There’s a 30-year old dead Rabbit in Seven Sisters tube station | Hacker News Reader

There’s a 30-year old dead Rabbit in Seven Sisters tube station

ianvisits.co.uk

423 pointsedward229 comments

Hah we had this too in Holland. Except it was called Kermit, the phone company actually paid millions for the Kermit the frog trademark. Eventually they renamed it to Greenpoint because the brand was so costly.

It was only around a few years until it was made obsolete by mobile phones which became small enough to fit in a pocket too. But it looks like it lasted a lot longer than the UK variants of this system did. I think this is because the mobile networks were way too costly at first. Kermit was the poor man's mobile.

The hardware was also different, Kermit used pretty thin flip phones that, like Rabbit, were also very popular as home phones.

Ribbit vs rabbit?

I'm surprised that The Muppet Show was well known outside of the US and Canada.

Was it broadcast there in the 1970s?

I grew up with it in Germany, dubbed of course. Late 70s.

The Muppet Show was actually shot in the UK at Elstree Studios, produced by Lew Grade at ATV. It was syndicated globally, including to the US, but it was not actually an American show.

Well, Gosh! 'TIL', as they say.

Turns out it was first aired in the UK too (according to the following link, anywa)!

https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/The_Muppet_Show

That was partly a hiring decision - most of the muppets themselves were alumni of the Royal Shakespeare Company of course.

Jim Henson was American though and the Muppets were first on American television, first in local Washington DC stations and then apparently (just looked this up) the UK show had two pilot episodes on ABC in the US.

Sure. Which indeed makes it natural that Americans would assume it was an American show and might not be known overseas.

But the surprising truth is it ran first in the UK, and was filmed just outside London.

I sense that you’re reacting to this news as if I shared it with a tone of ‘what idiot doesn’t know that?’, when my intent was to share it more in a tone of ‘So, actually, fun fact…’

If you ever wondered why the heck there was a muppet show with John Cleese as the guest star… this would be why.

> I sense that you’re reacting to this news as if I shared it with a tone of ‘what idiot doesn’t know that?’

Not really. Just sharing why people may think of it as American. eg. Wikipedia describes The Muppets as: "an American ensemble cast of puppet characters".

Everyone in Belgium above a certain age (I was born in 1974) knows it, and I bet half of them could at least name 5 characters.

Update: I was once on a client mission in Rochester, NY, and when I told the people there that we are deluged with/very knowledgeable of American culture they were very surprised (which in turn surprised me very much).

Well known in Italy in the '80s.

Oh, Kermit wasn't just on The Muppet Show; he was on Sesame Street too, with dozens of local language adaptations. Though it's not always popular in other countries as it is in the USA, it has been a worldwide phenomenon for decades. It puts Kermit is in the same league as Mickey Mouse. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of people worldwide recognize him, certainly a large majority in the west.

We had sesame street in Holland and it was broadcast way into the 90s. But the muppet show too, yes!

The muppet show was huge in the UK in the late 70s/early 80s.

Wait, what? The Muppets was a failure during pilots in the US and only became a worldwide success after it was bought by ATV in the UK - the Muppet Show was produced at Elstree studios in the UK...

Reruns of It & Sesame Street was broadcast on the Public TV Channel, in the early '00s. In the Anglophone African country I was currently residing in at the time.

It's tangential, but the Muppet Show was also shown in the 80s in Eastern Europe. I can only assume that it was a packaged deal of some sort, e.g. that licensing it and showing on state TV (there was no other at the time) was a condition for getting a loan or being allowed to sell local produce to the US?

Yes, to the extent that “muppet” is now common British English slang for a foolish person - e.g. “some muppet has parked badly and blocked the pavement again”.

Makes one miss gen-- Internet when things could be named Kermit, Archie and Veronica without involving the vertically integrated marketing apparatus. (I forgot about Jughead)

"Kermit was named after Kermit the Frog from The Muppets, with permission from Henson Associates." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_(protocol)

"The name derives from the word "archive" without the v. Emtage has said that contrary to popular belief, there was no association with the Archie Comics.[9] Despite this, other early Internet search technologies such as Jughead and Veronica were named after characters from the comics. Anarchie, one of the earliest graphical FTP clients was named for its ability to perform Archie searches." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_(search_engine)

Yeah in this case the company (PTT) paid a TON of money to Henson, so much that they eventually had to re-brand to Greenpoint (which mustn't have been cheap). Their logo was all green.

They were pretty bad at marketing in those days, they only got better in the 00's when they had moved from a state-owned telco to a private one. They had some hit adverts like one based on common spelling mistakes when texting on the old mobile phones in those days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuW6Q0NQmps (If you don't speak Dutch you won't get it though)

> texting on the old mobile phones

Was this in the T9 days or before then? (I wish the archivist had added metadata to the ad, which seemed to capitalize on similar spelled fish products(?).)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)

I wonder what it was like for the two communications to Henson:

  * Hey Jim, we called this computer file transfer protocol after Kermit, is that ok?

  * Dear Henson Production Lawyers, we wish to engange in an IP partnership...

