The
Smithsonian recognizes Message On Hold
Back
in 1962, Alfred Levy had a problem. The broadcast from the
radio station located next door to his factory was being picked
up by his company's telephone system. An exposed wire touching
a metal girder was causing his building to act as a transmitter,
and in turn, broadcast music to callers placed "on hold."
Instead of looking upon this as an annoyance, Levy looked
upon it as a true entrepreneur would and patented Music On
Hold in 1966.
Alfred's
idea has come a long way since wires rubbing against steel.
Other visionaries saw the marketing possibilities that time
on hold offered; they envisioned Message On Hold (MOH). Since
1990, as a Tampa, Florida based corporation and MOH innovator
and leader, Message On Hold (and its former affiliate names)
has striven to assert its product's prowess as an extremely
effective marketing tool and gaining widespread recognition
throughout the business community.
In 1995,
a Message On Hold predecessor presented their original digital
MOH unit along with the unit's tape cassette predecessor and
state-of-the-art prototype to the Smithsonian Institution.
In accepting the donation, Bernard Finn, curator in the Department
of Information and Society of the National Museum of American
History, noted, "These devices fit well with the Museum's
policy of collecting examples of technologies that have had
an impact on American life."
Where
did the idea of message on hold come from? MOH's humble beginnings
started with a phone call to a bank and listening to a competitor's
ad while the radio played on hold. After some initial technical
difficulties working with standard cassette equipment, the
dawn of message on hold came with the digital prototype in
1985 that allowed a pre-recorded message on a cassette tape
to be downloaded onto the unit's internal digital chip. It
wasn't until 1989 that mass-production of the MOH digital
unit brought Message On Hold to phone lines across the nation.
In the
new millennium, Message On Hold still utilizes the MOH unit
with the ground breaking digital chip download technology,
but now available for tape and CD pre-recorded productions.
The MOH CD unit boasts Flash Memory chips that retain the
message on hold even through a power loss. Message On Hold
didn't stop the innovations there! MOH has moved from all
analog recordings to the improved sound quality of recording
with digital computer technology. With the choice of marketing
messages, variety of music, and quality productions, Message
On Hold keeps sounding better and better decade after decade!
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