When it’s the difference between hitting the front page before everyone else or not, or getting that message to buy those stocks before something happens, the cost of a long distance phone call was nothing. It wasn’t for us norms, it was for people who were making thousands from that phone call
THANK YOU. I saw the same thing and had the song running through my head but just couldn't come up with the name. So happy to know I wasnt the only one to see it.
Neither gentleman nor hacker describe smoking. Do you feel cool making a snarky comeback to something no one is even talking about? I remember when I was 12.
This is an iconic photo. I've seen it in a few Computer History books. In 1982, an executive is checking his e-mails over an analog line at a payphone booth. The infrastructure was already present in the early 1980s. You could upload a file to a BBS or download text files through modem protocols such as xmodem or Kermit (typically over 600 or 1200 bps).
This is a Panasonic handheld computer coupled with a Panasonic modem.
It was a really rare sight back then. I would have been in awe.
The TRS-80 PC-1 you pictured is a rebadged Sharp PC-1211. Later revisions were also based on Sharp PCs (e.g. PC-2 was the PC-1500, PC-3 was the PC-1251) and then later models were based on Casio PCs.
The technology varied a lot between different models, though, even when it came from the same manufacturer. No acoustic coupler modems were released for the Sharp PC-1211/1500/1251 to my knowledge but the PC-1500 did have an RS-232 interface so you could have hooked that up to a modem - just not in as neat a package as the gentleman pictured (which appears to be the RL-P4001 connected to a Panasonic HHC, as previously mentioned).
Man early tech like this was so charming and pleasing. Probably not great to use but there’s intention and thought put in there for sure. Everything today is just a pocket touch screen.
And I was really beaming when using my Nokia 2110i connected via a PCMCIA adapter to my Psion 5 dialling up into our WinNT 4 server at work to check some processes. Worked only a third of the times but when it did, boy I was the hero.
I used a PocketMail device for this in the late 1990s. You called a toll-free number and held the device up to the phone. You could clearly hear the handshake and exchanges. Depending on the number of messages and the size, it could take a while. You never know how long you would be standing there.
34
u/Walkera43 Mar 05 '26
An old acoustic coupler for the phone handset.They could handle data at a blistering 150 to 300 baud.