So I had a project where I connected an old analog phone to a VOIP adapter, and then simulate the phone system on my computer. Pretty sure I could do that! Remind me...
I had both a Speak & Spell and a Speak & Math as a kid, so the phrase "The CORRECT answer IS:" in that robotic voice is permanently burned into my brain.
only an AVGN fan would recognise that. or someone who's played "BEEEEE SEVEEN TEEEN BOOMBERRR" with the voice synthesiser, I actually have played it like that. It's still in my memory Loud and Crystal clear in it's old synthesiser glory
The logo has an interesting story. Prior to the breakup AT&T wanted to begin selling business and consumer products made by Bell manufacturing arm Western Electric. The DOJ and FCC ruled that they had to set up a wholly separated subsidiary (not part of regulated phone business) to sell the equipment. They were allowed to use the bell name but not the logo, so they hired Saul Bass (the guy who made the last bell logo) to design one, and made the "death star" logo. American Bell took over the Bell Phone Centers and began selling equipment in the early 80s. As this was happening the antitrust case was settled and the breakup was agreed. Originally AT&T was to keep the bell logo, but the final agreement barred them from using the Bell name and logo except for Bell Laboratories, so AT&T adopted American Bells logo and renamed absorbed it into AT&T Technologies upon breakup
@@jovetj fun fact from some other TH-cam channel, for the war games computer voice, they had the voice actor read each sentence backwards, so he recorded "game a play we shall", then they spliced it back together to get that crazy voice.
I graduated engineering school in 1983. I would agree that this sounds pretty good. Some fellow students did a senior project on speech synthesis as I recall, and I am not sure how successful it was. Definitely not in widespread use.
@@Nathan-wk9dd Seriously??? In War Games, that was a PERSON talking? I never knew that. It sounded so much like an authentic TTS voice. In fact, I had SAM for my C64 back then and it sounded very similar. I'm surprised they didn't just use a real text to speech synthesizer.
Jäger, yeah I know. It sounds better than some modern text to speech tools we have now. Speak N Spell sounded pretty good too. I'm thinking the ROM chips didn't contain English text though (like "please hang up"). It was probably sentences made up of phonetic words. C64 SAM had a mode to do that so you could make every word sound perfect and still only be taking up a TINY bit of space for simple text. SAM had a "reciter" to speak English words but it messed up on a lot of words.
I'm kind of impressed with how decent the synthesizer voice sounded for 1983. I'm sure back then they would have expected computer voices to be completely natural sounding by 2017. They're making progress, but we're not there just yet.
I remember RadioShack used to sell a voice synthesizer chip in a kit along with a printed circuit board and some passive components, but I don't remember how was the input made, think it was a bank of 8 switches as a 1 byte register.
So in order to try this on 2017 you had to go through a digital IP connection with a router that simulates an analog POTS line, to a answering machine that reads on the analog line and stores the numbers digitally? We live in a weird world. On the other hand it is crazy to think that the analog POTS standard is still widely used today, to the point where internet modems "simulate" it.
in america (well in the greater terre haute/vigo county area in indiana) we still have the old pots system, i think the backbone of the cell phone systems still rely on pots. (i'm just going out on limb here, i'm not positive about any of this!) i mean jumping the signal from tower to tower would greatly reduce the already crap sound quality, (especially over extremely long distances) and you wouldn't be able to call anyone who still uses pots telephones! (as i said earlier, i'm just going out on a limb with this statement, I AM NOT SURE ABOUT ANY OF THIS)
My parents had one of these still in a box somewhere. They were sold to AT&T employees back in the 80s and as you mentioned, was rather a flop. While the idea was cool, they said that people would say "something weird picked up the phone." People were just getting used to answering machines in the 80s and even many businesses didn't have auto-attendants yet. Really cool to see a working one.
You could just use a older business grade phone system as they also have voicemail as well as the ability to call another phone on the system by configuring extensions. It might not be as retro but it would still function the same.
Very cool! We had a similar system in the early 90's but it was built into the telephones! You had to buy multiple of the same model telephone and connect them all to your POTS and once connected, they "find each other" and register to a user-set "master" telephone on the line. This allowed you to call all connected telephones in your house by pressing *01, *02, *03, and so on for every room a telephone was connected! It was very convenient for bigger houses (no cellphones back then!). I do love the synth voice on your device though!
