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Old 28th Mar 2015, 12:21 am   #81
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Default Re: Obsolete Technologies that baffle the modern generation.

Dan Dare set in my case

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Old 28th Mar 2015, 12:41 am   #82
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Default Re: Obsolete Technologies that baffle the modern generation.

I had the 'Johnny Seven' version. Two sound-powered red 'U.S. Military Walkie-Talkie'-style plastic boxes with two speakers in each unit, linked by several feet of twin bell-wire.
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Old 28th Mar 2015, 1:32 am   #83
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Originally Posted by vidjoman View Post
It did require you to eat 2 tins of beans and get a length of string to join them together
There's a "Landline" version of this in a children's playground near here. Periscope like mouthpieces with a buried pipe. It amused my Grandchildren & others. They can be interested, but they're used to being provided with entertainment nowadays, not hunting for it as we did. That's our fault though, not theirs.
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Old 28th Mar 2015, 8:22 am   #84
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That's a point, Bill. Kid's entertainment now is commercialised and done in a 'packaged' sort of way.

Kids are put into a car, driven to a centre for whatever it may be (swimming pool, indoor ski slope, stables, piano lesson, etc) given a timed session of the activity and then driven home. It's like a palletised factory.

'Playing out' now scares parents. They prefer to confine it to gardens.

As a kid I got to roam for miles around our village with my pals and to go down into Huddersfield for components from Jim Fish and Miss Taylor. Oddly enough we all survived this freedom. We explored. We learned about the area. we watched holes being dug, houses built, we developed curiosity.

The big masts at Emley, Holme Moss and Pole Moor were outside our range, and therefore were mysterious, but I'd read about crystal sets and I could listen to Pole Moor.

I had the usual toys of the era, but the junk was best. When I wanted a so-and-so, I looked at the available stuff and asked myself 'how do I make one from this?' This pumped up the curiosity still further.

We were not well-off and couldn't afford to buy a lot of things the rich kids had, but I sure as hell could find out how to make one. 14 years old, building an oscilloscope with mains derived EHT in my bedroom and I lived to tell the tale.

Kids for a generation haven't got to see anything outside of their packaged activities. They see the shapes of boxes and the user interfaces, but the works are hidden. The expectation of instant results precludes kit-building. Kids still have natural curiosity, but the directions available for it to go are constrained.

"Against the fall of night"

"The lion of Comarre"

I read them in my early teens. Like Carke, I thought it had to be centuries off, I never thought we'd get so close in my lifetime.

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Old 28th Mar 2015, 8:24 am   #85
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Default Re: Obsolete Technologies that baffle the modern generation.

Quote:
Originally Posted by russell_w_b View Post
Quote:
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Consisted of a huge box with a 12v lead-acid battery in it and on top was a sort of scaled down domestic phone of the time.
I first saw one of these at a trade-stand at the Preston radio rally about 1982. Would that be about the time you are on about?
Yes, it would be, Russell.
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Old 28th Mar 2015, 8:46 am   #86
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I used to see those phones at car auctions. All the self important had them. The really posh ones had a shoulder strap.

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Old 28th Mar 2015, 3:38 pm   #87
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The kids in my school were using portable communication systems around 1950. It did require you to eat 2 tins of beans and get a length of string to join them together. Some kids never could see how it worked despite being told and shown dozens of times.
Cocoa or gravy granule "tins", consisting of a thin metal diaphragm crimped onto the end of a cardboard tube, work even better -- at least as well as two old transistor radio loudspeakers and several metres of bell wire. But the string does need to be properly taut.

By the time I had learned to solder and acquired a sufficient stash of connectors to be able to connect almost anything to anything else, with the intended goal of being able to get the sound from any audio device to play through the speaker of any other audio device and bonus points for being able to record it and play it back, I was already noticing that input and output connectors were slowly disappearing from appliances. My first stereo radio-cassette player has a 6.3 headphone socket, separate left and right 3.5 mic sockets and a 5-pin DIN input/output. I remember seeing later ones with just a headphone socket.