I first thought you were referencing a different kermit:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_(protocol)

If you drive through a lot of small towns in the American west (east of California, such as Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Northern Arizona/New Mexico) you can often find some real fascinating relics of time like this. Depending on the area you get a little different era. In the southwest you can find a lot of cool stufef from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and early 80s. Up north is more 80s and 90s and early 00s.

One I really enjoyed seeing is a little ghost "town" in Southern Idaho that I had a blast exploring a couple years ago. It was a gas station, a restaurant, and a couple of houses and a small warehouse off the interstate a bit. It went out of business decades ago and was abandoned. It's remote enough that vandalism has been minimal (though certainly existent), so some things look fairly "pristine" the way they were last left. Seeing the desk in the office, with filing cabinet and desktop corded phone was a real nostalgia kick. There was a box that had clearly been picked through that I'm sure would have contained a lot of treasures. I found a barely readable instruction manual for a dot-matrix printer that would have been neat to see. You do have to be very careful because there are lots of sharp object galore, especially broken glass. Local "wildlife" has also been in and out once the door stopped staying closed, but for the most part it is just scratch marks (that could have been done by dogs or cats). The bathroom is a toxic bio-hazard though, so don't go in there. People clearly kept using for many years, long after the water was shut off.... Overall was a really fun experience. If you decide to explore though, be aware of where you go because a lot of old-looking stuff that might seem abandoned, actually isn't (it just hasn't been maintained), and usually the owners aren't too welcoming of trespassers.

What town in Idaho? I live in southern Idaho. Feel free to DM if you don’t want to post it publicly. If you don’t mind :)

Really curious as well. I'm from Rockland myself (but now live in Boise)

edit: Oh shoot, I'm guessing from your handle your a nelson from Holden :D. I'm sure your familiar with Rockland.

I don't remember exactly where it was at this point unfortunately. When I found it, I was exploring South of i-84, east of Burley, west of where i-84 splits to head south to salt lake (and the northern route becomes i-86 to Pocatello).

On the same excursion I drove through Albion. I was hoping to find a good place to camp in those mountains, as well as a more interesting route south to Utah. I think I was north of Albion, but I'm not certain, and looking at the map, nothing stands out. I wish I had paid closer attention. As insane as it sounds now, at the time I didn't really think a whole lot of the experience. I originally stopped hoping to find a bathroom because of an urgent biological need, and that's when I discovered that the gas station was permanently closed. I checked a couple of buildings looking for a bathroom and that's when I noticed that everything was completely abandoned. At that point my curiosity took over and I started looking around, but I was actually pretty nervous at the time because there was a recent news article that had talked about how squatters were taking up residence in abandoned buildings in southern Idaho. I didn't want to stumble upon somebody who may be very displeased with having been discovered, who might feel the need to physically defend their territory. There were also some "The Hills Have Eyes" type of vibes that did not help any with the comfort lol.

Isn't it kind of weird how the top comment on a post about an antique and interesting electronic system from the UK is about rural America?

How so? I accept stories about time capsules from any location. Just below is a comment from Holland. Less weird?

Americans probably make up a larger portion of HN visitors (especially in the currently awake time zone), and it is also a very big country, so stories from there are more likely overall.

When I was a teenager, my curiosity led me to do urban exploring, so I felt a lot more pulled in by freedomben's story than the one about cordless phones. If there were photos, it'd definitely be blog post worthy. Although that might spoil the visuals my imagination has already created. For example, I remember visiting Pleasure Beach and exploring all the dollhouses in that ghost town which was abandoned when the bridge burned down. I remember feeling so afraid when I discovered that one guy was still living there, just sitting back and forth in his rocking chair. I also think Bridgeport, having so long been a beacon of American values, teaches us what we can expect from America in the future once more critical infrastructure breaks down.

Maybe I should post some photos of my visit to an abandoned children's camp, complete with abandoned photo albums of children's parties in the 80s.

It is weird that there is still no obvious comments about abundance of such objects in Japan (with fan community around them), or from even bigger “urban exploration” crowd.

Is it weird? HN's largest audience is American. The next largest is probably Europe. I'd be surprised if the percentage of Japanese users on HN was high enough to break into the single digit range.

Edit: My assumption seems close, Japan is at 1% based on this. I'm surprised.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567986

https://archive.is/20230415023530/https://toolhub.tech/blog/...

It's funny seeing Germany third though. Nobody I know uses it unless I introduced it to them, and I've introduced it to quite a few people.

> It's funny seeing Germany third though. Nobody I know uses it unless I introduced it to them, and I've introduced it to quite a few people.

We're introverts.

Why is that weird? HN is a global community, and antiques are something that exist pretty much everywhere on Earth, people who are interested in them also exist pretty much everywhere on Earth. It's hard to even think of a more universal and culture spanning topic than antiques. I would think it a lot more weird if only people from the UK cared and commented about TFA.

Nevertheless, if you think it's wrong and only people from the UK should read and/or comment about a story from the UK, how do we accomplish that? Should we start putting country code tags on all of the posts, so that way only people from specific countries read and comment on them?

