50 Handbook of Intercom Systems Engineering
Figure 4.4
A comparison of the 9400 Intercom System to the 9500 Intercom System (see inset).
The 9500 represented a tremendous reduction in physical size.
By 1988, the limits of the square architecture were beginning to show. The 350 port
McCurdy 9700 matrix intercom systems that NBC commissioned for the 1988 Seoul
Olympics required 10 full racks, over 20 kW of power, and weighed in at over 2 tons. The
9700 matrix was the largest matrix intercom of its day. While providing nearly all the
features of today’s most advanced intercom systems, the limit on size had been reached for
traditional architecture.
By the early 1990s, manufacturers in Europe were developing intercoms based on a new
architecture. Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) had been deployed in telephone routing