Telephones connected in parallel, we did not have this in Germany back in the days and this confused me when watching US sitcoms where someone (typically unsuspecting wife) could just pick up the phone and enter another call from the same house (typically cheating husband). Over here the state phone service basically owned all your in-house telephone equipment and they had rules that it must be set up in a way that one phone being picked up means all other phones being dead. This even meant that you could not legally connect a modem in the early days because it was not licensed for use with their network. Fortunately times have changed.
Kabuto Isn’t that partly the reason for acoustic coupler modems? They allowed the use of an ordinary telephone handset 📞 to connect to the network therefore bypassing the whole “you can only connect approved equipment up to our network” law.
I love the way that it sounds like a Speak & Spell. And it looks like it was designed more for a small office than a home. I bought a Panasonic digital answering machine for my parents in the early 2000's. And though it was more reliable and still works to this day, my father preferred the old cassette one, he said the calls sounded better.
When I grew up in the 90s you could simply dial your own number, a recording would come on with instructions, but it used the same recording that would have been used if you called someone else on the same party line. The telephone company then known as Sprint United Telephone actually supported this. When my great grandmother moved in 1993, what the phone company did was simply connect the phone line to her new house while her old house was still connected to call from one house to another you simply dialed her number.
Actually, there WAS a way to call yourself using POTS lines... you just had to be super quick about it. You first dial your own number, then hang up before you get the 'ringing in your ears.' All other phones in the house/on the line will then ring. Once someone answered, you could talk as normal. My neighbor did it ALL the time to call up to her husband's garage, which shared the same number.
I like that speech synth. The germans had something similar. That unit did not come in a box but as a special fancy phone that did cost 1000 DEM (about $500) back then. It was called "Telekom Delegatic". It uses speech synthesis with very similar phrases you showed on the video (but in german) and could store numbers or even texts using dialtones with additional frequencies. No answering machine. The storage memory was a 28C16 or 64 parallel EEPROM. A little novelty for it's time.
I worked for American Bell at the time and purchased one of these. I was/am a geek and loved the technology of the device. It was like having a small PBX at home. Eventually the unit died and the fact (as you mentioned) that not everyone had touch tone dialing made the unit somewhat impractical. I was impressed with the technology of the device at the time and I want to thank you for this trip down memory lane of a fun time in my "high tech" life. Boy, I miss the old days! ;)
Thanks for the video. My dad worked for Ma Bell for nearly 40 years, and was always bringing stuff like this home for our family to use. I remember all those different emergency numbers as well. It sure is funny how old tech just kind of fades away and is largely forgotten.
You were right with the connection between American Bell and the Bell System Divestiture. AT&T introduced the company in 1982 as a separate division from their manufacturing arm Western Electric (due to FCC regulations preventing WE from selling "enhanced" telephony products, but it explains the connection between American Bell and Western Electric). But as part of the divestiture, they lost the rights to the "Bell" brand (with the exception of Bell Labs), so when the divestiture took effect in 1984, they renamed it to AT&T Information Systems until it was absorbed into AT&T itself in 1989 (as the FCC regulations were loosened by that point). American Bell was actually the first use of the Saul Bass AT&T "Death Star" logo, proceeding the use of it as AT&T's corporate logo by about a year. I recommend anyone interested in technology to check out more about the Bell System, especially the Bell System Memorial website. It's a very interesting topic. p.s. whoever made the captions: It's spelled "Ma Bell", no "w".
Who's bright idea was to change the name AT&T, one of the most recognizable brand-names in history, to Cingular. They changed it back some years later. I hope some someone got fired for that one.
Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that... Cingular originally began as a joint venture between SBC Communications and BellSouth. In 2004, Cingular purchased AT&T Wireless Services (which was spun off from the original AT&T a couple of years earlier). In 2005, SBC purchased AT&T and took the branding of the latter, becoming the modern day AT&T. In 2007, AT&T purchased BellSouth, thus consolidating ownership of Cingular to AT&T, thus allowing them to rebrand Cingular to AT&T Mobility. I'm guessing that your area was originally covered by AT&T Wireless Services, then Cingular Wireless, then AT&T Mobility. tl;dr: Cingular purchased AT&T's original wireless service, then one of the partners of the former bought AT&T and the other partner, thus allowing Cingular to become AT&T. Complicated, I know.