Toilets are an interesting invention. It seems like we have an instinct to want to shit in the same place every time. Toilets are one of those old inventions that I can't imagine ever uninventing. The people who are around 500 years from now will still want to shit in the same place every day. I suppose when we were nomadic then we'd designate a corner of the cave for all of us to go shit in. Maybe the instinct has lasted so long because it's so closely related to disease. For example, our instinctual hatred for the smell of shit is highly functional at disease prevention. Perhaps the desire to shit in a designated corner, away from our usual activities, has a similar functional basis. (I don't know enough about evolution to know whether I'm, well, talking out of my ass.)

Little town of Washington Iowa has a closed cafe, Wingas, that was a 40's-style cafe (actually opened in 1940) that simply closed their doors in 2018. When the old couple retired they just locked the doors and went home. And there it sits.

You can see the napkin dispensers on the tables, the dishes on a shelf behind the counter. The colorful booths and light fixtures, a little dust but it's been airless and closed up. After 78 years in operation. A lot of nostalgia there.

The name "Rabbit" almost got genericized - I heard DECT phones being referred to as "rabbit phones" just this year.

DECT in general (the successor to CT-2 which Rabbit used) is still going strong, though in some bubbles people are shocked to hear anyone uses anything other than a mobile phone.

I think that's because rabbit was slang for antennae in general, due to rabbit-ears TV antennae.

Isn't the term "rabbit ears" more of an American thing? Can't recall anyone using it in the UK.

It was a missed branding opportunity to make the Rabbit mobile phone with a pair of rabbit ears antenna.

Not sure about the UK, but was common in Ireland.

I think the Rabbit name was chosen more because rabbit can be used as slang for talk and chatter, you might say some people were “rabitting away together” and so on if they were conversing at length[1]. In the UK most portable TVs used halo type antennas for reception AFAIk, this might be related to the UK only using UHF for 625 line colour TV (and digital)[2] whilst the US also uses VHF. The main living room TV was / is usually fed from a roof mounted yagi antenna though.

[1] Just don’t use the phase “at it like rabbits” to mean conversations. Unless you mean Ugandan discussions… [2] VHF was used for the old 405 line system, which was turned off in the ‘80s.

> I think the Rabbit name was chosen more because rabbit can be used as slang for talk and chatter

There was a 1981 song in the UK by Chas & Dave called Rabbit which was about people endlessly rabbiting on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGNojF9qKS0

edit as I see this has been posted further down.

The only time I come into contact with DECT is during the yearly CCC hacker congress in Germany.

And of course I bring an old phone just for the fun of it.

Approximately everyone over 50 in Germany uses a landline phone when at home, and of those just about all use DECT.

I have one or two DECT phones but no landline for them any more.

The last 'landline' was going out over the fiber anyway and was some kind of emulation. The router had a phone jack to plug an old school phone in.

Back when it was at the BCC, I remember when they used to tell you to Absolutely Not buy one at Media Markt over across Alexanderplatz and just return it after the Congress. Phun times.

In Germany, many people love routers from AVM called “Fritz!Box”. They all can act as a DECT base station to use with either normal landline or Internet telephony.

AVM also has a line up of smart home devices based on the DECT standard that work in conjunction with their routers.

DECT still has its uses. I've encouraged more than a few people to buy multi-handset base units that have Bluetooth built in for elderly parents (mine is Panasonic; they call it Link2Cell). Leave cell phone in kitchen (or wherever base is) to charge, carry a DECT handset on you at all times. If you fall and break a hip, you're never without a phone. It can make and receive calls from two different cellphones.

Hm, I don't understand, why not just carry the cell phone directly?

Eventually, you will have to charge it.

Do elderly people find that hard? My parents haven't had any trouble with it.

The point is that if you are frail, you should always have a phone on you no matter how short the distance is.

But you also need to charge the DECT phone.

Obvious: Go ahead, state me!

How about I stare something equally obvious: If you have to charge the DECT phone, then it has no advantage over the mobile, which brings me to my original question, why not just give them a mobile?

Is that line of reasoning obvious enough to follow, or do I need to explain further?

Because you only need to carry the DECT phone while the mobile is charging. And they're usually good for a week or more on one charge.

The point is: how do you ensure that you always have a phone on you?

Ah, I see, I thought the mobile would need to persistently be next to the DECT base. What's basically a long-range Bluetooth headset makes sense, thanks.

Needs to be next to the DECT base only if you want to use the cordless handset on the mobile line. So yes, go about your day with mobile, then when you charge at night, leave it next to the base and carry the DECT around the house.

It is precisely a long-distance Bluetooth headset in phone form factor. The multi-handset, single-base units are very good.

Bubbles like most of the world?

> DECT in general (the successor to CT-2 which Rabbit used) is still going strong, though in some bubbles people are shocked to hear anyone uses anything other than a mobile phone.

A lot of modern baby monitors use DECT. Works much better than the old timey one-way radio type too, You'll get alerted if the connection drops, and on a lot of models you even get two-way communication.

Interestingly, the "you had to be within 100 yards of a base station" doesn't sound entirely dissimilar to 5G.

I really like this observation.

