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General Vintage Technology Discussions For general discussions about vintage radio and other vintage electronics etc.

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Old 15th Mar 2021, 12:43 pm   #101
Dave Moll
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Default Re: 'New' technology of the day, that is now mainstream, old school or even vintage?

The Amstrad emailer works as a normal telephone but not much else as far as I can make out with mine. I don't recall mine having an add-on device that fits underneath, but I'll have to dig it out and check.

The video-phone version though doesn't even work as a 'phone (as far as I can see0 without signing up to a (presumably no longer existing) service from Amstrad.

Another innovation that sank without trace regarding video telephones (this time from BT) was the Relate 2000 Videophone. Mind you, I never managed to achieve a recognisable image using a pair of them connected to extensions of my PABX.
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Old 15th Mar 2021, 1:47 pm   #102
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Default Re: 'New' technology of the day, that is now mainstream, old school or even vintage?

In the early 1990's GEC were selling them off cheaply to staff in pairs, mentioning that one could be given to a relative who lived far away.

I have the empty casing and handset of one. It was used by the GEC Patent Department when filing a registered design for it. When it was no longer needed I brought it home for the kids to play with. Must still be kicking around in the shed.
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Old 15th Mar 2021, 2:26 pm   #103
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Default Re: 'New' technology of the day, that is now mainstream, old school or even vintage?

LED watches are another item. Worth quite a bit these days I think.
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Old 15th Mar 2021, 2:54 pm   #104
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Default Re: 'New' technology of the day, that is now mainstream, old school or even vintage?

LED calculators too, not so long ago I was buying very basic ones for about £3-£5 just to harvest the displays from, now I can't afford to do that.
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Old 15th Mar 2021, 5:59 pm   #105
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Default Re: 'New' technology of the day, that is now mainstream, old school or even vintage?

Quote:
Originally Posted by robinshack View Post
LED watches are another item. Worth quite a bit these days I think.
Rob
I find it a little ironic that we had LED watches where you had to press a button to turn the display on.

Then we had LCD watches, which like the mechanical analogue ones, just had ot be looked at.

Now we have 'smartwatches' where you have to press a button to turn the display on.

As for the other things mentioned here recently...

I have the Bush Internet STB here. It's based on the Acorn Archimedes, actually and there's a way to get it into BASIC.

I also have a BT QWERTYphone, the loudspeaking desktop telephone with a built-in 300 baud modem and simple teminal emulator. I wonder if there were production problems with mine, I had to replace both the speaker and the reed switch for the handset on-hook detection which are in the same 'module' in the unit. It's not a lot of practical use now, but it's an interesting bit of history.

Never had the Rabbit phone, but I have a complete base unit for the similar 'Zonephone' system. Totally useless, and I am not going to power it up (I wonder what the frequencies are used for now)
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Old 15th Mar 2021, 6:39 pm   #106
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Default Re: 'New' technology of the day, that is now mainstream, old school or even vintage?

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Now we have 'smartwatches'
That need charging every day, just like "smart 'phones. How is that smart? I have never needed to charge my 706 (classic landline 'phone).
To quote the late, great Jeremy Hardy, "my 'phone is so posh it is tied to the house".
 
Old 15th Mar 2021, 7:58 pm   #107
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Default Re: 'New' technology of the day, that is now mainstream, old school or even vintage?

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Never had the Rabbit phone, but I have a complete base unit for the similar 'Zonephone' system. Totally useless, and I am not going to power it up (I wonder what the frequencies are used for now)
I don't know specifically about the Zonephone, but it was established here a while back that the Rabbit frequencies are now assigned to wireless microphones.
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Old 15th Mar 2021, 8:17 pm   #108
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Default Re: 'New' technology of the day, that is now mainstream, old school or even vintage?

What about first-generation "Personal Organisers" - these were the electronic version of that ubiquitous 1980s business/lifestyle-essential the FiloFax™ - used to store names/addresses/phone-numbers [and even email-addresses!] of the-people-who-mattered in your life.