It is more of a "complicated tape recording system" (in the wods of the Computer Chronicles). The speech synthesizer gets fed with compressed data based off a recording (instead of TTS)
nrdesign1991 That's interesting. Any specific device you're referring to? Though some of the earliest synths were based off mathematical models of a resonant tube. The majority of modern speech synthesizers are based on recorded samples of varying complexity. The extreme case of this being the multi-gigabyte sample sets that consitute Yamaha's most advanced synth, otherwise known as vocaloid. (it's most distinguishing feature, aside from the characters created by a licence holder of the technology known as Crypton Future Media for marketing purposes, is that it's designed to replicate singing, rather than conversations. The basis of the technology is still fundamentally the same though.)
nrdesign1991 I've got the Speak and Spell samples, it's possible to make sentences yourself with those alone, albeit it's not the same. Which is why I asked if there was a TTS in the vein of Microsoft Sam that used this chip as a basis.
The voices you can get nowadays are much more realistic sounding. I have the _Voice Dream_ app on my iPhone using the Ivona voice 'Amy'. She sounds very realistic - harposoftware.com/en/english-uk/88-s2g-en-amy.html
6:28 You could do this with a normal phone line. You would dial your own phone number then hang up. Moments later your phone would ring, and everyone in the house could pick up. Prior to having some good ole 10base-2 hardware, this is a feature my brother and I would exploit to create a connection between two computers to play a game that had a builtin dialer. The software was expecting a dial tone, and the receiving instance of the game was expecting a ring before it would answer. So we would tell the game to dial our own number, then quickly disconnect the line from the dialing computer and connect another wire which we had at the ready for a direct connection. Right after the phone line rang and the second computer picked up, we would disconnect the line from that computer and plug in the other end of our straight wire. Now we had one wire between both computers and they were communicating as if it were a normal modem to modem call.
I don't remember if it was part of the standard AT command set but on some modems I had back in the early 90s there was a command to make the modems ignore the presence/absence of the dial tone and to simulate a RING. I used that feature to transfer files between some computers much in the same way you did, except without out the swapping of phone cables around.
In Australia back in the day the callback number was 199. Handy for testing your ringer etc. This even worked on ancient public phones, before they removed the ability for them to accept incoming calls. (Number is now 12722199 on a Telstra line)
At that age, we didn't know anything about AT commands. I was going to say I wish we did. But nah, I'd rather have the fond memories of yelling at each other for getting the timing wrong. We did eventually figure it out, but that was short lived because we decided we wanted a real permanent network. (mostly because we wanted to be online at the same time, and you cant get online if your modem is busy talking to the computer in the other room) So that's when we bought the 10base-2 nics.
You really have nice content. i appreciate you doing this to teach every kid, teen, adolescent and elder to learn more! i been watching you since 2015! and i still have no shame
I still had a rotary phone in 1986. Reason: We were a family of six. (plus it was kind of a fixture: large (>ft high), nailed to the wall, center of the house)
@@taygadesign If I were to do it, I'd bet a small notch on the lower part of the upper receiver would be enough...that or the ear side expanded a little outward. I was only 6 at the time so I never checked, but I know I'd hung it upside-down a few times just to try and it wasn't exactly stable. Of course, the cord's weight and elastic pressure being exerted on the microphone side probably also contributed to that.
Ha. A family member of mine had one of these in the 80s. I remember calling and dialing in my number for him to call me back. This was high tech stuff back then and quite impressive!
There is one benefit to rotary style analog phones (or at least there was 10 years ago), if you live in a place prone to power outages the analog rotary phones would still be able to place a call assuming only the power was out and the phone lines weren't damaged. Since phone lines and power lines often run along the same poles it's possible both would be knocked out by a fallen tree branch, but if just a transformer blew or something like that happened the phone line powers the old rotary phones.
The touch tone phones like the ones shown in the video were also 100% line powered. The oscillator takes some of the phantom power from the line to operate. Later Trimline phones (both Rotary and Touch Tone) also used a LED powered by the line and you can still get Trimline style phones with illuminated keypads powered by the line.