In case a non-freq-wonk comes by: This a callback to the mm wave part of 5G. It's signal covers an area so small, you can quickly exit it at a walk. Mobile PR says it's awesome while you're in it.

It's the exciting part of 5g everyone talks about despite its somewhat narrow application. I guess busy subway stations are a good fit as they have large numbers of people in a tiny area. And in larger stations you can deploy multiple cells with minimal overlap to split the load.

My hope is mm wave cells start springing up at music festivals. Those and sports venues are the main use cases.

Even with regular 5G (sub 6 ghz) you'd take advantage of improvements over LTE like massive MIMO and more precise beamforming. All leading to more people using a network at the same time. Also anecdotally I've found that at music festivals, when cellular data doesn't work, texting or calling usually works fine (At least on AT&T)

> Mobile PR says it's awesome while you're in it.

It is! Even better, I live across the street from one. I get 5G home internet at 1GBps, faster than my cabled provider can achieve.

Nice. Cap?

What router do you use?

At this point street furniture should achieve a level of protection as a reflection of our technological past.

Actual street furniture on a street should probably be put in a museum, as streets are absurdly cluttered with posts, lights, cables, signage and adverts, each of which is terribly important to someone, but which adds up to oppressive distraction.

The clutter has it’s own charm

Not to a cyclist

Worth mentioning for all those that wondered why this didn't take off like the mobile phone network, proper... You could only make calls, not receive them and coverage was limited. I grew up in Manchester and remember seeing the base stations about but hardly anyone used them (10,000 subs was the max accroding to Wikipedia)

Yes you could only use them at hotspots like train stations and shopping malls.

Technically they could receive calls, but because that would only work in range of a hotspot, few operators offered this function. There was too limited radio spectrum to offer service across a wider area (reutilisation of cells not practical).

In some cases the phones had a built-in pager to provide some form of reachability.

I didn't live in the UK in the 90s, but if beepers/pagers were as prevalent there as they were in the States, that's not such a hinderance, and maybe still easier than finding a payphone to return a page?

How prevalent were pagers in your area? I was a college student with one in the late 90s. There was a Mountain Dew promotion that gave you a pager and a year's service for X number of proofs-of-purchase, which was easy to get if you just went to a gas station and asked if you could dig through the boxes, but I didn't know anyone else who had one. Crucial item for certain fields (first responders, healthcare, IT, drug dealers), but for an average person?

I don't miss carrying a pager, but the alphanumeric ones we had when I was a resident physician were pretty cool. Need to send a one-way message? They had a web interface, so you could. One or two months of service on a single AA battery. Worked everywhere. Far more than I can say for smartphones.

I recall having one in the late 90's, just before PAYG phones made their debut and SMS mopped up the market for them. Easy way for your Mum to tell you to get back for tea, or else! :)

In France it was branded Bi-Bop and ran from 1991 to 1997; many public places had the stickers to identify where service was available. Apple even had a Bi-Bop modem to go in the PowerBook laptops. Futuristic at the time but pricing pretty much kept it from getting much traction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CT2

Rabbit was (is?) slang for talking. That maybe behind the name. Also love the storytelling and research here.

And Rumbelows is another blast from the past. Is that still around?

Rumbelows was bought by Radio Rentals, who then merged with Granada plc, who then merged with Carlton to become ITV.

I worked for a competitor to RR (Visionhire) when a teenager, BSkyB had started the first satellite TV series in the UK. Nobody wanted to buy it (why would I need more than 4 TV channels?) so they gave it free, including installation, for 6 months before charging money. Unfortunately so many people wanted to cancel after the 6 months there was a huge backlog waiting to get somebody to take the dish down.

People were unbelievable angry, I worked in the callcentre and we'd have people turning up threatening to kill us, others sent us boxes full of literal shit. Not the greatest job ever.

BSB was first (Squarials!) and Sky second and then they merged pretty early on.

Rumbelows went out of business, many stores became Escom and they too went out of business pretty quickly.

Escom acquired the Amiga brand and distributed Amiga hardware (till they went out of business.)

Commodore brand too.

I very nearly bought an Escom Amiga in May 1996 but got a Pentium 60 Commodore branded PC instead.

By July Escom was done.

Remember the name but not the store - according to Wiki they closed in 1995. I have to give them credit for making a valiant effort though:

> Rumbelows had been losing £12 million yearly, and had never made a profit in its 24 years of existence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumbelows

> losing £12 million yearly, and had never made a profit in its 24 years of existence

Blazing the trail for modern internet companies!

Once again young'n's think they invented everything, including such games of economic chicken, but we find nothing is really new.

This would be an ideal opportunity to introduce American readers to Chas'n'Dave, here performing their song "Rabbit" which is indeed about talking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGNojF9qKS0&pp=ygUUY2hhcyBhb...

They might already be familiar with Dave’s bassline from Eminem’s “My Name Is”. My personal favourite bit of music trivia

    with your incessant talking,
    you're becoming a pest,

On the same theme, more recently, Leave Me Lonely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKifJ4Q5ph0

Wasn't Eminem's nickname, "Rabbit?"

In 8 Mile, yes.

