With so many online messaging services to choose from it’s almost as though the daddy of them all, email, has faded into the background as something you only use for more formal contacts. But it’s still the underpinning of much of the business world’s electronic communication and is likely to stay so for the foreseeable future. The BBC Archive takes us back to a time when email was relatively new, when in 1986 [Lesley Judd] takes a very chunky 1980s laptop on a plane from London to the Netherlands, and sends an email to her colleague at home using a payphone and an acoustic coupler.
There are so many of-their-era quirks in this film it’s difficult to pick, but little things like the aircraft still having smoking and non-smoking areas, there being no sign of a mobile telephone, or the payphone operating in Guilders rather than Euros make it from a different time. Perhaps most interesting though is the email system in use, because this isn’t an internet based service. Instead it’s using Telecom Gold, which was the UK telco BT’s online service offering to businesses, and part of the international Dialcom network. This was a commercial service which hung on until some time in the 1990s when the Internet finally displaced it.
The British writer L. P. Hartley used the phrase “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” as the opening sentence of one of his books, and the film below the break certainly brings that to mind. It’s a time that’s within reach, yet the changes in information technology over even the next decade or so would make the tech depicted not just obsolete but almost unrecognizable. Most of us today could sit at a 1996 laptop and send an email, but few of us would be as immediately at home with Telecom Gold.
It’s still possible to use an acoustic coupler today though.
Modern connection speed and convenience aside, am I the only one who misses how cool it felt to use an acoustic coupler? Maybe it’s just the nostalgia of kid me experiencing such magical technology. Even with how spoiled we are today though, I legitimately still crave the old bbs scene. A few years ago actually considered hooking back up to copper service (discouraged but still offered in my area) just for this, but I couldn’t find info that any still even exist. And pretty doubtful that if I set up my own I’d have anyone at all dialing in. I know there are online methods, but it’s not really the same.
I’ve noticed with kids today, even with the latest and greatest tech releases, none of it feels magic to them anymore. To them it’s more just “better” or expected. I wish they could experience the same level of amazement that we did back then—as my nephew likes to say, “in the olden days.” The closest I can get is explaining to them how the internet was carried by just strange sounds over the phone.
I also really liked the acoustic couplers. I built one myself at one point. I used it for pay-phone phreaking and it hooked to a micro tape-cassette instead of a modem, but it was really cool in my mind. I was only 13-14 years old at the time I guess.
Information reliability at that time was even worse than it is now, even with AI. I heard from one guy who knew a guy who did a certain little trick with a phone. I tried it out, and sure enough, it worked! but only on some phones. Other things like recording the clicks the coins made, I was too late for, at least in my town, the phones did not operate that way when I was running amok. Lots of things were word of mouth or urban legend, and you didn’t know if it would work till you tried it. The anarchist cookbook that I had access too was no exception. Somethings worked, others were just lies to fill out the number of pages. Experiments involving one material worked, others involving other materials did not.
I think we forget how roundabout and unreliable information was when the best resource you had for information was some encyclopedia written by a book publishing company with shaky concepts of truth and bias. We have certainly become spoiled by things like wikipedia. We pretend that AI has taken us backwards when it comes to information, but really, it used to be a lot worse and even with AI, access to correct information is far beyond what it was before we all jumped on the internet.
The anarchist cookbook was written by a teenager in the 1970’s and even the FBI concluded that it’s mostly bunk and poses no real threat. That’s the reason why it was allowed to be published and sold in the first place.
That’s right – it was an actual book sold in bookstores back in the day, for money, and then it got circulated on the early internet by other teenagers who thought they had stumbled upon some secret hacker goldmine.
I carried a coupler for travel well into the 2000s, (for just-in-case situations where no phone outlet was accessible), but I don’t think I ever had an occasion to use it.
Consider getting an amateur radio license, and use packet radio. 1200 bps is standard, 9600 bps on some links. Just like the old days.
Today’s kids are fascinated by vintage tech, vintage cloths and stuff, though.
It’s refreshingly different and “new” to them, which makes sense. :)
The resurgence of vinyl records really makes me scratch my head. What’s next? Crappy cassette tapes? I was so blown away by CDs when they finally got cheap enough to buy.
Video game remakes. A massive market doing nostalgia cash-grabs on people who didn’t even experience orginal until 20+ years later when it’s full of community mods, fixes and ReShade spunk.
I think the distinction is that if this generation want to listen to music they can stream it, buying vinyl now is buying an artefact from the artist, in the same way you’d buy a poster or t-shirt.
I always figured it was because of the authentic cracks, pops, and skips that added to the experience. But yeah I didn’t see the draw personally.
About the young people who grew up with streaming services..
To some of us older people it maybe looks as if they are spoilt by technology,
but maybe they’re not exactly happy with the situation at some point?
Maybe they were born into that society and hadn’t been asked about what they want?
I mean, what’s modern to us old farts isn’t exactly new to them, as well.
All their life they grew up in a golden cage, basically, and feel the desire to actually feel and own something for once.
A smartphone is a miracle to old people (speaking from experience, observed their reaction and statements),
but to young people it’s something ordinary, maybe even a burden.
