Back in the early 90s my dad repurposed an old Tandy laptop to effectively act as a scheduled wall timer for a "VCR for tape decks". He used the parallel port to send current to a few signaling contacts on a cassette recorder in order to record Car Talk and a few other radio programs he liked. A patent was considered, but podcasts rapidly became a thing a year or two after he had it working nicely.
Not a bit of that statement that fails to make me feel a bit old.
Early 90s, not 1990...probably would've been around 1993-1996, with the laptop coming after a year or so of playing around. Guessing that AC doesn't remember, but a 10 year old laptop in 1990 was pretty much completely worthless. Would've been a 286 or so in the Pentium era.
Eh... it wasn't really until the mid 90s before laptops or processors had a large difference between generations. 15 and 30 mhz 486s desktops were still common on store shelves in 1995. Sound cards and CD roms were still expensive add ons around then too. A lot of systems were still dos or Windows 3.1 and not only did you have to purchase a web browser, you had to install a network stack just to dial up the internet. I remember being stoked when i upgraded the 9600 baud modem to a USR 33.6k modem for
Not old enough to remember when a 286 laptop was completely worthless compared to a Pentium? Everything was rapidly pushing against computing power back then...and yes, it was around 10 years old.
Accidental hack, but in probably early to mid 90's, I took an old analogue VCR (it had push buttons, but if you pulled the plate off the front, there were dials to fine tune), connected it to at least 100" of speakerwire that I ran from my bedroom to the (adjacent) garage & around (the inside of) the garage... after fiddling with the dials for a while (I was a bored teenager), I found I could occasionally pick up cellphone calls (a rare thing in my town at the time). I thought it was cordless phones a
Yeah, any UHF TV (the second knob tuning channels 14-83) could pick up cell phones back then. You had tuned the vcr (you had to program the channel buttons then on cars since there were commonly only 10 or so buttons) up into that range. The speaker wire made an extremely poor but just good enough antenna for you to hear something! From the fading description you were hearing the phones themselves as they drove past your house as opposed to hearing the tower. Had it been the tower you heard they wouldn't ha
My favorite cell phone ever: a Mitsubishi DiamondTel 22X, back in the days of AMPS. Hold down the pound sign and type 0944635 (still remember that) and it would go into diagnostic mode. You could manually turn on the receiver, and then manually tune to different cell channel pairs, and spend the day listening to other peoples' phone calls. Not that I did, of course, that would have been illegal.
I've looked at the listing, and it's right!
-- Joel Halpern
Sometimes even your hack gets outdated... (Score:5, Interesting)
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>"Back in the early 90s my dad repurposed an old Tandy laptop..."
>Couldn't have been too fucking old.
The tandy model 100 came out in 1983, so it could have been 7 years old.
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Eh... it wasn't really until the mid 90s before laptops or processors had a large difference between generations. 15 and 30 mhz 486s desktops were still common on store shelves in 1995. Sound cards and CD roms were still expensive add ons around then too. A lot of systems were still dos or Windows 3.1 and not only did you have to purchase a web browser, you had to install a network stack just to dial up the internet. I remember being stoked when i upgraded the 9600 baud modem to a USR 33.6k modem for
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Re: Sometimes even your hack gets outdated... (Score:3)
Yeah, any UHF TV (the second knob tuning channels 14-83) could pick up cell phones back then. You had tuned the vcr (you had to program the channel buttons then on cars since there were commonly only 10 or so buttons) up into that range. The speaker wire made an extremely poor but just good enough antenna for you to hear something! From the fading description you were hearing the phones themselves as they drove past your house as opposed to hearing the tower. Had it been the tower you heard they wouldn't ha
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