Last time i was this early people wearnt using old and unoriginal jokes. People used to make their own jokes, but i guess not anymore, now it's just the age of autism and sheep.
So you complain about people not making their own jokes but then go on to use the word autism as a sign that you're so hip and cool you're using only the freshest and most interesting memes. Respect.
Thank you for this video, and all your videos in generel. This one however was very interesting because even though the "answering machine" is old, the premise of it still seems cool. I've been a subscriber since you had ca. 3000 subscribers, I'm really stoked to see how many people have begun to follow you as well. Also I have great respect for your decision to go full time as a YT'er. I wish you the very best. Andreas, Denmark. :)
This was super interesting! This is why you remain one of my favorite channels on TH-cam. Because you present it in a way that is not alienating folks. Info for all. ✊😌❤️
911 came out in 68, but wasn't well known until the 70s. It didn't make it to some areas though until the 80s. Prior to the introduction of rotary phones though, you would just tell the operator if you had an emergency.
In the UK we now have short numbers for non emergency calls to your local police station, and to the NHS helpline. Police are contactable for non emergencies on 101, and I think the NHS is 111. Most people don't know that, and would probably Google the numbers anyway! 😂
Whoa! This would have given someone essentially an internal phone network very similar to what I use at work with an IP phone. Internal extension dialing, "parental controls" etc. Hook up a phone in your kids' rooms that could only call internally, emergency, or your phone number. Hook up a phone in your office, kitchen, and room that could access the main box as well as call your kids for dinner or check on them. Just a few more years of development and maybe they could add a core voicemail box or per-internal-line voicemail. In the 90s my dad actually installed a system similar to this on our Windows 3.1 home PC that took a phone line into our modem and acted as our answering machine. I wish I knew what that software was. It recorded messages digitally in *.wav format on Windows. It's too bad there are so few landlines and everyone has a cell phone. We live in such an advanced age now, there's very little reason to have central home phone/computing hardware like this. I remember going over to a friend's house around 1994 once and they had call boxes in every major room and a central voice center in the kitchen. Sort of like a baby monitor, but all 2-way radios that would be networked by the central unit instead of one pairing. Nowadays everyone has a cell phone and can just text or message on various web platforms, so such a grand internal network is pointless.
I just love watching your videos while having lunch or dinner :D Keep up your great work! Your videos are one of the best on youtube! Greetings from Germany :D
I've heard you can get different voices for those things. But I've never used them. Personally I'd like something like what was in this video. Morgan Freeman would be cool too. Or Bender.
YES!!! I CANNOT GET ENOUGH! You call. No one answers. Instead, you are greeted by LINEAR PREDICTIVE CODING!!! I LOVE THE SOUND OF THIS KIND OF SYNTHESIS!!! OK, enough excitement for now. I wish this would also allow you to leave a message with your voice encoded as LPC. That would be amazing.
Honestly kinda surprised it didn't have a slot for a cassette tape to record messages too, I feel that would have been really useful, and maybe made it sell better.
man, you could make a really neat 80s inspired movie with all this old gear you have. every time I see a video of yours I craft a scene in my head that would make use of that tech! I love it!
It would have set the standard for whole house answering machines, face it nobody wanted that extra box laying around at the side table in the living room beside the couch where their phone was, unable to check the messages from their bedroom phone.
This explains one of my childhood mysteries. Like almost 40 years ago, I was 9 or 10 or something, we visited some relatives, and I was hanging out doing something, and the person I was with picked up the phone, dialed a number, and then hung up. The phone rang, and they picked up and talked to their mother in another part of the house. And I could not wrap my head around calling yourself, and talking to other people in the house. For years I would try to make that work at my house, or other people’s houses, trying to figure out how to make that happen. Now I know it was one of the these magic boxes in the 80s that made it happen.
You always make my day ! You have the most cool and awesome old toys and tech and have an awesome know how for all these things ! Keep up the good work man ! I love all your videos !
This was the one of the last vestiges of when Western Electric made bullet proof stuff that worked. The quality of this device versus consumer cr*p that was available at the time is amazing. This looks like it was designed at the time when WE / AT&T was still the Bell System and would lease or rent the equipment for a monthly fee. They made money when the equipment would work for YEARS without need for repair of any sort. Everything they made had design life in decades, not years. Sounds crazy now, having a phone (or associated equipment) that would last decades, but up until the 1980's a phone from 40 years earlier, wired with a new modular plug (trivial), provided the exact same voice service and quality as a new phone off the line.