Psion's 'organiser' was probably the best known - with - wow! a 16 Kilobyte memory! You still had to manually transfer the phone-number between the screen and the phone when calling someone though...

Today, you just say to your phone "Call Andy" and it does the rest.

Another thought: Does anyone remember those little "business-card scanners" that were popular a couple of decades back? Someone gives you their card, you popped it through the scanner, and it added their details to the contacts-database on your PC.

Today, you use your phone's built-in camera to take a shot of a QR-code.

Finally - "Terminate and Stay Resident" [TSR] programs on your DOS PC: Borland's Sidekick being probably the most well-known. A notepad, an address-book, an ASCII-codes-to-characters conversion-table, a calendar, a simple calculator... all waiting there for you if you could only remember the arcane key-combination needed to make it pop-up.
One later version could even use an attached modem to 'dial' a phone-number selected from the address-book! I remember using this to make calling my various suppliers' BBS easier.
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Old 15th Mar 2021, 10:32 pm   #109
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you just say to your phone
That is assuming one has a (presumably one of those modern portable jobs) 'phone. An antithesis to this thread I guess. I get paid to think, the very last thing I need is an annoying box in my pocket.
 
Old 16th Mar 2021, 10:45 am   #110
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Default Re: 'New' technology of the day, that is now mainstream, old school or even vintage?

Going back to the late 1960's there were two two new technologies that were causing some excitement.

First the all new UHF 625 line television system which promised us the new mysterious BBC2 channel, better black and white pictures with BBC1 being free from the effects of co channel or continental interference and of course colour television. This new service did deliver on most of its promises but after a few years the co channel problem actually became worse on 625 than the old 405 line system.

The second development was VHF/FM radio which bought us the promise of improved radio reception with better sound quality, and stereo, with less interference than the existing AM service. This eventually happened but it took over twelve years to get good coverage including new local stations, all in stereo, to arrive in this part of west Cornwall.
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Old 16th Mar 2021, 11:36 am   #111
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Default Re: 'New' technology of the day, that is now mainstream, old school or even vintage?

While Psion was a popular personal assistant (PDA) in the UK, the Palm Pilot seems to have been the market leader elsewhere. When I started learning Italian some 5 years ago, we used the BBC course whose books were the 2007 edition. In one dialogue the person has lost his "palmare", which the Italian-English glossary defined as a "palmtop". Presumably the italian term was coined from the Palm Pilot, but none of us had heard of the english term, and no-one except me had heard of the Palm Pilot.
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Old 16th Mar 2021, 2:28 pm   #112
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Default Re: 'New' technology of the day, that is now mainstream, old school or even vintage?

The Psion 3a from the mid 1990’s has up to 2MB of memory.

For phone dialling, it can generate DTMF tones for the numbers in its phone book - you just hold the Psion over the phone’s mouthpiece to make it dial for you. It even generates the required tones for international calls, you add a country name for all entries which are not your home country, the Psion adds your home country’s international prefix, the destination country code, and any required delays to the stored number (minus the leading zero). You even get the option of adding a building dial-out code when required.

When you visit the foreign country, you tell the Psion which city you are in, it then, as well as changing its clock to local time, treats all your home country numbers (with no country name) to the appropriate international prefixes for calls from the foreign country. The revised number comes up on the screen, quite useful when you go on holiday and don’t remember the international prefixes.

That’s in addition to its time management, word processor and spreadsheet apps, games, etc. All on 2AA cells which last for months.

They were ahead of their time.

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Old 16th Mar 2021, 11:46 pm   #113
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Default Re: 'New' technology of the day, that is now mainstream, old school or even vintage?

Thanks for the feedback on phone cards, I found a collector's page that mentioned BT changed their card technology in the mid 1990s but it wasn't enough to stop the decline of their use due to mobile phones becoming cheaper.
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Old 17th Mar 2021, 10:37 am   #114
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Default Re: 'New' technology of the day, that is now mainstream, old school or even vintage?

Credit card-type phone cards were still being used in France the last time I went there some 10 years ago.
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