Ah. Creative license?

Rabbit cages are called "hutches", which may have inspired a pun on Hutchinson Telecom.

Definitely is still slang, as in “what are you rabbiting on about?”

From rhyming slang “rabbit and pork = talk” apparently.

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/rabbiting+on

Loving that nothing in the rhyming slang rhymes.

It does, just maybe not in your accent.

I'm actually having difficulty working out in which accent they don't rhyme. Presumably talk is different, but I'm not sure how.

I think he might be referring to the words themselves - 'rabbit' and 'pork' - in that, despite not rhyming, together they are nonetheless described as rhyming slang.

The rhyme is "pork" and "talk". In rhyming slang, the slang term rhymes with the original meaning word.

Example: "comment and post" for "eat toast".

Apples and pears: stairs

for example too (for a single word example)

It’s pork and talk, I can’t make them rhyme even with a Boston accent ( which could do “car park” and “talk”).

In my London accent “park” and “talk” do not rhyme completely. Park has the usual “ah” vowel, but talk has an “o” vowel (in southern England we would call this an “or” vowel but I suspect that might confuse you more).

I'd love to hear someone pronounce pork and talk in a way where they rhyme because I sure can't picture it.

Just watch EastEnders, mate.

Hi, shawn_w: Pronounce the or in pork and the al in talk like the aw in shawn.

I can see /park/ and talk rhyming with a transformation like that (like a Boston accent), but the o in pork is a completely different sound. Going from pork to pawk isn't something I can wrap my tongue around.

I think the above poster is also assuming "Shawn" is sounded differently than it is in the U.S.

As luck would have it, "pork" and "talk" are rhymed in the first verse of Ian Dury's superb song This Is What We Find. I suspect the rest of the lyrics will only add to your confusion, unfortunately.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKoh1J84uCU

Around 25 seconds for anyone interested.

My Canadian ear somehow corrects the "pork" and "talk" so that they still don't quite rhyme (though they're certainly close enough for slant rhyme)

I hear the "r" in pork even if it's less audible than it would be in my English. And the "a" in talk sounds a little more like the "a" I'm familiar with from talk than the "o" in pork does.

In most USA English, both the vowel part ("long" vs "short" in our goofy classification system) and the r/l part are different.

Most of these accents have a rhotic r but not a rhotic (lotic?) l in this position.

They will fail to rhyme in any rhotic accent (e.g. general American, most Scottish accents, etc), where the ‘r’ in pork is pronounced.

A lot of song lyrics would be happy with the last sound (k) rhyming anyway.

"pork" and "talk" sound basically nothing alike in most American accents, for two reasons:

1. The "r" in pork is pronounced in most American accents,

2. The vowel is not the same.

It does if you’re from southern England.

/pʰɔk/ and /tʰɔk/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English

It's like that "orange you glad I didn't say banana" joke which makes no freaking sense unless you're from some tiny corner of the USA.

> Chaz and Dave entered the chat.

I didn't want to do this… I don't want to be a weather forecaster.

I don't want to rabbit on all day about sunny periods and patches of rain spreading from the west.

I wanted to be…

A lumberjack!

I think it's a combination of slang for talking, the association of rabbits with rabbit-ear TV antennae, and the fact the parent company was Hutchinson.

I like a good rabbit down the dog and bone.

Maybe it's because it is a [Hutch]ison product...

Rumbelows went bankrupt in 1995 apparently. I was a kids and it sticks in my mind as I used to get my mum to take me into the electrical shops after school as a treat and they had a proper fire sale with everything being sold off cheap.

I find those liquidation sales quite depressing now but at the time it stuck out as being really exciting and we got a stereo quite cheap.

> So, inside Seven Sisters tube station, there's still a Rabbit base station sitting on the wall, more than 30 years after it last broadcast a radio signal.

I wonder what the chances are that it's still plugged in, waiting to receive connections from Rabbit phones that will never come.

Pretty high I would say, seeing that it apparently hasn't been touched since it was installed... although someone may have thought about flipping its circuit breaker to power it off (but not sure about that either).

You never know… There was this tale of a neon sign that stayed plugged in inside a wall for something like 40 years and that was only discovered when they tore the place down.

You got a link to that? I REALLY want to read about it!

There: https://thefactsource.com/neon-light-hidden-behind-a-wall-wa...

You could have an elaborate plot point for a tv show that would hinge around firing up the ancient rabbit battlestations for comms that wouldn’t be seen by the cell monitoring spooks.

sounds like Slow Horses. Though I could easily see it being a 007 plot line

I think Person of Interest already did it. Involved ASI systems though.

Plugged into what? Can't be more than power because the rest of the infra is all gone.

It'd be interesting to see if it's still transmitting beacons though yeah.

Nonzero chance it's still connected to a phone line or some such.

The Japanese equivalent, PHS, lasted 25 years from 1995 to 2020(!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Handy-phone_System

> ... was a mobile network system operating in the 1880–1930

WHAT??

> ... MHz frequency band

Oh. Ok, I jumped in my chair for a moment, but when my brain calmed down I realized network systems in the 19th century didn't really make sense.

