Running the 1G Analog Phone from 1997 | Hacker News Reader

Running the 1G Analog Phone from 1997

medium.com

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I wish everyone Medium author would just buy a .com and publish there. I'm not signing in to read text, sorry.

Are there any advantages of using Medium over Wordpress.com?

It has a much nicer editor and it looks better by default.

I think it's more fair to compare Medium to Ghost (https://ghost.org/). It has all the tools for writing, publishing, maintaining subscriber databases and even payments.

Self hosted or hosted by ghost. You have all the options.

Man those are both terrible.

Just use a pastebin if you really care so little.

I'm not sure if things have changed but the paywall is completely optional if you're in the partner program, although it is an opt-out setting on each post you make (if you're in the partner program). You will lose out on discoverability through the medium platform if you do this. This affects search engine rankings as well.

>To remove your story from the paywall, follow these instructions. Because your post will no longer be a part of our metered paywall, it will also no longer be recommended to readers, except those who follow you.

>At the moment, you can only unmeter a post if you're in the Partner Program. We're working on adding functionality that gives writers who aren't in the Partner Program the option to unmeter previously metered posts. In the meantime, you can join the Partner Program to see the option to unmeter your posts.

I can usually get around the issue by opening a private tab or by disabling JavaScript before reopening the page. Seems they try to limit your number of views to Medium articles and try to force you to pay for the privilege of viewing more than a few.

But I agree, most of the time I don't even bother reading after encountering the paywall.

Install NoScript browser extention, then ban medium.com

Remember the RSS reader that was posted recently which generated new feeds by scraping websites?

I was thinking of making something similar for Fandom pages to remove all of the page bloat. The content is CC-licensed so I think it should work. The idea is that you'd have a website which acts as a proxy for every Wikia/Fandom site and forwards the content to a MediaWiki instance with a minimalist theme and renders it there.

The main issue I came across was that it turns out the wikitext format is highly implementation-depdendent and you'd basically need a full installation of MediaWiki to convert it to HTML.

I don't know about Medium's terms for its content, but maybe having a self-hosted proxy for personal use would work. I'm surprised the proxy idea hasn't come up much for taking control of content from websites with dark patterns.

They're really simple to talk to. I think the control channel is just a 1200 baud modem.

SMS messages were originally intended as a way to send error messages (number out of service, etc.) to AMPS phones. Since they went over the control channel, they had to be very limited in length so as not to hog the shared control channel.

Ah... brings back memories. I can still hear the handoff message.. bizzip.

I used to run an AMPS network back from 1991 to 1994. I miss the good old days; dailling NPA-NXX-7626 to reach a roamer, having to copy call records to magnetic tape to send off to GE for roaming calls, manually tuning combiners with my spectrum analyzer, calibrating audio levels on DS-0 cards using 1004 Hz tones, etc... it truly was a wireless telephone network.

> The sound quality is surprisingly good. Now I understand why people were complaining when they moved from AMPS to the first generation of GSM — the FM with 12 KHz modulation works actually well.

I remember this. When digital voice became commonplace a frequent complaint was how people sounded like they were underwater from the compression. I don’t think it was until VoLTE became a thing that I can recall a really big increase in voice quality since the move to digital voice.

Voice quality is still an issue but now is driven by greed. Pack as much channels as possible to maximize profit.

It's amazing how much better an old, fuzzy copper landline was than my phone with VoLTE/VoIP turned off. (Or to someone else on a cell phone without either...)

I vividly remember the Sprint ads I would see on TV as a kid where they claimed their voice quality was so good that you could hear a pin drop. Their phone number was even “1-800-PIN-DROP”.

Listening to phone calls was trivial back then (early to mid 90s).

Pretty much only rich people owned cellphones where I lived, and my unlocked Kenwood TH-78E handheld transceiver gave me access to their world :)

Well then... spill. Tell us what tidbits you heard please :)

There was actually a musician who incorporated phone scanners into his work (under the appropriate stage name "Scanner"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Rimbaud https://www.discogs.com/Scanner-Scanner/master/1767734

In the '90's I worked with a bunch of ham operators in a building next to Route 95. Perhaps the most interesting call that we heard was a guy who kept switching between his wife and his girlfriend. IIRC (it was many years ago) neither one was happy with him.

Late 90's, I heard all sorts of stuff. The one that really stands out was a girls basketball coach who was in town for a tournament on the phone with a prostitute, talking to her about the need for discretion.

Cordless phones were pretty common during that era, and they were just as trivial to listen into. Teenage me had a hard time looking the neighbors in the eyes afterwards though...

Oh yeah, I remember when they started advertising with 'encrypted' cordless phones.

You just needed an old analog TV. The UHF tuner would pick up AMPS.

https://archive.is/WI18G

> Read the rest of this story with a free account.

Oh how far Medium has fallen.

Was medium ever good?

> This is, by the way, the reason why so many museum expositions are boring, it will always happen when the things inside are not “alive” and cannot be demonstrated in real use.

Would be great if retro tech museums kept everything in working/demonstrable conditions. That'd be a mission!

Then this museum could be to your liking: https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/

Based in the Netherlands, they keep all devices in working condition and you can actually use them. Some on request.

I once went to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) to see an exhibition of various digital, partially digital, or digital-related exhibits...

What I remember the most was a room exhibiting several older websites on beige-boxes with CRT monitors, running Windows 95 and Netscape 3, and period-appropriate keyboards and mice.

They were set up so that you could click around and browse around, and I even went so far as looking at the source.

What I realized was that NN3 is a pretty capable browser, and so are many which came after them.

Well, I decided to start testing my Web projects with every browser I could get my hands on, and I've discovered that, if you are very careful, you can make sites which work with 25+ years worth of browser software...

And if I'm not on a strict schedule, browser quirks and compatibility are kind of fun!

So I am sort of on the type of mission you're describing. I've set up the appropriate VMs, and whenever I'm working on the computer (pretty much every day haha) is like a visit to a historic browser exhibit. :)

I also like writing in MS Word 97, so this makes it easy to paste the text into my blog afterwards.

Those StarTacs are still such great looking devices. I had one of the later digital ones. It was comfortable to use and carry, and you always felt cool snapping it shut after a call.

Interesting. I have quite a few old GSM phones which only recently I started powering up using a power supply - No hope to repair/clone batteries except maybe nimh ones - and in some I had issues recognizing a relatively modern SIM cards. Maybe I need to write a post with them powering up just of the fun of it

NMT is the analog 1G standard that's still in use in a few places like Siberia, where the ability to cover a lot of area with a few towers comes in handy.

I really wish somebody would make a modern phone I could install netbsd on.

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