1990 to 2000
I had originally joined the NYNEX Science & Technology research laboratory, in 1989. as a contract technical writer, working through my own company. NYNEX was the Regional Bell Operating Company that was created from divested local carriers New England Telephone and New York Telephone. I had been tasked with writing the documentation for the Automated Functions Node and the SCL object oriented programming language, both of which under development as a tool for operator services, to enable the partly automated handling of operator calls, as a cost reduction measure, to reduce the Operator Average Work Time, the amount of time an operator spends on each call. The platform brought speech recognition, speech compression, and speech store-and-forward to the operator services network.
It was soon recognized that I had skills as a system integrator as well as system tester, having been trained as a Systems Engineer in-house by IBM Research in The Netherlands, where I had worked prior to setting up my own ISP in England. By the end of 1990, I had joined NYNEX as a full time Member of Technical Staff in the Systems Analysis Laboratory, where the AFN was invented and built, and where we dissected Northern Telecom DMS switches to figure out how to control those through automation.
The Automated Functions Node was eventually installed in the NYNEX network in both New York City and in Boston, handling not only Operator Services tasks, but automated intercept (in New England), and credit (in New York) as well. You will find the patents I participated in (and for the most part wrote), covering the AFN, here, as well as a narrative brochure describing the AFN as it was marketed commercially in a cooperative venture with manufacturer Tandem Computer.
While at S&T, I took part in the project that would make NYNEX Science & Technology, Inc. the very first R&D lab in the world to achieve ISO 9001 certification, which included development. I was a registered auditor on the team that "made it happen".