Smoking gentleman using an acoustic coupler to send an email with a payphone. Early 1980s.
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r/OldSchoolCoolu/semmeess (53841)

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Those acoustic modems were very cool. My first exposure to computing was when my dad brought a teletype machine from the office with an acoustic modem and coupler. We dialed into his office and played Lunar Lander. It printed out a page with the landscape and position, you made your inputs on the keyboard, then it printed out the next page. I was enthralled. I'm now a software engineer largely because of that. Can't even begin to describe how advanced that seemed at the time particularly the fact that some minicomputer 40 miles away was handling all the logic. Probably mid 1970's.

I work in radio, while it was only used before my time (I was born in ā€˜92) my stations still had a teletype just sitting in the newsroom. It was really just there as a paper stand when I started.

I donated it to the towns heritage museum when I was tasked with overseeing the station building remodel. They got it working, and you can type messages across the building to another unit. Whatā€™s awesome, is that it still amazes the kids that go through there in class tours. They have been surrounded by smartphones their whole lives, and this electro-mechanical wonder really captivates them. They have all kinds of fun on it. Thereā€™s an office in the back that has a bulletin board of all the more hilarious/ lewd things theyā€™ve typed on it. Itā€™s pretty funny to read.

At least theyā€™re learning, right?

I recently visited the sixth floor museum on Dallas, about the JFK assassination. I think the coolest thing for me was the Teletype print out where the operator in Dallas was frantically trying to keep the line open, writing STAY OFF ALL OF YOU STAY OFF AND KEEP OFF GET OFF...WILL U U PLEASE STAY OFF THIS WIRE...STAY OFF STAY OFF

I restore old teletypes to run old mainframe video games on. It's a big hit at events, there's just a certain physicality to a completely mechanical device. Like playing Asteroids on an actual vector console; it just feels so different than an emulator.

..I also have a bunch of copypastas on paper tape for people who just want to watch the teletype be teletypey.

i would crack up if i saw "lorem ipsum" etc start scrolling out of a teletype machine

I find the sounds of teletype quite relaxing. Similar to the sounds of the old mechanical train station and airport displays.

Do you have any videos, posts, or pictures of your work? This is the first I've heard of these and I'm super interested to learn more.

what's some of the memorable bulletin board messages if you remember any?

I just turned 30 today and Iā€™m blown away by this. I never knew this existed. I would be in just as much awe and amazement as the kids.

Technology: how yā€™all like talking over wires

The Kids : 69 ā€¦. noice

Hack the Planet!

Theyā€™re trashing our rights!

ZeRoCoOl

Acid Burnā€™s software matches her hardware

And cereal killer went on to become a serial killer

I believe the line is..."I hope you don't type like you screw" -acid burn

You can tell she says ā€œfuckā€ and then they dubbed in the ā€œscrewā€

I hope you don't screw like you type

It's when Kate agrees to a date with Dade if she loses the competition to hassle Gill. She already knows how he types, not how he screws!

Yeah, I've watched this film way too many times.

Great rewatch ability

I wanna double the ram on my pc from 16 megs to 32 megs

That cellular laptop was a boss.

Burn's wetware matches her software

Tbh I've never really understood the line, but I could pretty much recite the whole script from memory at this point.

He's hacking the Gibson!

Mr the plague: type cookie you idiot

Mr. The Plague

You hapless techno weenie

There is no right and wrong. There's only fun and boring.

Phreaker vibes

"Of the things I lost I miss my mind the most" Ozzy Osbourne man

Whoa, this isnā€™t woodshop?

Wut you mom buy you a puter for Christmas?

This entire comment chain just made me ugly squeal in absolute joy at 3:15 am. I hope you all are proud because the fiance, both dogs and cat are all angry at me for waking them up. I love this movie and can't listen to Voodoo People without wanting to watch it again.

"What's with this guy?" "His parents missed Woodstock and he's been making up for it since."

I feel kinda like God yo.

And be super classy at the same time?

[deleted]

God, we had a whole bloody thing leading off this when I was about 8, and I can still remember it decades later.

Mess with the best and you die like the rest

 

Don't mess with the best, 'cos the best don't mess

And when you mess with the best, the best might mess

And when the best do mess then you die like the rest

So don't mess with the best 'cos the best don't mess and mess with the best and die like the rest

 

Think it got longer and more repetitive every time we chanted it in the playground. Pretty good as a tongue twister; you had to say it all as fast as you can.

Hack the planet!

Just look at that phreak.

Its in that place where I put that thing that time

He's got padfoot at the place where it's hidden.

Where he put THAT thing that time

Everything can be hacked...

... And everyone

When you really want to flex on being a very important business person.

I mean, I was already sold with the bearded man smoking a pipe in a suit with black leather bound folders filled with papers. Success is written all over him, the guy is obviously important and up to his friggin eyes in important business stuff. Then you see the enormous metal box he carries around just for emails in addition to all of that. Think of the process he must have to go through every time he needs to stop and get an email that way... It blows my mind how successful some people are man. Nothin but respect homie, nothin but respect.

Then you see the enormous metal box he carries around just for emails in addition to all of that.

And while we're on the subject, what the hell is an email? It's 1982, here. I'm happy to get three channels on a good day and shout "Hi, mom! See you soon! Talk to you later!" down a rented handset before the long-distance bill breaks me.

I remember 1982 and how the phones were. You are not wrong about any of it

It was basically just a pager, right?

I would absolutely have assumed that dude was an alien from a very cool planet

Ford from The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is.

Zaphod's just this guy, you know?

I can still hear the actor saying that in the BBC radio production of that show.

Belgium

Hey! There's no need for that sort of language! This is not a serious screenplay.

Holy Belgium, man!

So, Ford was born with another name. He chose the name Ford Prefect while stranded on Earth.

When Ford meets up with Zaphod later, Zaphod calls him Ford, but Zaphod didn't know his new name is Ford.

Welp, gotta go. Sub-Etha Sens O Matic is buzzing.

I could really go for a jynnan tonyx right about now

What's so bad about being drunk? Ask a glass of water.

Are these actual one-liners from the series? I think I need to read this.

Yes and yes.

Myself, I prefer a good gargle blaster

Or Brother from Another Planet.

Or GayNi**ers From Outer Space.

This is a real movie.

Guildford/Betelgeuse represent

I'm getting James Bond/Sherlock Holmes vibes.

Looks like it's right out of TENET.