This was the odd time in the Bell System where you had the choice to rent or buy and had the option of purchasing from Ma Bell. It was also in the early 80s that Bell also started selling telephone equipment not manufactured by Western Electric. The Bell Nomad telephones were manufactured by Uniden as AT&T did not manufacturer their own cordless phones.
So what kind of impact does this have on a modem attempting to connect? Usually these kinds of devices weren't the "cleanest" pass through given the voltages and quality of components used to bring prices down to consumer acceptable levels...
I don't think this was a concern for very many people in the early 80s. Except businesses or others who had dedicated lines for that, in which case they would not have the Telstar connected on that line. But assuming you were a person who had a computer that you would use for some kind of online activity in the 80s, you could presumably disconnect the telstar and connect your modem, then swap it back when done (if it is not modem compatible which I guess it probably was not).
The TI chips always had really cool digitized speech, but they're pretty useless as vocalists. I've used an emulator of this chip to add vocals to some of my music and all the consonants are really muffled. Now the Votrax SC-01, that's got a good tone. And given decent enough pitch control, you can get almost a "talkbox" sound out of it :)
I think that Apple, Samsung, and Google should ditch their “unnatural” in the name of “natural” voice of voice assistants and adopt this synthesized version for the sake of good voice
In 1984/5 we had a hybrid answering machine (likely Phonemate) that had digital voice prompts and menus, and ability to remotely retrieve messages, but which recorded the actual messages to audio cassette (full size audio cassettes). Your greeting, though, was stored on another endless loop cassette. The nice thing about the setup is the caller never had to wait after the greeting to leave a message since separate cassettes were used (unlike single cassette solutions once messages accumulate) and you never had to remember all the remote control code sequences, just your PIN code since all the menus were voice prompted. I believe the model also served two lines, though could only service one at a time if both were to ring at the same time. Ten years later (1996) and I had a two-line fully digital answering machine that I still use to this day (21 years later!) as it does very nicely with good quality speech and audio and can accept around 17-20 minutes of recording time in all (shared between greeting and messages) and allows you to delete messages individually and return that memory to the recording pool, unlike with tapes where you had to erase everything to recover recording time. Never had to pay the telco for voice messaging service in all those years as it did everything they could offer.
yeah just use 999 it was pretty bloody logical wasn't it yeah it actually was here's why. australia's 000 and america's 911 would be stupid on rotary phones due to being At the far side that's why Britain uses 999 as 9 is the closest number to the end of the phone, meaning it would be very effective, americans weren't thinking straight clearly, they should've used 999 until they left rotary phones.
999 ? That's horrible when using a classis round dial. 9 pulses for each number. In Germany it was 112 which means it was even possible to dial it without touching the wheel only by using the hook (Yes I'm that old that I knew how to dial only by switching with the cradle)
I've read somewhere that 9's or 0's in the emergency number were used to avoid accidental calls to it. Placing the earpiece (or what do call it) on and off the hook repeatedly when hesitating making the call, could have been interpreted as dialled '1' or '2'. Also connecting extension cords while earpiece would be off the hook could have induced some dialing pulses.
The city I live in had them. You just called 911. So as a kid I didn't think much of it. Until I stayed over my aunt's house in a different county. She lived out in the middle of nowhere and told me about all the numbers you had for emergency and how you had to pay for trash pickup instead of it being part of the city taxes directly because she was in a rural area. I assumed at that age the trucks just always came everywhere. It was a bit mind blowing. I didn't know you could use the hook to dial. My grandparents had a rotary phone until well into the 90s. Then when they finally got a touchtone my grandfather wouldn't pay to have the rotary line switched. It was like an extra 50 cents to have touchtone and he thought it was a waste of money. So every time you pressed a number you had to wait for the tick tick tick sounds to stop before you pressed another. It was very slow and very annoying. Thankfully he finally decided to pay the fee.
