Meridian Mail

Meridian Mail was one of the early all-digital voicemail systems, running on Meridian Norstar digital PBX systems from Northern Telecom (later known as Nortel).

In the early 1980s Northern Telecom introduced the Norstar, a scaled-down version of their SL-1 all-digital switch. The Norstar was the first all-digital system suitable for small-sized offices (up to 192 lines), 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 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 (BNR), to look for ways to spend those cycles.

Some time in the mid-1980s a complex project evolved that would deliver a large terminal onto every user's desk, combining a color screen, keyboard and telephone. The Meridian would be used to run various application software in a timesharing fashion. Since the Apple Macintosh had been recently introduced, the system was also to support a rudimentary GUI based on character graphics.

While impressive in concept, the Norstar was simply not up to the task of driving such a system. A similar amount of processing power was needed to drive the single-user Macintosh, so how it is that the BNR developers felt that they could drive multiple terminals as well as telephony from the system is something of a mystery. The system was extremely slow, taking over a minute to open a window for their rather basic spreadsheet for instance. Project managers continued to report the system was on-track and just needed a little more time to complete, even though this was clearly not the case.

After millions had been spent on the project, Nortel management finally gave up and decided to cancel it. In the midst of this a group of three engineers suggested that they could use portions of the system to deliver a voicemail system very quickly, and at least salvage some of the money spent so far. Management accepted the proposal, and the three (two brothers and a longtime friend), styling themselves as the Toronto Ideas Group, soon had a demonstration system up and running.

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