He kinda looks like Walt Frazier, and the time period would fit too.

I was a overnight delivery driver in the ā€˜90s. We carried couplers, a black rubber cup that fit over a pay phone mouthpiece. The coupler had a cord coming out of it that we would plug into our scanners. From time to time we would pull over to a pay phone, dial a toll-free number and transmit our scanner data to the station.

This is how we placed our orders at the store I worked at all the way up until I left in 2016. Every Tuesday the boss would put the phone receiver up to the coupler/scanner and use that to transmit the order.

[deleted]

Next time you swipe your credit card check out the machine - if it has rj-11 cords running out of it chances are it's a single board computer with a dial up modem.

There's still a lot of places in the USA that have zero internet.

Worldpay, Americaā€™s largest processor just put out a mandate that dial up support is ending within the next few months.

Source-use to work there and still know people that do.

Why? It's still useful for payments and there's not much delay

That is frustrating. I use dial-up as a backup for our credit card machine. That is one of the reasons our internet and phone lines come from 2 different providers. If one goes down we normally have the other.

Might be tough for the average person to tell. Even if the point of sale terminal is connected over ethernet, quite a few cables will be going to components like cash registers that still use what looks like phone cables. They're usually 6p6c/rj-12, but hard to distinguish at a glance.

Scanner + Modem + Phone Line = Fax? Still in use in 2021

And fax won't die. It's one of the few well established HIPPA compliant mediums. So it's not going anywhere

Edit:a word, not the misspelled acronym

I like the bot!

It's HIPAA!

Name does not checkout.

Yes it does. It shows up when someone says HIPPA.

I turkey love that this bot is a thing!

Edit: not fixing the original typo lol

It's Chicken!

It's not a question on the annual training quiz.

Never understood the HIPPA thing. It's sitting in a print tray where everyone can see the data. Doesn't sound secure to me.

It's HIPAA!

Easy big felaa

Itā€™s FELLA!

Easy there. Too many details might be a HIPPA violation.

Any one fax isnā€™t particularly secure (excepting that the potential malicious actors are limited to those physically at the fax location), but itā€™s hard to imagine someone getting their hands on hundred of thousands of physical faxes.

Most healthcare providers use electronic fax now. It doesnā€™t print anywhere.

Which is idiotic because fax machines are responsible for more data leaks than anything at the hospital.

And a fax is one of the most insecure mediums of transmitting data.

As a sys admin for a hospital, faxing is the bane of my existence.

Fax? Still in use in 2021

Where? The only place I could find a fax machine around me is probably a tech museum.

Hey at least one other co-worker new how to email in the orders but bossman did not and didn't want to learn. The company we ordered from eventually got rid of ordering over the phone the year I left.

This isnā€™t uncommon. In the legal field so many older lawyers are about to be alarmed at their obsolete status. They refuse to learn or embrace newer tech despite the demand for it.

Thats why I like older accountants. They stay up to date on tech, but their frame of reference is 12-20 years behind. My accountant uses an insanely huge trac-ball and the most insane ergonomic keyboard. He looks like an ad from the late 90's.

That one guy must have been losing his mind the entire time

"I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"

-- That One Guy

I imagine a mix of 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' and 'change is scary and expensive' contributed to this.

Another fun one is take-home EKGs. My grandma had weird palpitations for a while so they sent her with this 2 lead hooked up to a small device with a speaker. Whenever she'd have the palpitations she'd press a button on her little device, it would capture the rhythm, and then she would call a number and hold up the speaker to the phone to transmit the EKG to the hospital records. This was back in 2013

I worked at a grocery store from 2003-2009 and thatā€™s how we sent our order to the warehouse until 6 months before I left. The equipment was such shit too. It took forever and half the time you have to resend it because if the wire moved too much the signal would cut in and out.

The security cameras were top of the line though. Batman would have been jealous.

Funny story the store I worked at only had ONE phone line. So when we would place orders to the warehouse the phone was busy until the order was completed. Luckily our orders were never that long from what I remember but yeah we had to resend them a bunch.

The security cameras were top of the line though. Batman would have been jealous

Ours were mostly fake lol. Only about four were real and they were hooked up to a CRT TV with a VHS recorder. The tape never got swapped out either.

The most amazing thing about using couplers was that all handsets were the same so they could physically fit

I have an acoustic coupler on my mantle at home. It has an adjustable portion so it will fit any telephone if that era. They werenā€™t always so interchangeable.

I drove a delivery van in the mid 90's. Felt like I was living in the year 3,000 when they handed me a pager and a pamphlet of codes, that I would get from a dispatcher, and what they meant.

My kids have a play doctors kit. It comes with a little beeper. I had to explain to them what it is and why it was used. I mean, they still are in some hospitals. But the last time I saw one it was under my washing machine when we were moving our and it had been given to my father years prior to that.

My dad had a pager until a few years ago. Some doctors still like them.

That sounds quite magical. Do you happen to have any pictures of those days??

Dialup was never magical. Those were dark days I never want to experience again.

Keeeeyyy errrrr beeeep ong dee ong waaahhh urrrrrr. Welcome, you've got mail.

I'm always impressed with people who somehow manage to sound out or type up the precise sounds things make.... And you are no different. I'm thoroughly impressed by your talent here!

Ah yes, the choking duck sound of dial up.

GODDAMMIT IT MOM I'M ON THE INTERNET! YOU CAN'T PICK UP THE PHONE WHILE I'M ON THE INTERNET! SWEAR TO GOD IF THE WHOLE RAID WIPES BECAUSE OF THIS... oh that's just fucking great. FUCKING great. Two hours of clearing wasted. Because you had to call aunt Cheryl and see if gramma woke up yet at the hospital. News flash ma, she's gonna die in that bed.

Goddammit.

Everquest killed my grandma too

No Johnathan. I killed your grandma

Ah poor internet flashbacks/PTSD, im not the only one.

watching websites load from the top down

If I so much as made a peep when my mom picked up the phone, Iā€™d never use the computer again

None of that came out of his mouth. It was all in his head!

I did say it, to my roommate, not my mother. I thought it was funnier this way. And no, nobody was in the hospital.

We got word a couple weeks later that cable internet was coming to our area, and we (I) hopped on it. Compared to now it was slow as shit, but versus a 28.8 or 56k dialup it was considerably faster and never dropped because of the phone being picked up.

