On 2008-02-16 18:56:49 +0000, (Andrew
Gabriel) said:

In article 47b6feb8@qaanaaq,
Andy Hall writes:
On 2008-02-16 15:00:41 +0000, (Andrew
Gabriel) said:

Back in the days of BT approvals in Baynard House, I took a couple
of devices along to get their approvals, which was a remarkably
unscientific process.



... (although testing had been taken over by BABT by then, and
they might have changed the procedure).

Probably not. You should have seen what they did with an X.25 gateway
that I took to them at one point.

How strange -- I designed X.25 switches at GEC in the 1980's,
and had to get those tested for PSS approvals in early days,
and the line modules had to get electrical approvals. One I
remember was our G.704 module which we designed to provide a
raw unstructured 2Mbit X.25 link over BT's Megastream service.
Went along to Baynard House, and the bloke took it and looked
at it, and said "that's fine". It was the first G.704 module
they'd seen, and they didn't have any tests defined for it!

Well the problem was that this was a product that had originated in the U.S.

For some reason, best known to themselves, BT had an addressing scheme
(group number IIRC) that was 4, while in every other country it was 0.
On this particular box the addressing wasn't configurable, simply
because there was no need anywhere other than in the UK.

Anyway, the BT guy agreed to sign it off on the basis that I agreed
that we would have a software fix to allow configurability before any
were connected to their network. I suspect that he figured that if
this wasn't there, it wouldn't work with their PSS environment anyway.
All of the other HDLC and other tests had passed and they seemed more
concerned about that for some reason. There was no interest in the
hardware at all.

Imagine paying by the packet (well segment)..... but one did.