My mom and grandma both worked at Western Electric in Indianapolis assembling those old telephones. When that plant closed in 1984 they transferred to the AT&T fiber optic plant in Norcross, Georgia and most of my family moved from Indianapolis to the Atlanta area. My grandma retried from AT&T in Norcross in 1994 after 35 years (including her time with Western Electric). Mom finally got laid off from what was by then Lucent Technologies/OFS in 2002. Nothing to do with this video really, but seeing those names and logos sparked my memory.
The media came out with the television show Rescue 911 narrated by William Shatner to get the word out about 911, which helped greatly to get people on-board with using 911.
I remember that show, and I can imagine how effective it was. It was also shown in Finland, and as result many people in distress would try first to dial 911 instead of the 112 that's actually used here, and in many outher countries.
Pauli Vaara must cell phones win people dial 911 in the wrong country it connect to the countries emergency system to wherever the number the post down there. It be easy for county's to program there system to we direct the calls to the right emergency system with someone dials 911 one from the wrong country and by versa
Oh and I remember they have really emphasized that it's 9-1-1 and not 9-eleven so kids don't get confused in case they had to dial it, since there's no eleven key on the keypad. he-he
Kacper Skornicki You got the format correct. It's 10 numbers. For example (123)-456-7890. Also in case you're wondering the () symbol indicates area code.
This is the type of content I need at 2am.
It's 5PM for me
Ni Ki for me it's 10 pm!
8pm for me
1AM here
5pm for me!
I want the lite version that just says "Please hang up" every time someone calls.
So I had a project where I connected an old analog phone to a VOIP adapter, and then simulate the phone system on my computer. Pretty sure I could do that! Remind me...
@@thewhitefalcon8539 reminder
Alex C Remember to do that
Alex C reminder
@@thewhitefalcon8539 REMEMBER
It was actually really funny when the answering machine said "please hang up" and then you just walked away disappointed
it's like 'sorry for using the phone geez'
Telstar: "Freshen your breath, then dial your number."
DoctorSherwood I laughed at that bit.
I love that robot voice. Awesome!
DoctorSherwood lmao right
All I can think when hearing that old school speech synthesizer is "Mattel Electronics Presents B17 BOOOMBER"
b 17 BOOO0OOMMBER
tomoya97 yes 😂
I had both a Speak & Spell and a Speak & Math as a kid, so the phrase "The CORRECT answer IS:" in that robotic voice is permanently burned into my brain.
only an AVGN fan would recognise that.
or someone who's played "BEEEEE SEVEEN TEEEN BOOMBERRR" with the voice synthesiser, I actually have played it like that. It's still in my memory Loud and Crystal clear in it's old synthesiser glory
tomoya97 Why this was never a meme? Yea there ware few videos making fun of it but thats about it
"Please hang up."
*walks away*
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣👍
Hilarious!
The logo has an interesting story. Prior to the breakup AT&T wanted to begin selling business and consumer products made by Bell manufacturing arm Western Electric. The DOJ and FCC ruled that they had to set up a wholly separated subsidiary (not part of regulated phone business) to sell the equipment. They were allowed to use the bell name but not the logo, so they hired Saul Bass (the guy who made the last bell logo) to design one, and made the "death star" logo. American Bell took over the Bell Phone Centers and began selling equipment in the early 80s. As this was happening the antitrust case was settled and the breakup was agreed. Originally AT&T was to keep the bell logo, but the final agreement barred them from using the Bell name and logo except for Bell Laboratories, so AT&T adopted American Bells logo and renamed absorbed it into AT&T Technologies upon breakup
Yeah. The legend of the Bell System is one of the most fascinating stories in tech history.
When in need "Better call Saul" (hope you guys get the humor) he-he
@@WOSArchives This site has probably some of the most comprehensive information on the Bell System: www.bellsystemmemorial.com
Dude, that synthesized voice sounds crazy natural for 1983. :o That is awesome. :D
Shall. We. Play. A. Gaym??
@@jovetj fun fact from some other TH-cam channel, for the war games computer voice, they had the voice actor read each sentence backwards, so he recorded "game a play we shall", then they spliced it back together to get that crazy voice.
I graduated engineering school in 1983. I would agree that this sounds pretty good. Some fellow students did a senior project on speech synthesis as I recall, and I am not sure how successful it was. Definitely not in widespread use.