28.8 was like a dream. My first modem was a Hayes 2400. I canā€™t count how many disappointed looks that hayes was witness to when 12 year old me spent 9 hours to download a picture from ā€œplayboyā€ that ended up being a picture of Ronald McDonald flipping me off.

a picture of Ronald McDonald flipping me off.

I can't think of a better welcome screen to the online world.

You got McRolled

At first I thought you had a roommate living with you at your momā€™s house.

You ever try to get online and hear your moms voice talking inside the computer?

Or if you forgot to turn off call waiting

This raised my blood pressure. Holy shit the memories are still so stressful.

Yeah, give me a few hours to upload.

More like, give you an hour before someone else in the house picked up the line and said 'oops' for the tenth time that day.

I would but who the hell carried cameras around back then?

I worked at a restaurant and we had to do the order for food, there was a catalog that we had to use a light pen to scan the barcode and enter the quantity on the same apparatus that had the light pen attached. Then when the order was done, he had to call it in and attach a coupler to the device and send in the order.

I hope you also had a Sherlock Holmes pipe

"Excuse me ladies, while I whip this out."

shocked gasps

Seriously, this was one of my most used samples way back when ā€¦

I had something smaller in the '90s called pocket mail. You just held it up to the handset to send and receive emails.

The one is the photo is a Panasonic RL-H1400 hand held computer, which was introduced in 1982, with a RL-P4001 Acoustic modem.

This is why I come here.

Panasonic RL-H1400 in 1982 prices US$600, with the AC Adapter/Charger (RD-9498) at $58. Among the peripherals are a thermal printer at 15 characters per line, an RS232 I/O port that allows communication with other devices (RL-P3001 at $254), an acoustic modem (RL-P4001 at $285), a video /r -f adapter that connects to a baseband video monitor or a TV receiver antenna and allows display of 16 lines of 32 characters, or up to 48 by 64 picture element graphics in 8 colors and black (RL-P2001 at $349), and an I/O Adapter for multiperipherals (RL-P6001 at $158). A 4K RAM (RL-P9001) is $221, with an 8K RAM block (RL-P9002) at $330. An attache case and various cables are available. Initially, 8K Microsoft BASIC, 16K Level II BASIC, and the Snap operating system are provided in plug-in ROM. However, a number of application programs are available including a word processor. When the upcoming disk system is plugged in, an internal (to the disk) Z-80 CPU allows the system to work with CP/M, thus opening the door to a wide range of software. The 14-ounce HHC can be disconnected from the system at any time and used as a stand-alone portable computer. When the complete system is packaged within its attache case, it is known as The Link. The system is of the "mix and match" variety, with any arrangement of peripherals attached. It's quite nice for the time. source: Popular Mechanics (1982)

There was also the Panasonic RL-P1004A thermal printer that could attach to it.

I have two sitting on my coffee table that I donā€™t know what to do with other than display on book shelf.

I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2005 and I carried a PocketMail to send journal entries to my mom so she could post to my online Trail Journals. It worked great, and there were still enough payphones back then to use it.

Did it work very well?

They actually worked really well. But you were sending tiny amounts of data as well. Just like my first slip account was only over a 1200 modem, it was still super fast to search bb's and telnet around the country. Even text based games ran well when dialed in halfway around the world.

Mutants, The Pit, legends of the red dragon.. so many good bbs games. Then MUDs came..

So many hours on muds... Used to play on The Metropolis all the time. That and a smaller local one called the rock garden. Live trivia was always a fun one as well. Damn... Wow. brought back a ton of memories... Loved those late nights skipping around the world.

Telnet! I memorized telnet addresses and ports. There were no search engines, just directories. I can't remember how I managed to get those MUD addresses but I suppose children will find a way to get playtime.

I think windows came with a telnet terminal as a default app in those days. Or was it netscape navigator with telnet function. Damn my memory is getting fuzzy.

I believe Windows 3.1 had the telnet dos console.

Netscape may have had a UI but probably not till 3.0. But then I don't recall because well, ~~40~~ 30 years ago... ;)

30 years ago! I donā€™t need that extra decade just yet damn it!

Omg I just realized that when I was learning and the old timers talked about tube computers they were just as far away from that tech as I am from Windows 3.1

Nowadays kids with their genshin impact with 60fps cartoon characters.

Back then, all we had was black on green text! And we had to imagine the action too!

Yep there was a telnet app in windows 3.1. That was the first time I ever was told ā€œjust use Linuxā€

(Edit: I was poor so in 95 I was still on a 386 running Windows 3.1. I didnā€™t sync up with tech until 97 and Windows 95 OSR2)

I remember when I was in elementary school, PC Magazine had a bunch of online services listed in the back. In the early days of the web, adult websites would list both a URL and a direct-dial number (I think 900 number).

I remember that would write down the websites so I knew where to go on the web to find porn.

Windows got rid of telnet because it's insecure. Everyone uses ssh these days.

Actually just stumbled across this the other day. I have switched over to ssh years ago, but still used telnet as a quick way to check for listening ports.

Went to use it and it wasnā€™t there by default. Easy to install but funny you mention it as it just happened to me.

I'm pretty sure it's still present in Windows, but it's disabled in the default installs now. Also, people still use Telnet, although mostly just to manage and test stuff, especially local stuff.

Man those are some memories! Used to run a bbs out of my bedroom as a teenager on a 1200 modem at first. Had those games as well as trade wars at some point. Spent so many hours running that and logging onto other bbs systems.

Nothing like trying to login at midnight when all the games reset.

I would bank my turns for Solar Realms Elite and destroy people before and after midnight. It was my signature move, don't fuck with Avegedly.

I used the same strategy! In the later 90s, I began using AIM to coordinate turns with a couple friends so that we could do the before-and-after-midnight attacks all together in sequence.

Not OP but, yes, it worked quite well. Slow as shit though. Ate quarters like they were candy, down in the Islands (BVIā€™s).

Where in the BVIs? Like Road Town?

We were at both West End and the Marina in Roadtown over the 13 winters we spent down there. Lost our 32 foot sailboat in Hurricane Maria.

Sorry to hear that. I went through west end quite a bit getting a ferry to Jost.

I want to know too

Had the same when I joined the Air Force. Thing worked great assuming I could find an empty payphone.

What is this system called?

Sol, after the star we orbit

r/technicallythetruth

It's a modulator, turning text into audio tones down the line to a demodulator to be converted back. Mo-Dem->modem. This was how my brother hooked up his C64 to the phone line and connected to airline booking computers in the 80's.

