The speaker is used in place of the telephone bell to tell you the phone is ringing. So you should leave it plugged in. The speaker may also be used to play pre-recorded or synthesized voice messages, or it may be combined with the microphone to form a speakerphone arrangement (the microphone quality is seldom satisfactory; use this feature with discretion; and be sure to turn the microphone switch on if you plan to use it.)

Move the speakerbox toggle switch from the center to the up position to turn the speakerphone on. Your calls will then be switched to the speakerphone whenever the handset is in its cradle (on hook); lift the handset to speak privately or to use the telephone keypad, replace it to return to the speaker. Returning the switch to the center position ends the conversation or (if the handset is off hook) returns it to a conventional telephone call.

The speaker switch is spring-loaded in the downward direction. Depressing it and releasing it immediately is called a click. You can turn the speakerphone on by clicking; the subsequent behavior is subtly different from the other kind. It makes sense, but it's hard to describe. There's $5 in it for the first person who can describe how all this works, in writing, clearly and accurately (including the interactions with Finch).

In normal use, the Etherphone system takes care of the back door telephone line, connecting it to your telephone when necessary. Sometimes it is necessary to override the system manually; whenever you hear a dial tone, you can dial **0 to make this connection.

N.B! Important! Once an incoming non-Etherphone call has transferred to the CSL receptionist, and the receptionist has answered the call, it stops ringing in your office. The Etherphone system has no way of knowing that the call is still available on your back door telephone line, so you'll get a dial tone when you try to answer it. Dial **0 to pick up the call.

Call-forwarding is a feature that has yet to be integrated into the Etherphone system; it is not available through Etherphone or Finch commands. When there's no call in progress, dial **0 to get the telephone company's dial tone, then dial 106 or 107 and so on, as usual.

Other features, such as call-trasfer or 3-way conferencing, are also not yet directly available thorugh the Etherphone system. From a standard PARC telephone, these features require that you depress the telephone hookswitch briefly (for a second or two), then release it, an action known as flashing. The Etherphone designers do not believe in flashing: depressing the Etherphone hookswitch hangs up the call. You can get the desired effect on one of two ways:

The Etherphone system maintains an up to date telephone directory for PARC people, and a less up-to-date version for SDD (osbuNorth and osbuBayshore) and Versatec. If you know someone's number, it's still quicker to use it. Otherwise, consider spelling out their name on the telephone keypad instead of looking up the number.

To do it, dial *0, followed by the digits corresponding to the recipient's Grapevine RName, terminated with #. Three or four digits are often enough. You'll get a fast busy signal if you haven't uniquely identified your party; try again using more digits.

Although the telephone keypad does not say so, you can use the digit 7 for the letters PQRS, the digit 9 for WXYZ, and the digit 1 for punctuation (notably - and . ).

Examples: to reach Pier.pa, dial *07437172#. To call Willie-sue.pa, *09455431# is enough.

Please log the difficulties you have with as much detail as you can remember, and send them to LarkSupport.pa. Since your phone still works when you turn your Lark off, we might otherwise not learn of the problems.

Whenever the Lark loses power, communication with the phone server fails, or serious trouble develops in the Lark's programs, the Lark will give up and connect your telephone directly to the back door telephone line. This will allow you to place and receive telephone calls while repairs are made. If you lift the handset and do not hear a dial tone, wait a bit for the Lark to discover that it's in trouble. You should hear the telephone company's dial tone within fifteen seconds. If the Lark recovers from its difficulty, the Etherphone features will return the next time you hang up.

You may occasionally find that waiting doesn't help. Find the power switch on the power-cord end of the Lark box. Turn it off, then back on. You should now hear the telephone company's dial tone, and be ready for business. Again, if the Etherphone system recovers, it will regain control after you hang up.

If things continue to cause difficulty, turn Lark power off and leave it off.

Finally, if you are still not able to use your telephone satisfactorily, remove the telephone cord from the Lark socket labelled "Telewall", and plug it into your old trusty black telephone, which has not yet removed from most offices. Additional difficulties are now almost certainly not the fault of the Etherphone system.

Obtain Finch from CedarChest (Environment.df includes Finch, so you may already have it.)

