Obsolete Technology in Unicode (2018)
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
It’s because of products like this: https://www.summitsource.com/Eagle-Telephone-Pick-Up-Coil-wi...
Instead of having a device sitting on the phone line, this just suctions on to the handset, and uses a microphone to pick up the sound vibrations. Similar to how a Jawbone headset works when clipped to your head!
It’s described as a ”Telephone Pick Up Coil with Microphone”, but I don’t see how one would need both a coil and a microphone to pick up the signal, and I would think a coil to be the more reliable method, so I suspect it only has a coil, picking up the signal though electromagnetic induction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_induction)
Coil: to pickup via electromagnetic induction the voice sounds of the remote speaker.
Microphone: to pickup the voice sounds of the local speaker (the person holding the handset to which this device would be attached).
You likely would stick the device to the end of the handset with the speaker, where the coil could pickup the relatively strong electromagnetic signals from the speaker mechanism within the handset. But as that end would put it about six inches away from the microphone portion of the handset, leaving little electromagnetic induction possibility available, the 'microphone' part would then be present to pickup the speaker directly.
And I can assure you that pagers are very much alive and well, I personally manage a technical team which uses paging technology to support 40000+ emergency services personnel. On our network they have coverage in many areas where 4G or satellite alone can not/do not.
Here's where it all started, with Susan Kare.[1] She designed the original Mac icons. The original Windows icons. And is still at it.
Some icons have changed in meaning. The envelope icon on web pages used to mean "Compose email to author of web page". Now it means "spam this page to someone else."
For example Greek capital alpha, Cyrillic letter A, and our Latin letter A all look the same but each has its own code point. There’s a ton of that.
The origin of emoji is not Japanese computers but mobile phones (keitai), which were quite advanced compared to what was available elsewhere until the iPhone, hence a lot of weird and obsolete images that appear in them.
“Han unification” was caught bitterly and the lack of alphabetic unification was cited by opponents that the motivation was racist. I have a strong opinion as to how Han unification should or should not have been conducted, if at all, however I recognize the strength of the counter argument as well so to avoid flame wars I don’t express my opinion.
Given that this comment is a deep reply to a reply and probably will never be seen this shows how hot tempers flared at the time, and perhaps still do.
(Having a range for punch patterns may be also nice, thus we could actually list these kind of media.)
The meaning of the symbol outlives the technology that begat the symbol.
They were 45's.
5.25" floppies had a much softer case. They would, for example, sag and bend under their own weight if you held one end, or bend due to air resistance if you waved them around. They didn't have rigid envelopes.
I have no experience with 8" disks.
I did work experience at a printer in the mid 80s, and their photosetting machine used 8" floppies.
Source: The three eight inch disks on my desk right now.
Floppy disks had platters/recording surfaces that were plastic, thus "floppy". Had nothing to do with the envelopes as such.
In Japan they were huge! It's still frustrating that at end of their life some of the final models would run for 230hrs on a single charge! I know of zero mp3 players or phones that do that.
Good memories.
I grew up in Italy. I started using them in 1998 or thereabouts. I was the first one amongst my social circle who adopted them, and a couple (literally two) of friends followed suit. Everybody else was stuck with CDs and CD-Rs. They seem to have appreciated the MiniDisc’s advantages but regarded it as something not quite of our time, some kind of science fiction thing that you saw in movies but couldn’t actually buy or own.
I used mine until about 2003 or thereabouts when I got a 3rd generation iPod.
A relative of mine tried to sign up for unemployment online yesterday. Her state requires additional documentation. The only method offered by the state was by fax.
I had to sign up for an e-fax account to help her send her paperwork in. Hopefully it worked!
Another fun one I've come across is refusing to accept a photo of a document but accepting a scan or faxed copy.
• The first in “Magnetic Tape”
• The last three in “floppy disks”
• The last in “CD and DVD”
• The last in “Pager and Fax Machines”
• The first two, fifth, seventh and eighth, tenth, and eleventh in “Telephones”.
This worked for me to see them all. (1) "select all"/"copy" on the page, (2) open a new Microsoft Word document, and (3) "paste" in that document.
Anyway there is nothing obsolete about any of these symbols. Context is everything and sometimes you need diagrams of how things used to be done. The symbols are handy for explaining the past.
I have used all manner of acoustical couplers including some built into terminals, some attached to modems and some that could be connected to a modem (like a Bell 103)
I just found it funny that people should get so nit-picky about such things when it is just a matter of emoji symbols and when there are so many other conventions such as the save icon that we don't need to so triggered by.
Some people in the comments just could not let it go, they had to hammer on about the difference between the MODEM and what an acoustic coupler was when the world has utterly moved on and nobody cares.
This leaves us with 830,606 to work with. Is that really such a 'huge mistake'?
Text rendering has become a lot more complicated and memory-intensive. Glyphs used to be plain quadratic Bézier paths, but now there’s hundreds of full-color images — and if your drawings don’t look as pretty as Apple’s copyrighted emoji designs, someone will complain.
For embedded specifically, this forced Unicode into many systems that previously didn't have it, and sucked at non-ASCII (or non-Western European) text as a result. 10 years ago, I still had to use transliterated titles for my music files to get the in-dash system in my car to show them properly; not anymore.
BTW, I don't think emojis have to be full-color images. On some platforms, sure. But e.g. on Win10, emojis are clearly vector images.