Thatā€™s immensely cool!

Wow. I grew up in the days of 110bps acoustic coupling modems; thanks to my moms job at the university we had an internet connection in 1979. Never saw one of those. Most of our connected machines were big. Like the modem by itself was bigger than that thing. This must have happened at a strange crossroads - by the time devices got that small the acoustic modem was already obsolete but maybe they made this one to cover the email needs of the pipe smoking traveling exec market. Never saw one of those.

My friend's dad had one in the early 80's. He was a postal carrier, so I guess it was just for hobby purposes. I vaguely remember my friend using it to play a game with someone on the other end of the line but us kids weren't really allowed to mess with it much.

That's probably because back then internet was $5 an hour.

Could you imagine paying that much today? It's no wonder ISPs try every fee imaginable. They used to have it on lock. I learned recently that Ma Bell used to charge for the use of touch tone phones when the tech was new and pulse rotary phones were the norm.

Imagine if we paid $.08/minute for Reddit. I wouldnā€™t be commenting on this, thatā€™s for sure

Yet in the days of BBS systems and long distance I varies 8 cents a minute might actually be cheap.

Back then just calling the nearest PoP was long distance and could cost $1/min or more in charges.

Back in the 90ā€™s they charged separate monthly fees for everything. Call waiting. Caller ID. Voicemail. Unlisted number Renting a phone

Touch tone is a line item on my phone bill. They won't let me remove it now either like I could in the past. My grandma had to change out her rotary phones for touch tone ones when they eliminated pulse dial from her area last year. Was renting her wall phones from Bell Canada since she moved here in the 60s and they actually sent someone to pick them up.

Wow. That really feels like something that would have slipped through the cracks. I'm amazed they followed up.

She probably paid thousands over the years for the rent on those phones, it was the least they could do. She is on a party line still, only her on the line (ring party alone) but pays Ā½ a phone bill, and in theory they could put in a second home on the loop at any time, but they don't do that any more. No DSL or digital services available on the line either.

I work in IT and I recall someone's grandmother had broadband for like 10 or 15 years. When her son took over her bills for her he learned she had been paying $60 a month for EarthLink dial up she hadn't used since she went broadband. Criminal.

Actually, there weren't public ISPs until the 1990s. They got popular after the launch of the World Wide Web. From the 1960s to the 1980s, if you wanted to get on the internet, you had to go through an institution that was connected to it.

In the 1980s, any online gaming was probably a direct modem connection or done through some kind of server or other online system. Commercial publishers releasing online games that could be played through the public internet wasn't really a thing before the 1990s.

If you ever read the manual for Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 thatā€™s one of the (many) odd ideas about ā€œthe internet of the futureā€ from 1990: that we would still be paying by the minute.

Not only that, but that it would cost more to connect ā€œlong distanceā€ than it would locally. If you go by the rules it will cost more for your players to hack a server the farther it is away.

Early 80s, I guarantee he was wasnā€™t dialing into the internet for $5/hour, but was likely dialing into a private corporate network and using costly mainframe time at much more than $5/hour. Heck, in the 80s long distance calls used to be $1 a minute so it was likely he was paying a ton more than $5/hour for that phone call PLUS the timeshared mainframe usage.

The commercial internet wasnā€™t a thing back then as it was strictly education, research and government (defense).

It wasnā€™t until the mid 80s and early 90s that you went beyond local BBS systems and got early online dial up service providers like The Well (ah, the Whole Earth Catalog), compuserv, prodigy, and, sigh, yes, aol. But those were mostly closed networks into the 90s when they unleashed their masses into the internet. And even then, we were limited to crude, text-based exchanges until the mid to late 90s.

Yup, this is true. I inherited my grandparents house. When I moved in, my grandmas touch time phone was still there, of course. When the first phone bill came, I discovered that she had been paying a LEASE on the phone to Bell this whole time. I quickly dumped that shit and bought a phone at Target. Lol

I had a summer job in high school in 1977 where I used an acoustic coupler to send FORTRAN code that I wrote to a mainframe in Dallas where it would get compiled and run and then send back the results. The next summer they had a Cromemco minicomputer that could do it locally so no more modeming.

That FORTRAN code is probably still in use today, lol.

Probably is. All of the major banks and other huge industries have massive systems written in old ass code like FORTRAN. At some point, Jim isn't going to be able to come out of retirement a day a month to fix the code and it's eventually going to have to be replaced. But in the meantime, get the guy who knows Jim to see if he can come in, now.

Probably COBOL. FORTRAN was, and still is, widely used in science and engineering. COBOL was used in business.

It's not like modern programmers can't learn COBOL, and pretty quickly too. It's a very simple language. What really gets these companies is that they're not willing to pay market rates for onshore programmers to do COBOL work.. then they complain they can't find anyone and need the old guys to come back. Or blow tens of millions on a failed Java rewrite instead.

The code stays hidden until an intern is forced to refactor it and core systems go down all summer. Fuckin classic

Nice, cloud computing 1977 style

It kinda seems like this might be similar to a TTY/TTD machine used by deaf people back then to type out messages over the phone, although those were generally for live "speaking" rather than reading older messages. But you could also get them with little printers on receipt sized paper to print out the conversations.

AH! You have just explained why they would develop such a machine. I was thinking by golly how would they ever expect to turn a profit on something so expensive to develop and sell to such a small market.

But you remind me of the push to make it possible for the hard of hearing to communicate over the phone. TTD was an already developed product kinda similar to this. By 1980 they were already in production and already miniaturized.

With that work already done, developing this wouldnā€™t be so expensive. Thanks for that perspective.

Absolutely - my sister is deaf and we grew up in the 70's/80's so yeah, you got it exactly right. I was amazed at how they worked, as a kid it seemed like magic!

110bps

oh god

dude i was about to one up you by saying i had i an even slower 56kbps connection...then i realized modem speed dint have a 'K'

I can't even imagine the barren wasteland that would have been late 70's internet.

Is that Bobby McFerrin?

Subject: Don't worry. Be happy.

Still misattributed to Bob Marley.

Itā€™s Jeffrey sending Willā€™s first email

Bobby McFerrin

Defiantly getting a Jeffery vibe from this too!

I thought you wrote, ā€œFrom this toolā€ and was about to chastise you for being an unnecessary asshole.