And it wasn't just audio. When I got into computers, my first "real" printer had detailed descriptions of its control codes to select various text effects (bold, underlining, double width .....) and graphics modes (it only had two, officially: 480 or 960 columns of pixels across the page; but I discovered a way to get a third graphics mode with 576 columns) and even pages on the interface timings and specifications, for those seeking to use it with equipment other than a personal computer with a Centronics port already built in. (I connected eight toggle switches to the data lines and a push-to-make switch to the strobe, and found I was able to produce readable text, one letter at a time, this way. It was very slow, and suffered with occasional dooubbling or tripppling of charactters or even the odd mssng lettr due to my ropey debouncing of the strobe switch, and it was all too easy to out a word altogether due to nothing being actually printed until you sent a newline, but I was happy just to be able to prove the point to myself.

I think that manufacturers of new products always include too many features in the beginning; but as they learn what people are using their equipment for, they get quietly dropped to save money and avoid information overload for people who only ever wanted to record from the internal mic or the radio, or print out letters and spreadsheets. Unfortunately, this leaves experimentalists like the younger me out in the cold.

By the way, I used a slide rule -- probably one of the last ever made, left to me by my Grandad, who was an engineer by profession; it's a 250 mm. model, made of modern plastic in Japan -- to multiply 480 by 1.2 above. The slide rule told me at once that 4.8 * 1.2 lies somewhere between 5.75 and 5.8, and a quick mental check shows the answer is somewhere shy of 600 (= 50 * 1.2) and the units must be 6 (2 * 8 = 16, and we can ignore the carried one because we don't care about the tens or higher places) -- giving 576. Which is a multiple of 9, as you'd expect from multiplying 48 (which is treble) by 12 (which is also treble, so the product must be a multiple of nine). It sounds like a lot of work from the description; but most of the sanity-checking happens subconsciously, and it was still a bit quicker than firing up a calculator app on my laptop or mobile phone. Which I would then have to check anyway, by writing it all down and doing the full multiplication! (Two nones are nothing, two eights are 6 carry the 1, two fours are eight and one is none; extra zero; one nothing is nothing, one eight is eight, one four is four; nothing and nothing is nothing, six and nothing is six, nine and eight is 7 carry 1, four and one is five seven six point nothing. Why did I even bother using the calculator?)

Oh, and if you want a bit of fun sometime, try multiplying 2 * 2 using four-figure log tables .....
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Old 28th Mar 2015, 4:10 pm   #88
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I'd multiply 480 by 1.2 in my head by saying it's 480+48+48 which is 480+96 which is 576
No need for computer, slide-rule, log tables, calculator, abacus or pencil and paper..............

Seriously, though, I never got on with a slide-rule, much preferring log tables

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Old 28th Mar 2015, 4:41 pm   #89
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Default Re: Obsolete Technologies that baffle the modern generation.

I used logs from a Frank Castle 5-figure book or a British Thornton 250mm slide rule depending on the precision I wanted.

I did my industrial year at HP and came away with an HP45 calculator (bought at employee discount but still expensive) in its leather pouch hanging on my belt. It made the final year of my degree a bit easier.

Even calculators look passe to the latest generation, to them such things are apps on phones. As are cameras, so my Nikon must look like a dinosaur, but the phones don't equal the lenses and its sensor... and as for the F5 film-burner......

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Old 28th Mar 2015, 5:11 pm   #90
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In that current programme on TV where they take people back in time with period furniture and equipment, commented about elsewhere, the people were having great difficulty in understanding how to use an old manual tin opener. They made a terrible mess of the tin and probably sent a lot of swarf into the contents.

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Old 28th Mar 2015, 5:45 pm   #91
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Quote:
unlike your version which requires line-of-string.
Ah, we went round corners with a string telephone using a rubber band to support said string.

It gets worse, last week a software house asked us what the 'MODE' command did in a command prompt in a Windows .bat file that we supplied did to set a com port up,........................................, big gap as polite words failed me.
 