Add a tailored version of the entries from Finch.profile to your user profile. Finch.profile includes definitions for several Commander buttons, some of which you may not need. You may also include the full path names of one or more personal telephone directories (do not use short names; Finch will not understand which working directory you would like it to use). The value of the user profile entry Finch.InitialDirectoriesLeft determines whether the directory viewers will be created automatically whenever you start Finch. Note: If you previously installed a Finch.InitialDirectoriesRight entry (which behaved like InitialDirectoriesLeft) in your profile based on bad advice in an earlier FinchDoc, consider making the change.

Create your telephone directories based on the template and instructions provided by Sample.TelephoneDirectory. You might want to copy TelephoneDirectory.Style to your root directory and to use to format your directories. See that file for a discussion of how to use it.

It is also necessary for your workstation's Ethernet number to be registered with the telephone system. This should have been done before you received your Lark, but if you have trouble getting started, let us know and we'll check it.

Start Finch by issuing the Finch command to a Command Tool. This command will create the various Finch viewers, if they do not already exist, and start the program.

You can include a running Finch in a checkpoint.

Finch creates a Finch viewer (its icon is a telephone) and one or more telephone Directory viewers. The Finch tool viewer has a menu line, a one-line Called/Calling party area, a typescript subviewer that serves as a catchall for system messages, and a Conversations subviewer. The Conversations subviewer logs each voice conversation that you have had during this session, and highlights the entry corresponding to the current active conversation, if any. The directory viewers are just your directory files, converted to Tioga Buttons. More about each of these later.

You may destroy a Directory viewer whenever you choose. Destroying the Finch viewer destroys all the directories, too.

The Finch viewer includes a specialized set of menu buttons. Here is a brief description of the menu buttons:

Each node in a Directory viewer is a button that can be selected using the left button or invoked using the middle or right one. Invoking a Directory entry places a telephone call to the indicated party; invoking with middle button will call the office number and invoking with right button will call the residence number.

Whenever a call is placed in this way, the Called Party field in the Finch viewer will be filled in, so that it is easy to redial a busy number, or to call the same individual again. If there is a call in progress, attempts to use directory entries to place calls will be ignored; the hang-up-and-redial behavior would be too easy to provoke accidently.

Whenever you have made your directory (or directories) available to Finch (by pushing the Directory button or through a user profile option), all of the other Phone buttons or commands search it before consulting the RName directory maintained by the system. This is the only way, at present, to obtain residence numbers. This directory is not available to interpret names specified by number on the telephone keypad.

WalnutVoice.load is included in Finch.df. It registers the WalnutVoice command, which you should then use instead of the Walnut command. Once you begin using WalnutVoice, you must use it every time. If you run WalnutVoice sometimes and just Walnut at other times, you might mess up the voice message database. No additional profile entries are required to run WalnutVoice.

Finch has to be running, too. Your Walnut sender will have four new buttons. Button Record, wait for the beep, then record your voice message. You can use the Etherphone's microphone if you wish (be sure to turn it on), but the quality will be better if you use the telephone handset instead. Button STOP! when you're done. Button Play to hear what you said.

After you record a voice message, notice the VoiceFileID field in the header of your Walnut Sender. If you choose not to send the voice message, or if you want to record a different one, delete that line first. You can record more than one message, whereupon you will discover multiple VoiceFileID fields in the message. Play will play them in order (see below).

To copy a voice message from one Walnut message to another — perhaps to forward a copy of the voice attachment that you have received — Button Attach to create a template VoiceFileID field, then fill it in by hand. Or use any other method you like to copy the entire VoiceFileID node into the destination header.

Finch does not have to be running when you receive messages with voice in them. But WalnutVoice does have to be running (cf. warning, above)!!! If you don't move a message from the Active message set, its attached voice message is only guaranteed to last for two weeks. If you move or copy it to another message set, voice attachments will be retained indefinitely. If you delete and expunge all your copies of a message, its voice attachment will also be deleted unless somebody else still wants it.

Finch has to be running, too. Your Walnut message viewer will have two new buttons. If it has voice attachments, there will be one or more VoiceFileID fields in the message header. Button Play to hear the voice attachments associated with a message. Button STOP! to stop it before it's done. The message will be played through the speaker unless the handset is off hook. You won't be able to play the message at all if you are already using the phone.

If you place the primary selection within one of the VoiceFileID fields before invoking Play, Finch will play only that one. You can select and invoke Play sequentially for several VoiceFileIDs, in any order, and they will be queued for playback.

VoiceFileIDs can be placed anywhere within a Walnut Message body, as individual nodes, and they can be played back using this selection method. Only entries that appear in the message header can protect a message from being garbage collected, though.