@@Nathan-wk9dd Seriously??? In War Games, that was a PERSON talking? I never knew that. It sounded so much like an authentic TTS voice. In fact, I had SAM for my C64 back then and it sounded very similar. I'm surprised they didn't just use a real text to speech synthesizer.
Jäger, yeah I know. It sounds better than some modern text to speech tools we have now. Speak N Spell sounded pretty good too. I'm thinking the ROM chips didn't contain English text though (like "please hang up"). It was probably sentences made up of phonetic words. C64 SAM had a mode to do that so you could make every word sound perfect and still only be taking up a TINY bit of space for simple text. SAM had a "reciter" to speak English words but it messed up on a lot of words.
The 8-Bit Guy: Weird, even the dial tone sounds different.
TELSTAR: PLEASE HANG UP.
The 8-Bit Guy: *hangs up telephone*
Me: XD
I'm kind of impressed with how decent the synthesizer voice sounded for 1983. I'm sure back then they would have expected computer voices to be completely natural sounding by 2017. They're making progress, but we're not there just yet.
I remember RadioShack used to sell a voice synthesizer chip in a kit along with a printed circuit board and some passive components, but I don't remember how was the input made, think it was a bank of 8 switches as a 1 byte register.
Well it is now
So in order to try this on 2017 you had to go through a digital IP connection with a router that simulates an analog POTS line, to a answering machine that reads on the analog line and stores the numbers digitally?
We live in a weird world.
On the other hand it is crazy to think that the analog POTS standard is still widely used today, to the point where internet modems "simulate" it.
Yeah, we need to ditch the telephone standard entirely.
in italy we still have normal phone lines so it is a lot easier
LowSpecGamer 9.
in america (well in the greater terre haute/vigo county area in indiana) we still have the old pots system, i think the backbone of the cell phone systems still rely on pots. (i'm just going out on limb here, i'm not positive about any of this!) i mean jumping the signal from tower to tower would greatly reduce the already crap sound quality, (especially over extremely long distances) and you wouldn't be able to call anyone who still uses pots telephones! (as i said earlier, i'm just going out on a limb with this statement, I AM NOT SURE ABOUT ANY OF THIS)
In the analog cellphone days yes, but now it's all carrier over carrier grade digital connections.
I wish they still made landline phone boxes like this, because it would be great at preventing phone scammers from leaving messages at all.
My parents had one of these still in a box somewhere. They were sold to AT&T employees back in the 80s and as you mentioned, was rather a flop. While the idea was cool, they said that people would say "something weird picked up the phone." People were just getting used to answering machines in the 80s and even many businesses didn't have auto-attendants yet. Really cool to see a working one.
Real talk: I would put this into service. Pronto.
The Obsolete Geek I particularly want the please hang up sample for my voicemail because I know that even if I did find one I couldn't afford it
You could just use a older business grade phone system as they also have voicemail as well as the ability to call another phone on the system by configuring extensions. It might not be as retro but it would still function the same.
I would buy this just to be, "that guy" if you know what I mean.
However, we already have caller ID and most modern phone systems can record who called.
The Obsolete Geek same
That voice synthesizer is fantastic.
that would have been a great telemarketer deterrant.
7:22 I made a recording of that and use it to make telemarketers hang up
Very cool! We had a similar system in the early 90's but it was built into the telephones! You had to buy multiple of the same model telephone and connect them all to your POTS and once connected, they "find each other" and register to a user-set "master" telephone on the line. This allowed you to call all connected telephones in your house by pressing *01, *02, *03, and so on for every room a telephone was connected! It was very convenient for bigger houses (no cellphones back then!). I do love the synth voice on your device though!
Oh man that old dial tone beeping.... takes me back.
GenuinelyJake landlines still do that.
Even smartphones still make a dial tone
It's a diffrent tone though
TigerMan1995 They Do? I always thought you HAD to input the number first removing the need for the tone. Unless you mean the “ringing” tone.
Telephones connected in parallel, we did not have this in Germany back in the days and this confused me when watching US sitcoms where someone (typically unsuspecting wife) could just pick up the phone and enter another call from the same house (typically cheating husband). Over here the state phone service basically owned all your in-house telephone equipment and they had rules that it must be set up in a way that one phone being picked up means all other phones being dead. This even meant that you could not legally connect a modem in the early days because it was not licensed for use with their network. Fortunately times have changed.