   > but when my brain calmed down I realized network systems in the 19th century didn't really make sense.

-Now, in the 18th century, on the other hand, the Chappe telegraph network was king. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappe_telegraph

I was about to comment similarly that this is totally a wireless telegram system!

For anyone who doesn't want to click the link, it's a visual telegram system similar to semaphore codes, or the 'clacks' in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.

And, as every communications systems, it was abused (as mentioned briefly in the WP page) by stock brockers between Paris and Bordeaux via a side channel attack.

They used it to covertly transmit swing in trading prices between the Paris stock exchange and Bordeaux. If memory serves, they used unused symbols or abused error correction, I don't remember which, but from a technical standpoint it was pretty advanced and covert.

I seem to remember they only got caught because somebody snitched them when they suddenly got veeeery good a predicting prices in Bordeaux, some 400km away from Paris.

It appears transmission speed for a symbol was on the order of magnitude of 7 meters per second, and full messages travelled 400km in 9 minutes instead of 4 days by horse. So speed was a ginormous improvement despite low bandwidth and very high capex & opex and limited operating hours.

It operated from 1793 to 1854 in continental France.

The Chappe telegraph supported 98 possible signals with 6 of those being reserved for service purposes (like signalling end of message), so 92 possible message signals. If you could get that to 96 then you could transmit ASCII characters using one signal from Decimal 32 to Decimal 126, and use one signal to enter the original "two signals per symbol" mode for the rest of ASCII and other symbols. Then automate it with machine vision and we'll have an 1800's style steampunk Internet.

ASCII is overkill anyway, nothing's wrong with 6-bit. ECMA-1 already had Escape, Shift-In, and Shift-Out as standard control characters.

Man that is fascinating - too good not to share as a post itself https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40021455

Indeed! That was almost a decade before the founding of Nintendo, absurd.

Here's a video of those mobile phones in use: (warning: conspiracy content)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwy6gSs-ljA

They launched a few years later with a technically superior platform.

And now I know why the option in the menu in Final Fantasy 7 for "calling" other player characters (to rearrange them / form a new party) is titled "PHS". Mystery solved, 23 years later.

I miss that SquareSoft era. The standalone Final Fantasy games were great. Still are should one forget a bit too much. Words and their context were often rich and intriguing.

Entry to an official building in FF12 featured a docent, not a receptionist or greeter or guard. Just one of many examples where Square found something a little obscure to spice the overall experience.

Great story, and that's a killer logo!

The logo is very cool I hope someone borrows this.

There is almost a unicode for it: ʁ

That's funny. Playboy sometimes uses an inverted R like that in place of its masthead logo, although I can't find an example on the Web right now. You can see it in their Rabbitar logo: (although it is right-way up in this example)

https://web.archive.org/web/20220422230205/https://www.playb...

edit: found one the other way up...

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/6aQAAOSwB3Ri~Cps/s-l1600.webp

Sort of the nerdy brother of the Playboy logo. It's the one Playboy calls when it can't get the dang printer to work.

Here's Playboy's version of it for their Rabbitar NFTs:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/6aQAAOSwB3Ri~Cps/s-l1600.webp

Fascinating reminder from the future where streets be littered with tech junk from forgotten eras... Just take a look at wires in arbitrary mega-polic, fantastic. I'm in the process of collecting pictures of routers and other net equipment hanging in obnoxious manner in the most unexpected places. Some of it even powered.

> Some of it even powered.

Old redundant stuff powered on in network cupboards and server rooms must be a fairly common occurrence. Shared spaces are perfect for it.

Well I’m really talking about boxes hanging like crazy on the outside of a buildings still having a green light on. I presume most of these have been patched directly into the electric net skipping all kinds of metered use.

The amount of wires you can find in some cities in India is also mind blowing… not because they are there, but because we’ve only been like less than 50-70 years into wiring stuff.

I heard that when the cleared out the old BBC Television Centre there was masses of cabling that nobody had used for decades. As new tech arrived; new systems were put in place but the old cables remained. Probably a fair bit of copper in there.

Costs more labor to pull it out than you'd get for it as scrap. At least if you're using union-scale electricians as your labor. But maybe even at minimum wage.

Once, when moving an office we were taking the network down and found this cable, lit on the switch, but all machines accounted for.

Of course we followed it... and it led to an SGI personal Iris!

It was hosting a small FTP drop used by a former employee and a few select customers who needed it for some reason. I don't know.

Logged in using the 'lp' account, which was a standard IRIX security hole strangely tolerated by many due to it being a great way to get guest access to the machine to tinker around.

In our case, we just wanted to run 'top', 'ps -something', and of course 'uptime', which was something north of 5 years, lol.

Was in the very back of one of those hole in the wall network wiring points. It being dark and noisy was just perfect cover for a dirty machine and monitor, keyboard and mouse. The monitor was scary, but working. Keyboard and mouse mostly the same.

You must be joking !!! But stories like this can be on the pages of some newskool cyberpunk story perhaps. Fascinating times seeing it all come to live…

No joke. That really happened.

Was really cool to see such an old and distinguished box doing its thing.