To the young, playing outside and meeting real people might be exciting.
Using physical media might be something new to them, too.
Like holding a floppy or a MiniDisc etc. Or an vintage MP3 player, even.
It’s not just about collecting, it’s about the whole experience, maybe.
They might feel as excited as toddlers who just begun to explore a world full of wonders.
..
Um, vinyls (or 78s schellack records!) were already oldschool in my youth.
I had a hi-fi stereo with a record player, though and listened to my dad’s old Elvis/Abba collection. ;)
While he was all about CDs and high-quality headphones.
No, I was thinking of the NES/CRT TVs, Laserdisc, VHS and Audio CDs, rather.
Physical media and 80s/90s music/pop culture. Old Animes (aka Japanimation), too, maybe.
Maybe incandescent lamps, wired phones and other artifacts of late 20th century, too.
Like an old radio alarm clock with 7 segment display or those models withmechanical flip numbers.
Some might be interested in video game history, as well.
Pong, Donkey Kong, PacMan, Space Invaders, Breakout etc.
Or Zork, Adventure etc. Arcades. Out Run..
If you get a landline, it will most likely be VoIP even if the last mile is analog. That will not work well with a modem. It may not even work at all.
You could certainly get an old analog PBX system and set up a private network in your house if you want to play around with modems and BBSes.
Hi! There’s a codec (G.711 ?) for VOIP that increases compatibility with DATA/FAX modems.
Not sure how reliable it works for higher modem speeds, though.
https://mfax.to/blog/fax-with-voip/
I think a traditional PBX without digital/analog conversion is probably best, though.
Latency and the simulated dial tone are better on the classic PBX, I think.
production is epic..
I found the acoustic couplers fairly inconsistent in use and had a number of modems instead, ranging from 300 bps to 56K, the first being home made.
Around 1989 I got access to the internet, at that time mostly accessible by academia only, and used that to arrange a trip to USA through a friend working for UCSB via E-mail.
A revolutionary experience … for the time.
BBC 007? Really?
Did you pick the password?
I didn’t but I’d imagine it wouldn’t be too difficult for someone skilled, looking where the fingers went.
FYI Leslie Judd became well-known in the UK, when she was a presenter on the kids TV show, “Blue Peter” in the 1970s. Her successor, Janet Ellis, was “Murder on the Dance Floor”, Sophie Ellis-Bexter’s mum.
Btw, the technology in the video was slightly dated by the time of making.
That acoustic coupler is an old 300 Baud model, rather than 1200 or 2400 Baud.
Sure, for payphone use at a noisy airport 300 Baud were more reliable, I admit.
That “notebook” is no real notebook, but rather a handheld, a big electronic organizer. Some sort of PDA.
It has PIM applications, BASIC interpreter, a small RAM disk and a feature limited terminal application.
Many commenters think it was hi-tec, but it’s from 1984.
It’s comparable to a late 80s/early 90s vtech learning computer for kids.
https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/collectie/tandy/tandy-200/
That “notebook” is a TRS-80 Model 200, the bigger-screened brother of the famous Model 100 and Model 102. In 1986 it certainly qualified as a “computer”, certainly not ” a handheld, a big electronic organizer. ”
They worked just fine for email, text editing, data entry and even some data processing. We got three university degree theses out of ours. We still have it, for old times’ sake. It still works, 40 effing years later, though the outboard floppy drive died years ago. (We “graduated” to a Panasonic CF-270 VGA ‘286 in ’91, which itself lasted a couple of decades — big fan of Panasonic for that.)
Back then I paid Compuserve more each month than I paid in apartment rent. shudder.
Maybe, but that’s what it was from an electronics point of view.
It wasn’t much different to an Olivetti M10 or a Sharp pocket computer (PC-1500 etc).
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/535/Olivetti-M10
Technology wise, it wasn’t much more sophisticated than, say, a Yeno MisterX 2 “laptop”.
These late 80s/early 90s learning computers for kids age 6 and up had BASIC in ROM, as well.
The reason I wrote this is to prevent a misunderstanding.
People of today might confuse the Tandy 200 as a 20000 USD “notebook” when in reality it was an 100 USD piece
of old 1970s technology that ran on AA household batteries but was sold for an unashamedly 1000 USD.
https://vintage-laptops.com/en/tandy-200/
The 80C85 was an embedded version of 8080 with a 5v voltage supply.
It was less sophisticated than Z80, Z180 or NSC800. It was CMOS, though, at least.
The large LCD screen was the most valuable part, maybe.
And the internal modem circuit, maybe. Not sure. Was it a smartmodem already?
there’s no confusion. its a puter. not an organiser.
Hm. On a second thought, it could be categorized as a handheld terminal computer, maybe.
There were serial terminals that had “extras” or a bit of intelligence. Like Minitel, Multitel etc. Which had a simple calendar, phone book etc.
Some could run CP/M, like the DEC VT180. The Tandy 200 was a bit like a portable version of that.
That 21920100481 looks a lot like an NUA for an x.25 packet switched network. But it’s been a loooonnggg time.