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"When I was in Sankt Peterburg working in a hospital, I was asked to "fix" a patient call-button / intercom
system. Really, one of the Russian staffers had been to their stateside
partner hospital and seen something modern. They didn't want theirs fixed,
they wanted me to magically turn it into some state-of-the-art US model.
Anyway, I could improve it a little, as it had been very poorly designed.
When the patient pushed the call button, an LED was illuminated on a unit
at the nurses' station. However, the LED was down below the panel, so you
had to be standing right above the unit and look down into a hole to see
which was illuminated. I managed to disassemble it, enlarge the holes
where the LED's were supposed to go, and reassemble it in a more useful
configuration. I could do nothing for the completely unintelligible noise
you got in place of the patient's voice, however....
The calculator-relevant angle is that the maker of hospital patient intercom
systems simply used calculator bodies! It was a unit kind of like the B3-05
or MC-1103. The display panel was missing, of course, they had only used the
plastic shell of the calculator. A long and narrow speaker was mounted there,
with a cloth-covered grill covering it. The keypad was completely missing,
and the space normally occupied by keys was covered with a metal panel with
a row of sixteen (tragically undersized) holes above the LED's. A push button
on one side allowed the nurse to "talk" back to the unit in the patient's
room, which was just a simple small plastic box with one button and a speaker.
As I mentioned, however, they might as well have simply used buzzers in place
of speakers.
Afraid I didn't take careful notes of the exact details, I didn't imagine that
anyone would be interested!
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