This makes me wonder if there are any Metricom Ricochet[0] poletops still hanging on light poles in US cities.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)

There are some around my neighborhood in San Jose, CA.

They are ubiquitous in the Southwest

There's a weird twist of fate lately -- I had a lead on a Rabbit base station and handset recently that I'm importing into the US, now this discovery? ;)

I already collect weird "personal cellular" stuff in my house -- probably one of the only running PHS home phone base stations incl. data, a bunch of NTT Personal handsets, and now this Rabbit.

It'll be very fun to make a call from a PHS handy to a Rabbit handset and vice-versa for probably the first time in the world very soon...

I worked on PHS gear in the US for the Japanese market. We even had an experimental license to operate within our dev building. We tied into our office phone network so we could makes calls just like a desk phone. Nifty little handsets were tiny compared to early AMPS/CDMA chunkers....

Yep! The tiniest little thing I've got blows me away. And it can do 32kbps tethering!

... You wouldn't happen to have worked on the STAR WIT would you have? ;)

IIRC, this was the first attempt by Hutchison Whampoa, a big Hong Kong company, to enter the UK. They gave up on this and eventually started Three, who are now one of the biggest mobile networks in the UK.

I remember them trying to sell Rabbit when I was a kid, and even I was bemused. Why would I want to stand outside a hotspot in a shop when I could use a phone booth?

In between Rabbit and Three they launched Orange, too.

Indeed, and one of the best advertising campaigns I can remember even though their claims of a wire-free future were somewhat optimistic.

I learnt from the article that they started Orange before Three. I always thought that was France Telecom but I guess they must have sold it to them.

France Telecom bought Orange (then a UK company) and decided several years laters to rebrand the french "Itineris" mobile brand "Orange" and progressively did the same across most of its business lines, both domestic and abroad.

Everything from landlines to datacenters to service centers is operated under a unified brand, Orange, originally stemming from this UK mobile operator. (I think there's a few things here and there such as live tv broadcast that have not been rebranded but I'm not entirely which and why).

The "France Telecom" brand has, I think, completely disappeared.

Funnily enough, through hoops of corporate history and divestment, there are now completely separated business entities in completely different sectors than telcos that operate under the "Orange" brand, such as Orange Bank in several countries, mostly sub-saharan Africa, that do not have anything todo with Orange/France Telecom anymore.

Three is so horrible though. I had them in Ireland and they put all our internet traffic behind a super slow proxy so they could ban porn and gambling, none of which is required by Irish law.

Then you had to go to the shop with photo ID to get unblocked. Also their support was absolutely terrible, their agents were so dumb. One time I had an issue with logging into their web portal (to change my plan) from my computer and their agent insisted they needed to put my handset in for service (which worked fine, of course). I asked for their supervisor and they said the same. They were real scriptmonkeys.

At that point I simply unlocked my handset and switched to vodafone.

Kinda a cool sign to keep around. Little piece of history.

Did the US have an equivalent short range only / tied to a base station / could use at home setups?

I don't remember any.

For a while iPod Touches were used as Wi-Fi only cellphones phones via VoIP apps to avoid high cellular fees. I’m sure there’s other devices used like that, but they’re what came to mind and like had more monthly users than Rabbit’s 10k or so.

I like to believe in a world where these guys recognised the alternative use for early mobile phone non-audible alerting and pivoted their business in a more Rampant direction, hence the dead store.

I can't stop marvelling at the Rabbit logo, and also the mysterious icons under the text "RUMBLELOWS" in the print ad. What do those beautiful icons mean??

Looks like a department store or big box store.

I can read some of the fiery symbols - play, record, film, medicine, power, but then I get less certain. There may be a pause button.

I wonder if it was made to be reminiscent of a tape deck.

They were a UK electronics retailer. There's a wiki article with some info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumbelows

Sadly, it doesn't touch on the symbols of the logo

The frost icon is likely freezers, and the spiral is laundry washing machines

Rumbelows was a white goods store, so didn't sell medicines. I think some of the symbols may refer to duplicate items. I'll give you my guesses using the letter above to refer to the symbol.

The R, U, and L symbols are all from a tape deck, and are play, stop, and pause respectively. The M is a roll of camera film. The B is a frost symbol, and most likely represents fridges / freezers. The E is an on/off symbol; it may just refer to generic electrical equipment, or could possibly represent cookers. I have no idea what the O and W are supposed to be, but if I had to make a stab in the dark I would say one may be microwave ovens and one may be radio or TV. The S is most likely washing machines, as someone else has mentioned.

Reading this thinking "it's amazing that this outdated technology was so recent" and then realizing 1992 was more than 30 years ago :-/

After the network didn't really work out, you could pick up the base stations and phones pretty cheaply so my family had these as our home phones for a while. They were very chunky and tough, with an aggressive beep when you pressed the buttons. I suppose that was due to lugging them round outside. Surprising in retrospect that smartphones look like they do instead of Panasonic Toughbooks.

It thought this was about a literal "dead rabbit".

Same. I was wondering if the rabbit had just died at the age of 30 or if it had been there for 30 years after dying.

