at people's desks after lengthy delays, contained little content other than the caller's name and number, and were often inaccurate, with misspelled names and wrong phone numbers.

Tape-based telephone answering machines had come into the residential telephone market, but they were not used much in the corporate environment due to physical limitations of the technology. One answering machine was needed for each telephone; messages could not be recorded if the user was using the phone; messages had to be retrieved in sequential order; and