek, which operated out of Bromont, in Quebec Province. Siltek were having a hard time to keep going and there was talk that they were about to go bankrupt. Their major shareholder was the Quebec government. Mike Cowpland met with the government and the outcome was that Mitel, in 1976, took over the ownership of the company and it became known as Mitel Semiconductor. We now had our own IC design and manufacturing group and in turn, an answer to the problem of how to reduce the size of the SR80.
Bob and I met with Frank Dea, the engineer from Siltek and it was decided that it would be feasible to develop an IC that would contain all of the fifteen ICs into the one package. The new IC was named the Mitel 8804 SuperSwitch.
A rush was now on to redesign the PBX, using all the ideas that we had developed with respect to reducing its size and cost. We started in September 1976 and the target was to have a machine ready for an important Telephony show in April 1977. This was a major project and the tasks were split up between several engineers. Bob and I did the common control and the digital portion of the line circuit. Pat Beirne developed a solid state line circuit that got rid of the bulky transformers in the line and trunk circuits. Bill Kiss, who had joined us from Consolidated Computers, designed the main power supply. By April we had the first SX200, which had twice the capability of the SR80 and was in a cabinet half the size. We now had a product that could compete with Northern.
We had achieved the goal of providing a system for the Telephony show in April 1977 and to celebrate this event, Mike and Terry arranged for the whole company to go on a trip to Florida. A DC10 was just big enough to accommodate the whole company at that time.