I caught the 'Defiantly' and wanted to tell everyone that maybe they typed it correctly and maybe we should all be up for a double entendre\~

Yes it is! He could masterfully whistle the modulated tones into handset using the pipe as a coupler. Here you see him examining the much more bulky arrangement mere mortals needed to email.

Right! That "pipe" was actually a whistle that could generate a 2600hz signal.

Wait what for real? Is there a way to see him doing that on a video please?

Huge fan of bobby, my man.

I was referencing Captain Crunch, who found a whistle in a box of Cap'n Crunch cereal that could generate 2600hz signals.

The smoke signals were like emojis back then.

No wonder why Phreaking was huge back then. Are you checking your emails or making free phone calls? I couldn't tell. With hardware like that, I'm not gonna try stopping anyone from contacting their home planet.

Ching'ers. I had a pocket auto-dialer that you could use at a payphone to make free calls. We used it for local and long-distance calls.

red box

used one to talk to my girlfriend across the country for an entire year

ā€œShe lives in Canada, met her at Niagara Falls. You wouldnā€™t know her.ā€

Now I just feel like a chump paying a 70 a month mobile bill andā€¦ certainly not communicating with any girlfriends.

I enjoyed your comment.

Perfect username for this post btw

I remember you could make them out of a modified personal memo recorder. Everything from Radio Shack was like 35 bucks.

Edit: electronic address book, not personal memo recorder.

What did you just call me?

Edit: I'm glad people aren't offended by this, I was on the fence about posting it - was afraid people might think my silly comment was racist

The Phantom Phreak? The King of NYNEX?

Hack the planet!

Ā«Ā Le phreak cā€™est chicĀ Ā»

apologies but whats phreaking?

A key concept about phreaking that makes it possible is that the signaling the phone system uses to say you entered enough change or whatnot was in the same channel as the userā€™s voice, and it was just tones. So fake those tones and boom you have fooled the phone system.

This is called "in band management" and is a potential vulnerability even with digital equipment.

The solution is "out of band management" where administrative communications take place on a separate channel not accessible to the user.

Analogue phone systems operated on tones, clicks, and beeps to tell it what to do. If you figured out which tone did what you could be a wizard.

Old school hackers could do weird shit by making different noises into the phone. Somehow, a cereal box whistle prize was integral. I realize I've probably only confused you further.

Send 2600hz into the phone, receive free calls.
Some of the old school guys could whistle into a payphone to call for free.

People with perfect pitch: now is my time to shine.

*Back then was my time to shine.

Woz made ā€œBlue Boxesā€ and Jobs sold them before they came up with the Apple II

My buddy and I used to make red boxes (A box that makes the sound that signals that a coin has entered at the payphone)

there were instructions in 2600 magazine about how to do it. You take some $10 RadioShack thing, swap out one of the crystals and Bam! you have a machine that can make free phone calls from pay phones.

later on they invented these greeting cards that would play music. You could hack those to play any recording and then just playback the sound that the blue boxes make. We would cram them into packs of Malbro reds to make a cool little package

Now this is cool. :) thank you

The whistle was used by a Captain Crunch. Blowing that whistle into the receiver caused some strange things to happen. One of which was free calls. Eventually, hackers made a device that could play all sorts of tones so you can call anything, anywhere at anytime.

I think a guy named Moog beat you kids to this. Carry on.

You could also hang up calls, iirc, and people would use these whistles in public places when pay phones were more prevalent.

I remember seeing this referenced In a movie.

Might have been Pirates of Silicon Valley.

The Phreak does it in Hackers

HACK THE PLANET

It's also in that shitty doomsday movie, "The Core".

Best awful movie ever!!!

I remember seeing that in a high school science class, my buddy and I high as kites on percocet.

As they barreled into the center of the earth, and race around the ship trying to do shit, he turns to me with perfect sincerity and childlike wonder, and asks "...hey, uh, man. How can they stand up on the ship? How are they standing up, though?"

I did not have an answer for him.

"I remember seeing that in a high school science class"
My poor child, what have they done to you.

Is that the one where they just dropped a bunch of nukes into the earth or some nonsense like that

To get the core of the earth spinning again, yeah. It was actually pretty comical

They also claim at some point that the core stopped spinning which basically would mean death and destruction.

Whenever you dial a number, those tones in that order are specific for that number.

[deleted]

When you dropped coins into the phone, the phone itself generated weird tones that signaled to the central computer that you paid what you were supposed to. But you could also make the same noise into the phone's mic and fool Ma Bell.

The 2600Hz tone was for "seizing trunk lines", whatever that is. I might inaccurately describe it as using a "phone VPN".

Thatā€™s a red box and originated in the 70s I think but I ran across how to build one in the 90s. The whistle was more of a ā€œblue boxā€ hack from the 60s.

I remember reading about all that stuff in the anarchists cookbook in the mid 90s and had absolutely no damn idea what it all meant but it sounded cool as fuck to my teenage self

I've read Ready Player One a few times so that's how I know this.

Early pay phones sent a tone to the exchange when a coin was inserted. The captain crunch whistle made the same tone fooling the exchange into thinking payment had been made.

No, the coin tones were different. The toy whistle was 2600 hz which was the internal tone used to signal the trunk line was no longer in use. You'd dial a nearby (but still long distance) number, it would connect to the trunk system, then you'd make the 2600 hz tone and it would disconnect but leave you attached to the trunk line still. You could then dial any number and it would connect, outside of the payment system (which thought you disconnected when it heard the tone). Source: used to do it in the 80's but with a tone generator kit you could buy (I think called a "silver box").

Or the "blue box". My dad was a phone tech from the 60s-90s.

Is the 2600 zine still around? I remember reading that in Barnes & Noble when I was a kid thinking I was so cool

The cereal box whistle, from Cap'n Crunch cereal, is what gave John Draper his nickname of Captain Crunch. And yes, it was literally a whistle from the cereal.

There is a great book called Exploding the Phone by Phil Lapsley that covers a ton about the entire subculture of phreaks.

It exploited control signals in early electromechanical telephone switching systems. They were massive, floor-to-ceiling messes of circuits responsible for routing long distance and international calls between remote telephone exchanges.

Since digital signaling wasn't a thing yet, the electric switching systems relied on a series of analog tones at specific frequencies, broadcast "in band" with telephone audio, to send instructions to the telephone switching systems. Someone figured out all of these frequencies, which allowed "phreakers" to manually control what were essentially massive computers by simply playing the tones into the phone.