Glad to see I'm not the only person who thinks sentences like that are unclear!

Would this have qualified for the Dead Media Project? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Media_Project

> So, inside Seven Sisters tube station, there’s still a Rabbit base station sitting on the wall, more than 30 years after it last broadcast a radio signal.

Is that the base station itself, or is it just the antenna, with the real base station sitting in a closet somewhere? And if that's just an antenna, the base station might have already been removed, leaving just the antenna and its cabling (though it wouldn't surprise me if you open the right closet and find the original base station still plugged into that antenna).

>Is that the base station itself, or is it just the antenna,

You mean the rabbit ears?

"Customers who owned a Rabbit phone were given a refund" wooow. Imagine something like that nowadays. Companies that actually have a backbone

I wonder if any of the old Dutch CT2 system ("Greenpoint") is still around.

They refurbished all the bus stops that still had stickers for it a few years ago.

Amazing article on Hong Kong/Shenzhen CT2 system in Wired by NEAL STEPHENSON

In the Kingdom of Mao Bell FEB 1, 1994 12:00 PM

https://www.wired.com/1994/02/mao-bell/

There's an interesting story inside this interesting story. In the counterfactual, the company continues to manufacture and sell the product as a cordless telephone for a few years before the rest of the vendors catch up with it in terms of quality. That's not what happened. Why not?

The article mentioned Mercury too. I distinctly remember working for a company that had Mercury telephones and their wall sockets were strange: they had this bare filament of wire that glowed blue. Was very alarming when you first saw it: something clearly electrical with a bare glowing wire.

I remember these antenna points being rather ubiquitous in London when I visited as a child.

It's a really nice logo. I wish someone would clean away the dust and cobwebs.

I have noticed something similar in stockholm sweden where I live, in a shadowy corner of metro station you can find the remains of a phonebooth with a logo of the then national telecom company

As can be easily verified by turning the sign upside down, it is not a Rabbit, but a Яabbit.

Wow. That tech should have worked.

It did. It was OS/2 of mobile I guess!

It’s weird to think that cell phones didn’t really become ubiquitous until after we started do everything with them but make and take calls.

In the UK they were heavily used for voice and text and were almost ubiquitous circa 2002

In Holland and Ireland and Australia too. Way before they became 'smart'.

In those days we didn't use them for everything, people still used landlines sometimes. But everyone had one.

Right up until the iPhone the USA was miles behind Europe and Japan for cell phones, infra, cultural penetration etc.

When I moved here in 2005 people didn’t even T9 text.

At least they didn’t ubiquitously like they did in the UK where I moved from.

It wasn’t even a massive thing with the young people which at 27 I think I still qualified!

We had one of these as a house phone at one point when I was a kid!

A reminder that sometimes it's by chance more than anything what products get popular. This could have developed much further if the product were not cancelled. In a way it's closer to 5G in that it requires many many small cells to get coverage.

Exactly what I was thinking. I guess sometimes you have to prove something at wide range tower level before you ask to put blinky boxes in every ceiling throughout a whole country.

But it was working already - the alternatives then were

- landline

- landline + cell coverage in certain locations

For most people a "regular" cell phone was not an option at all. So this hybrid landline phone could have incrementally gained traction and out competed analog cell phones, but for a tiny watershed moment in history.

Also, this digital handset was light. Pretty cool tech. I think dense places like Singapore and Hong Kong could have ran with this tech.

Love the logo!

someone should convert all these into meshtastic hubs, that'd be a cool second-lease on life

Cool logo

amazing!!!

Good story but not a fan of the title. It should at least be "Rabbit" which would hint that it's not a literal rabbit.

I wish this comment had revealed it was an early mobile phone antenna and not a Volkswagen Rabbit.

The VW Rabbit was a model only sold in the US, not in the UK.

It's a 'Golf' in most areas

Having read the article: Yes, against Hutchinson will, customers kept buying the Rabbit that was about to be killed...

Wouldn't be half as funny with a capital R.

The title is thankfully not using the confusing (and frankly stupid) Title Case so it's obvious to the reader that it's not about a literal rabbit.

The title has since been changed, it was lowercase now it's uppercase.

Ah, my bad. I'm just constantly confused by title case titles here with the weirdest product names mixed in. Can't edit or delete my original comment it seems, sorry.

How odd.

Do you also have trouble thinking Python (with a capital P) is a literal snake and GIMP (all caps) is a gentleman in a rubber suit?

If I read 'there's a dead Python under the table', the snake is what I'd think it is, not the language. Context matters.

I thought some 30 year old rabbit corpse was discovered, yes. I've never heard of Rabbit the company.

A dead rabbit would be plausible though: it could have been trapped in the foundations and found during remedial work, for example.

The title has been completely changed since I made my comment. My comment no longer applies but I can't edit or delete it.

Sigh, clickbait. No, not a real rabbit.

I actually enjoyed the misdirection on this one. And I really enjoyed the post itself.

To be fair it's only kinda clickbait on HN. On their actual site the thumbnail is very clearly not a real rabbit and is visible before you access the article.

It was more interesting and less gross than a real rabbit so I'm not disappointed.

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