Old 28th Mar 2015, 11:25 pm   #92
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I managed to rescue two of the old original transportable analogue cellphones from work a few years ago. They weigh a ton and have a slide in lead acid battery. Basically a car telephone with a battery box under it. I still have the old Motorola 4800X fixed car phone I had for work in the early nineties. I remember having to help fit a whole load of the things at the time, then it went to fitting adapters and then hands free kits, Parrots... then bluetooth, before it was the norm for cars to come "bluetooth ready" from the factory. I will also never forget the sound of high volume DTMF resounding from other site users as they whacked the volume up to maximum to make sure that everyone else knew they had one of the new hi-tech transportable cellphones! Kids don't realise how far things have developed in the last few years. At least the buttons weren't too small for my fingers in those days.
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Old 29th Mar 2015, 12:51 am   #93
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Are there any analogue base stations still in existence, or have they all been switched off now? I remember being offered a Nokia 5110 for £10, or a free Ericsson (forgot model number; I chose the Nokia, anyway), when my telco wanted to switch everyone over to digital. That shows how long ago it must have been .....
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Old 29th Mar 2015, 1:24 am   #94
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I'm pretty sure the UK analogue cell sites were switched off a few years back, I suppose when the GSM take up was above a certain percentage. Not sure about the rest of the world though. Some countries may still have E-TACS systems but I bet there aren't many. I think the old National Band 3 analogue trunked PAMR system we used to use is defunct now as well.
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Old 29th Mar 2015, 1:41 pm   #95
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Default Re: Obsolete Technologies that baffle the modern generation.

Analogue cellphones don't baffle anyone, they just don't work and can't be made to by us old hands, let alone by the General Public.
This thread is really about things that can or could work, but which baffle most people these days, the rotary phone being a good example.
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Old 29th Mar 2015, 5:57 pm   #96
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My granddaughter was intrigued for a while by my black and white TV. She had never seen anything but colour and thought black and white was produced by special processing at the TV station. I must admit she quickly saw the reality and commented on how she and her generation take so much for granted.
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Old 29th Mar 2015, 6:54 pm   #97
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Default Re: Obsolete Technologies that baffle the modern generation.

We could build a list of things worth demonstrating to the current generation, things which aren't obvious from the things which they are familiar with:

Dial telephone and Strowger exchange demonstrator.
Plugboard exchange
Phonebox
Mechanical 30-line televisor
Monochrome TV
Phonograph
Golf-ball typewriter
Daisy-wheel printer
Avometer
Hand soldering
Shortwave radio
Morse on radio
Pipe organ action
Tonewheel organ
Theremin
Tesla coil
Valve amplifier
Moog modular synthesiser
Steam engine
wet-plate photography
roll-film photography
Electric milk float
Nixie tube
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PPI radar


That should be a good start

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Old 29th Mar 2015, 7:14 pm   #98
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Creed 7 teleprinter
Stopping down a camera to get depth of field, and the Fresnell lens (I think)
Air raid siren, or whirling a wooden ruler over your head
Weren't the flash cubes used in the Instamatic cameras mechanical, no battery used?
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Old 29th Mar 2015, 7:58 pm   #99
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The early "Flashcubes" were electrical, the later "Magicubes" were mechanical.

I still have my late father's box Brownie and the large flashgun he later bought to go with it. It took bayonet flashbulbs, but came with an adaptor for PF1 bulbs, and you tested the state of its two U11 cells using a 6V SCC motorcycle bulb. One of my first independent forays into electronics as a schoolboy was to convert it to capacitor discharge powered by a 22.5V hearing aid battery, using a capacitor and resistor reclaimed from old radios that our neighbour used to break up for the scrap metal. I got the circuit from an encyclopaedia of photography.
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Old 30th Mar 2015, 12:37 am   #100
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When I was about five my uncle gave me a couple of ex wd balanced armature ear pieces and a long bundle of twin flex, they worked brilliantly as a phone and I was absolutely made up, I used to take them into the woods so you couldn't see the person on the other end. I wonder what the modern generation would make of them.

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