Fun fact: You can hear these tones in Pink Floyd's 1979 hit "Young Lust." Towards the end of the song, the main character calls his mother in London. You can hear an international long distance operator dial the supervisory tones to route the call.

The phone system at the time was operated via simple audible tones over the line, so play the right tones into a phone and you could make the switchboard switch and connect you to whatever or whoever you wanted, or override certain restrictions like extra costs for long-distance calls, or calling into certain networks and devices and computers regular phone users weren't suppose to have access to. Phreaking is what that is called, it basically just means hacker but for old phone/telecomm networks.

Exploiting the telephone system to make free calls. They would use different means, like the whistle explained above. Kevin Mitnick is a famous one.

Kevin Mitnickā€™s autobiography, ā€œGhost in the Wires,ā€ is great. I have listened to the audiobook version of it several times.

Not just free calls, but accessing electronic systems just like a hacker would today.

Hacking but phones

It's covered in a great documentary. It's called 'Hackers'.

I bet he sent his dick pic to his secretary

Three archaic things in this photo: Audio modem Pay phone Smoking a pipe in public

I worked part time for a lawyer who smoked a pipe. I was grad student and teaching. My night students complained so Iā€™d have to bring a change of clothing. Couldnā€™t do anything about my hair though. The other lawyer smoked cigarettes.

Interesting, I smoke a pipe and Iā€™ve only ever been told the smell is pleasant. He must have been using some vile plug tobacco

I didnā€™t mind it at the timeā€¦my students were complaining. Maybe when you wear itā€¦

Smoking in public and smoking a pipe should each count, imo.

Protip: When making a list make sure to add a double space after each word and hit return to go to the next line.

For example:
Audio modem
Pay phone
Smoking a pipe in public

or use a list with numbers
1.Audio modem
2.Pay phone
3.Smoking a pipe in public

Or a comma

Yeah that would work too! haha

I looked at the source of the original comment to see if I could determine what the writer meant to do.

  • hyphens
  • work
  • too

Or better

Three things

  • Audio modem
  • Pay phone
  • Smoking a pipe in public

People smoking pipes in public isn't archaic. It's just usually not tobacco pipes nowadays.

/r/pipetobacco there are dozens of us!

Must have taken forever to email that way, given all the pip pip and cheerios this man was sending.

Another email that couldā€™ve been a phone call.

Probably said ā€œthanksā€

ā€œPer my last email; thanks.ā€

Says ā€œKā€

Thereā€™s a lot goin on in this picture, the pipe is just what takes it over the top for me.

For some reason this looks far more futuristic than cell phones to me. It's like he's some kind of time traveler sending messages to the year 2059 or something. Like something out of Black Mirror.

Modem chimes on, printer fires up and office lights dim slightly

The receptionist waits 5 minutes at the printer for the printout from the dot matrix.

ā€œSend Nudes..ā€

"We have been trying to contact you about your extended car warranty"

I can hear this photograph.

I can smell the pipe on his suit.

The only tobacco smoke that ever smelled pleasant, most likely due to the non-tobacco added flavoring.

The suit is wonderful. I have never, nor never will be this cool.

Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrā€‹kakingkakingkakingtshā€‹chchchchchchchcchā€‹-ding-ding-ding

Pipe smoker!

We really need to bring back pipe smoking

/r/pipetobacco

I am more blown away by anyone allowed to smoke in public.

The caption (below the photo in the image) says that the smoking gentleman is receiving the email, not sending it.

I still have the acoustic couplers for my old TRS-80 Model 100. 300 baud modem, baby!

Greetings professor Falken...

Shall we play a game?

Joshua?

HE'S STILL PLAYING THE GAME!!!

My dad smoked a pipe like that in the 80s. I loved the smell of the tobacco store heā€™d goto

In college I used to smoke a pipe while laying on a hammock, don't to that anymore because it's bad for the lungs and mouth.

Pipes are so rare nowadays. Even in the few public places that still allow smoking.

I just got into pipe smoking and Iā€™m enjoying it. Itā€™s a skill to learn and not as easy as it looks. Very relaxing and takes concentration. Not sure how this guy can just have it hanging out of his mouth like this while working and it not go out

Bobby McFerrin sending emails in the 80s.

Finally an appropriate old school cool! Radical!

My old man worked as a customer service engineer back in the 80s and his company had something that was a few versions ahead of this.

In retrospect, this thing was awesome for it's time. He would dial into the mothership every morning to get his mail, write responses back to the boss, and then also receive any updates from customers. (customers would call into a call center and my dad would get a ticket that somebody needs help)

after my dad visited the customer, he'd write notes into the system and then call back for his boss to see what the issue was. this was all the beginning of a CRM today.

i had one of these in the 90ā€™s. actually 2 separate devices- the acoustic coupler that would velcro to the phone handset- and an early philips velo 1 mobile computer. took the kit to mexico on a road trip and would try to check email from payphones. problem was it would only connect maybe one out of 10 tries. then come to find out at&t was dinging me for every attempt.
came home to a 4 figure phone bill!

This has a Fallout vibe to it.

"You have a collect call from beeee-booo-wahhh-wah-waaah-wah-bzzzzzz"

This feels like a scene from a Christopher Nolan movie, if that movie took place in the early 80s.

I came here to say it looks like The Protagonist is messaging the future to stop the reverse-entropy war. But, he has to type backwards on that keyboard, inverted QWERTY!

Nothing more early 80ies than this.

I remember my dad using an acoustic coupler to access his companies intranet in ca. 83. It wasn't mobile though, the tech in this pic was super cutting edge for the time!

I bet that thing has 16 AA batteries with 0,5 hrs opration time max or something.

I feel like when ā€œweā€ (meaning society as a whole) talk about the advancement of technology, we tend to skip a lot. As if one day there was no Internet and then the next day there was, when there were all these gizmos and gadgets in between that paved the way for the smartphones and other cool shit we have today.

Iā€™m honestly learning a lot in this thread about some things I never knew even existed - especially in that ā€œin betweenā€ time where the Internet existed but everyone was still trying to figure out the best ways to use it.

My favorite thing that still makes me laugh is that, when the Web was very new, Yahoo got its start by allowing people to submit their new sites to them and they would publish a "what's new" page full of links. That was how you discovered new sites. There were no search engines.

And don't get me started about Gopher and WAIS.

