GTA Online - The Saga Continues

[Art Blade]

yes, here they were called acoustics couplers. I even saw them in action when they were state of the art. Those openings for the ear- and mouthpiece, we called them "rubber c***s" 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Better than this one

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I have used the coupler type, we had one in middle school, but the base it was attached to was much bigger than the previous picture, I couldn't find an equivalent one. You'd be hard pressed to pick it up with one hand and throw it.

[Art Blade]

 

Holy Moly, Guacamole.

I hadn't seen anything like the stuff shown in this new pic before. Note the mirror (lol) in the lid of the box to the right, you see the reflection of a tape recorder and the woman's hand.

The box to the left reminds me of an old telex (teleprinter) -- I remember one that had to be fed with paper for punched tape..

[PZ]

You should be on the development team for Fallout, D_B 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah I think those are more telex machines than modems, but essentially do the same thing.

[Art Blade]

I wrote "right" but meant the "left" box, regarding telex. I silently and secretly corrected that.

Yep.. man, those were weird times. Remember full-field teletext? 16 colour graphics.. it used some weird kind of ANSI escape codes to create graphics, and you had to be very efficient because of limits and money it cost.. I helped out in an advertisement agency back then and among other stuff, they created teletext content.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I never used a telex, but it sounds like fun!

[Art Blade]

erm, are you referring to telex or teletext? Because teletext was kind of fun, telex was just as funny as a typewriter. Perhaps even less so.

Just to make sure: The way I remember it, teletext was printed on a TV screen. Like a very clumsy and clunky web page, sort of. Like 10 lines of text covering up the whole screen. Telex, or teleprinter, was used to transmit text almost like a FAX these days. The difference was, you first needed to encrypt the text using a punch tape because the machine couldn't transmit plain text. Then the punch tape code was transmitted like a FAX or phone call of sorts, and there the typewriter would decrypt the code and print out a readable text version. Oh and these things were LOUD 

[fragger]

They sure were. CHAKKA CHAKKA CHAKKA CHAKKA CHAKKA...

I too remember Teletext Art, although I never had it connected, or whatever it was you had to do to get it. It was a big deal at the time, a wonder of modern technology I remember seeing ads on TV for it: "Television and The Computer have combined to bring you Teletext!" the voice-over dude would gush with much revelatory excitement before going on to bedazzle you with its capabilities.

There were some very pixelly graphics, but mostly it was just text in chunky fonts in a few different colours on a black screen. You could get news stories, $p@rts results, weather reports, TV guides, stock market updates, and other stuff.

Below is a pretty typical Teletext page. Basically primitive internet on TV, where you used a remote to navigate through the pages and select things:

Spoiler

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It sort of preceded the internet the way the mechanical adding-machine preceded calculators

[Dweller_Benthos]

OK, yeah, never saw any of that, interesting. I'm mostly thinking of the teletype machines that would transmit text from one typewriter to another, sort of. I never used one, but we had a system in school that was more of a remote terminal to the mainframe at the local university where you could type in commands for various things to look up information and get a printed page spat out at you. No monitor, just a keyboard and a printer, which was mostly a dot matrix pin printer, and a box of pinfeed paper underneath feeding the thing.

[Art Blade]

that must have been after telex and teletext 

I have memories of those telex and teletext that are from the late 1970s and early 1980s

[Dweller_Benthos]

This would have been late 70s or early 80s, either middle school or high school for me. As I recall, it was a remote link to the mainframe at a local college/university only instead of a monitor, everything you did was printed out on pinfeed computer paper.

[Art Blade]

I hated those matrix printers. They used to scream with a very high-pitched noise that would render any verbal conversation a pantomime act. When everyone else went to get ink printers, those matrix screamers would remain for a long time in medical facilities because they didn't want to spend money on new stuff as long as the old stuff was still doing fine. And that stuff lasted QUITE long I remember that even after years, I'd think, "oh Jesus, they STILL got one of THOSE..."

[Dweller_Benthos]

The place I get my car worked on had a dot-matrix printer up until a year ago or so. They had pre-printed pinfeed forms with carbon to make several copies when it was printed out. They finally upgraded to a laser printer this year.

I had a color dot matrix printer as my first printer. Yes, I tried printing photos with it, and the results weren't too bad, considering, but the pins pummeled the paper so much it was actually tissue thin wherever the image was because it had been passed over four times (CMYK ribbon) to make the image. But it worked. It was really meant for "business graphics", pie charts, Excel sheet outputs, that sort of thing, but it could do photos. And yeah, it was loud, as in, leave the room when it's printing loud.

[fragger]

Funny stories, and fond memories - not

I hated those dot-matrix printers too, especially when the damn things would jam up. Loading a new block of that continuous paper was a pain as well as you'd have to line up the holes in the edges of the paper with the sprockets or whatever you call them and if you loaded it one peg too short or too far, the pages would get out of whack - like a title for the top of a page would end up on the bottom of the previous page, and that sort of thing. Then you had to stuff around with the paper positioning to get it back to normal. It sucked when it had printed out about fifty pages like that before you noticed and you had to realign the paper and print it all out again

I used to have to do that when I was in IT back around 2002. Some jerk in the finance department had a daily report he wanted printed out and he wouldn't accept it if it was out of whack. So I used to have to get it from the print room on the lower floor (it would print out automatically at the appointed time each day), make sure it was folded up properly, and take it upstairs to him. It was a big report too, about 80 pages on that really wide matrix paper. When he got his report, sometimes he would look up different pages, but way more often than not he would just flip to the last page, look at it for a minute, then chuck the whole thing into the bin.

Now you know why I called him a jerk.