How to understand the serial number system
In June 2003 , we received the youngest known MAX 3000 and MAX 6000 in our lab.
It is easy to understand the Ascend (and Lucent) serial number order. As we were told from ex Ascend employies,
the first digit of the serial is the last digit of the year of production and
the nextmost two digits are the week of production.
Then there are some more digits (mostly 5), representing a kind of follow-up number. So nobody can find out the real quantity of sold equipment. There are some rumors, that more than 100.000 MAX 4000 were sold from 1994 to 2001and some ten-thousand other MAXen.
This MAX 3000 is built in week 04 in 2001. Its real serial is 92357. As we have seen, many chips have a production date like 48-00, that means week 48 in 2000.
- its a 6 BRI-S version !!
This MAX 6000 is built in week 12 in 2001. Its real serial is 13704.
And here you see, from that time on, Lucent did ship all MAX 6000 with these hashcodes already installed. It seems to us, that even with a payment it was too much work to generate the hashcodes for a single serial number and supply this over the worldwide sales channel to the end user and get it running without a lot of support.
Curently there seems to be no Hashcode access even for paying customers.