This takes dial-up connection to another level

I sold booze in the early 2000ā€™s and we absolutely placed our orders via a coupler or ā€œbrickā€ by finding pay phones. Orders had to be in by 5 to guarantee deliver the following day.

What would be the modern day equivalent of this?

Like piggybacking on one technology to achieve the function of another. Steganography?

one technology to achieve the function of another

Modem = modulation/demodulation of signal onto another medium. That transport medium for data can be RF (OTA HDTV, cell phone, wifi), light (fiber optic), sound (buoy, submarine comms). Any of those would qualify. For something a little more dramatic, a QR code might be more in line what you're looking for.

I expected a typical nerdy type; instead we got us here this classy af motherfucker just photogenic af.

GLOBAL THERMAL NUCLEAR WAR!

HACK THE GIBSON!

Hack the Planet!

The pic comment says it all. I remember the evolution from 300 baud through the lovely USR v92 days.

Its a MODEM - (MO)dulator-(DEM)odulator, it worked in both directions.

Couplers...typically only worked in one direction.

Those were the good ol days. When you could smoke a fuckin pipe in the airport after having a drink or two while downloading your email while shoving 7 dollars in quarters (or was it dimes in the early 80s? I'm 46 I remember pay phones but I remember them being 26 cents) in a pay phone. Totally normal.

I can feel the weight of the D batteries through space and time

How big of a flex would it be to use this technology now? Dude looks so cold with the pipe!

Walt Frazier?

Akchually I believe he is actually receiving an email.

Seeing a modern smartphone in the early 1980s would have been as mind-blowing back then as is seeing an actually still functioning public payphone nowadays.

I suspect pagers will make a comeback at some point. Really in limited hipster circles but still

Email in the early 80s?

Honestly tho I feel like in the 1980s.

NY Post is such a wild turn.

Old school??? Thatā€™s futurey as FUCK

as someone who phreaked in the 90's, this is dope

gold boxes were fun... got into it just after the 2600hz tone became useless due to digital switches.. on to diverters and pbx's

This guy looks suave as fuck.

Thank you Mr. Al Gore for inventing the infrastructure that allowed this to happen

"C'mon man, I KNOW you know how to do the Electric Slide."

This picture makes me grateful for free WiFi.

You do all realize this was a magazine advertisement right?

Panasonic RL-H1400 with a RL-P4001 acoustic coupler, I think. Pretty sweet at the time. Still think RS model 100/102 was peak 80s portable though.

I'd love an acoustic coupler on a cell phone so I can use the fax on my printer to send faxes.

This dude is cooler than I'll ever be and I really want to know where he is today.

​

(Though given the image credit, it is probably just a promotional pic)

Thatā€™s the dude from west world

I've done that before. It was state of the art tech, BAY-BEE!!!!

Holy shit! Itā€™s the future! Wait til someone mass produces converting emails through iphones!!

Nostalgia never dies.

The smoking pipe takes this picture to the next level

Hack the planet.

This is so boss. I dreamed of being a jet setting baller professor smoking a pipe like this back in the day.

This is one where I imagine the discussions in the board room about the pipe.

He looks good, but it's just not there yet. He needs something...

A pipe?

Ok, yeahhhhh. Maybe a pipe!

But is it awkward to have hanging out of his mouth while he types and holds a payphone?

Hmm. No, it seems fine. Let's do it!

Imagine getting a 100 messages a day like this!

I didn't quite know what to expect from the title. But that man just screams style, and I oddly respect him for that.

S E N D N U D E S

Hey itā€™s like from wargames how Ferris Buehler hacked NORAD and SAC

That pipe!

Furious typing

"I'm in"

And looking very fly doing it!

"Would you like to play a game?"

is that Walt Frazier?

I have done that! And looked nowhere near as cool by far. Beer orders for bars, at the end of the day we hit a payphone and hooked up a machine, and could not wait for a better time to be alive.

Donā€™t worry, be happy.

I just realized i haven't seen someone smoke a pipe in like 10 years.

I drive and smoke a pipe. Definitely less commitment than a cigar. :)

Beautiful urban gentleman. My husband might have worked with him at Texas Intaumwnts in the 70s and 80s. He made 70-80 thousand Iā€™m sure this gentleman did as well

That technology can fit in the same pocket you keep the sawed off in. Humanity never ceases to amaze.

Cool pipe, too.

The pipe is def what did it for me

For no extra charge, you can have the attendant outside revulcanize your tires.

Posthaste.

Sending the first email about the Nigerian Prince

That's cool af

Brotha has style.

Boss level 1,000,000

Back then people really dressed up to go on the internet.

We werenā€™t fuckin around. It was a very formal activity.

Bloody hipsters!

This is the man 10 year old me wanted to be... Just hacking everything looking like I don't give a fuck. I need to take lessons from this gentleman

ā€œWhen I was a kid, we had to strangle a robot to get online. The screams were awful.ā€

ā€œPer my last email..ā€

Pipes need to make a comeback.

Get this man some Grey Poupon.

I don't think you can get cooler than this.

Like....I think this dude won

In 40 years all we have done is make communication more expensive and banned smoking indoors.

Think of the internet as being made up of pipes.

They should have phone charging booths

This is the future, wait...

Drift King?

I can imagine how frustrating using that must be.

ā€¦I feel old now.

You can still send an SMS to an email address, and vice versa.

From a tandy 1000, pocket computer!

We take emails for granted to the N-th degree; hell we take most instant communication for granted. The amount of sheer infrastructure that exists so that you can send a message like "šŸ˜€" to a friend pretty much instantly is incredible.

Haha my mom was a real estate agent in '82 and she had one of these to get her listings!!

Clearly, that is a photo of Dr. Bakare Tunde, the cousin of Nigerian Astronaut and Air Force Major Abacha Tunde who was the first African in space when he made a secret flight to the Salyut 6 space station in 1979, during his early attempts at e-mail requests to obtain the US$3,000,000 required to unlock his cousin's US$15,000,000 in accumulated flight pay which was held in trust at the Lagos National Savings and Trust Association. For those not familiar with the story, he needed this money so he could place a down payment with the Russian Space Authorities for a Soyuz return flight to bring his beloved cousin back to Earth. This was one of the very first of many e-mails to mistakenly be considered as a Nigerian Prince scam. Clearly it was not as evidenced by the photograph.

In many ways, they were more advanced than us.

The future...

New Tenet movie really planned these previews well

Is that the guy from Tenent?

He looks like dude from Tenet. He inverted all the way back to dial-up!

