Automatic telephone answering device

Abstract

An automatic telephone answering device employs a single magnetic tape and a single driving mechanism for driving the magnetic tape. Whenever an incoming call is received, a control circuit of the device sets the driving mechanism into a playback mode to play to the calling party an outgoing message recorded at the beginning of a track on the single magnetic tape. Then, if there have been no previously recorded incoming messages, the device records the calling party's incoming message after the end of the outgoing message. However, if any incoming messages have been recorded previously on the same track of the single magnetic tape, the tape is advanced at high speed to a point beyond the last of these previously-recorded incoming messages. Then, the present incoming message is recorded. As soon as the incoming call is ended, the device is set into a rewind mode. When the beginning of the recorded outgoing message is reached, the driving mechanism is stopped, and the device stands by to greet the next incoming call with the recorded message. In a preferred embodiment, a counter counts the rotations of a reel drive of the driving mechanism, and its contents are stored for points corresponding to the beginning and end of the outgoing message and the end of each recorded incoming message. The stored contents are then compared with the count on the counter during operation. A coder can be included to record a code identifying the sequence number of each incoming message.