We used a coupler at our John Deere dealership to interface with Deere's main computer and input orders. When we first got it I was in heaven. For the first time I was able to verify availability and part number substitutions all by myself. I spent many a night at the dealership until the wee hours of the morning using that. Still have it too. Good times and, to me, the first taste of what was coming.

My parents had something like that in the early 90s. It was called pocketmail. You had an email address, and a little device with a keyboard and speaker/microphone on either end on the back. You could write emails on it, and then use a regular telephone handset, holding the phone up to the back, to send and receive emails. I remember being with them at a campground in Quebec, and uploading and downloading emails on a pay phone.

When I was in college in the 80s, I had a model 3 teletype in my apartment, that I had borrowed from the electrical engineering department. It used an acoustic coupler to transmit at 300 baud. Later I moved up to a Decwriter (dot matrix printer terminal) that worked at 1200 bad. I couldnā€™t believe the speed!

Now I have a Mac mini M1, which I paid about $900 for, that is several thousand times more powerful than the $150,000 Vax 11/780 we used to timeshare on. Itā€™s pretty amazing: not everybody gets to live in to the far future. Damn, even this iPhone 6s Plus Iā€™m using is more powerful than that old Vax.

Butā€¦ heā€™s not sending, heā€™s receiving an email.

Tell me your from Westworld without telling me your from Westworld

80s Morpheus was so cool.

The process looks incredibly convoluted compared to how easy handling email on smartphones is today. And yet, I kinda wanna see this tech make a comeback lol. Thereā€™s was so much cool tech from the early days of computers- hell from the 60s/70s into the 90s and early 2000s even- that became obsolete seemingly as soon as it was released because of just how rapidly technology advanced in the digital age. I remember iPhones being next level shit when they were released, and a decade later the first few generations seem downright primitive now. My younger sisters canā€™t even comprehend using AOL cds to get onto the internet or using floppy disks like I did when I was their age. Regular video buffering was still a thing a few years ago and itā€™s already faded from active memory for most in the first world!

I still can't get over that kids in the 2020's will look at this photo like I would look at a picture from the 1940's.

ā€œ640K ought to be enough for anybody."

This is roughly where we currently are with Cryptocurrency.

I remember my boss in the mid 80s had one of the first cellular phones I had seen, the size of a walkie talkie, the battery was separate & had a carry handle, it was the size of an ammunition box, it cost $5k, I'm guessing $10-$12k today, calls were $10 for 5 mins.

He did this hilarious trick of ordering a pizza delivery with his phone while we were in a bar, everyone was astonished & confused, people talked about it for weeks...

Brought to you by Cinco

All i have for you is a gesture... and a word... tenet

I mean he could of simply just made a phone and been like any messages for me Sharon? But no letā€™s make a huge thing out of finding out your receptionist order you lunch while you were gone by mistake and Larry from accounting is now eat your lobster quiche.

Dapper downloads

Downloading his jams.

Do we know if he got an Out of Office?

You two must be a reaction to something.

The 8-Bit Guy on YouTube did an episode on these mini-computers.

Hey. I had a Sharp one as a kid. Mostly for memo pad though.

Not gonna lie really sharp gentleman there

Neo, from the matrix, will never be as cool as this guy.

Looks like a fresh faced protagonist...

Would that still be possible today?

Who'd have guessed that it would come full circle and we are again (still?) sending emails through our phones?

Phreaky

That would have to cost like a million quarters!?

Some Matrix ā€˜ish.

Maybe he is asking for nudes

Postal companies HATE him!

Message: ā€œI just took a shit that looked like you. Just thought you should know. Love, Dad.ā€

PHREAKIN

This was the beginning of the end. Who knew that greater connectivity with work would mean a gradual shift towards corporate overwork / late night emails etc. Sadge :(

Early promoter to SM? Sounds like vale lol

Holy wow I literally learned about this today nice to see what it looks like

This would transfer data at 300 baud.

Hijo is such a gentleman!<

Rich people using stuff smart people made!!!!!!!!!

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Tenet

Is there a YouTube video of this device? If not, Techmoan should do it.

We have this today in Australia. It's called the NBN.

Imagine going through all this trouble just to read someoneā€™s one word reply to your email

No a bona fide "email" system, but likely either Telex or TTY (used by deaf people to make phone calls using an intermediary operator who reads the messages and speaks them to the recipient of the call, and types responses back to the caller)

. .,... .. . ...mvm .............. MO

all this effort to send something straight to the spam folder :P gmail wouldn't acknowledge the address that it came from.

Early troublemakers, eh? That's a steal.

Tenet

Are you sure that guy is not from Tenet world?

Very Sneakers

And thats when the first were trying to reach you about your cars extended warranty went out

I had a smaller version of that in the 90s called Pocketmail. Looked like a folding organizer with a little pop out acoustic coupler on the back, felt very James Bond to use it.

TF I have never seen this. Was this ever actually used or just shown in a magazine like ā€œhey hereā€™s a really cool thing youā€™ll be able to do in the future yourself with this tech of tomorrowā€ type stuff.

Man there's something fascinating about 80's electronics, especialy around computers that just seems like simple yet so elaborate. Compared to modern tech it's like what a steam locomotive is to a modern maglev high speed train, yes the new one is better and faster but the old one is juste way cooler.

So Terminator 3 did not lie?

Is he inside the stock exchange?

No more ticker tape parades, or documents falling from burning towers.

I remember when I upgraded my modem on my Vic 20 to 2400 baud from 1200 baud and it was like night and day. Also the games took 7-10 minutes to load using a cassette tape player and only successfully loaded 60% of the time without errorsā€¦ and weā€™re pissed when our iphone is running slowlyā€¦

How does this work?

This man has class.

woah that's cool

300 baud

Man that is one cool dude.

Absolute Chad

Now thatā€™s an absolute gent šŸ‘ŒšŸ¼

It's really impressive that they were able to find a black executive in those days.

That's young Bobby McFerrin

I bet he gets no kick from champagne.

1980s: Man uses payphone for email.

2020s: I use my pocket-sized super computer as a paper weight.

I'm not entirely sure what direction things are going...

So does this technically qualify as texting?

HACK THE PLANET!!!!

Is that dude from wakanda?

I thought we were in fantasy land with what commercials are showing lately, apparently it's been going on for decades.

Hmm looks like leaked photos on the set of Christopher Nolan's sequel to "Tenet"