Kabuto Isn’t that partly the reason for acoustic coupler modems? They allowed the use of an ordinary telephone handset 📞 to connect to the network therefore bypassing the whole “you can only connect approved equipment up to our network” law.
As in Germany... the same in England.
WOW, the voice synth technology was *really* very good in the 80s, this is very clear!
Thank you, God bless you :)
This was an extremely cool device. Never heard of it and I'm really glad you made a video about it.
Good Job 8bit! I really like the the simple way you explain all this retro stuffs
I love the way that it sounds like a Speak & Spell. And it looks like it was designed more for a small office than a home. I bought a Panasonic digital answering machine for my parents in the early 2000's. And though it was more reliable and still works to this day, my father preferred the old cassette one, he said the calls sounded better.
Here in New Zealand you could dial 137 then hang up and it would call all lines in the house and it would be silent when you picked up
Didnt know that, have to try it
And 136 made a different ring tone if I remember right?
When I grew up in the 90s you could simply dial your own number, a recording would come on with instructions, but it used the same recording that would have been used if you called someone else on the same party line. The telephone company then known as Sprint United Telephone actually supported this. When my great grandmother moved in 1993, what the phone company did was simply connect the phone line to her new house while her old house was still connected to call from one house to another you simply dialed her number.
Can you still do that?
@@LegoWormNoah101Yes you can.
Actually, there WAS a way to call yourself using POTS lines... you just had to be super quick about it. You first dial your own number, then hang up before you get the 'ringing in your ears.' All other phones in the house/on the line will then ring. Once someone answered, you could talk as normal. My neighbor did it ALL the time to call up to her husband's garage, which shared the same number.
Becky Lawson simple enough have your finger over the hook dial the number and hit the hook once they start ringing you could pick it up
still works on most telephone exchanges in the U.S today! (Assuming you don't have Voicemail setup on your telephone line)
I like that speech synth. The germans had something similar. That unit did not come in a box but as a special fancy phone that did cost 1000 DEM (about $500) back then. It was called "Telekom Delegatic". It uses speech synthesis with very similar phrases you showed on the video (but in german) and could store numbers or even texts using dialtones with additional frequencies. No answering machine. The storage memory was a 28C16 or 64 parallel EEPROM. A little novelty for it's time.
I worked for American Bell at the time and purchased one of these. I was/am a geek and loved the technology of the device. It was like having a small PBX at home. Eventually the unit died and the fact (as you mentioned) that not everyone had touch tone dialing made the unit somewhat impractical. I was impressed with the technology of the device at the time and I want to thank you for this trip down memory lane of a fun time in my "high tech" life. Boy, I miss the old days! ;)
that's an excellent voice for 1983 standards.
Thanks for the video. My dad worked for Ma Bell for nearly 40 years, and was always bringing stuff like this home for our family to use. I remember all those different emergency numbers as well. It sure is funny how old tech just kind of fades away and is largely forgotten.
You were right with the connection between American Bell and the Bell System Divestiture. AT&T introduced the company in 1982 as a separate division from their manufacturing arm Western Electric (due to FCC regulations preventing WE from selling "enhanced" telephony products, but it explains the connection between American Bell and Western Electric). But as part of the divestiture, they lost the rights to the "Bell" brand (with the exception of Bell Labs), so when the divestiture took effect in 1984, they renamed it to AT&T Information Systems until it was absorbed into AT&T itself in 1989 (as the FCC regulations were loosened by that point).
American Bell was actually the first use of the Saul Bass AT&T "Death Star" logo, proceeding the use of it as AT&T's corporate logo by about a year.
I recommend anyone interested in technology to check out more about the Bell System, especially the Bell System Memorial website. It's a very interesting topic.
p.s. whoever made the captions: It's spelled "Ma Bell", no "w".
Who's bright idea was to change the name AT&T, one of the most recognizable brand-names in history, to Cingular. They changed it back some years later. I hope some someone got fired for that one.
Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that...
Cingular originally began as a joint venture between SBC Communications and BellSouth. In 2004, Cingular purchased AT&T Wireless Services (which was spun off from the original AT&T a couple of years earlier). In 2005, SBC purchased AT&T and took the branding of the latter, becoming the modern day AT&T. In 2007, AT&T purchased BellSouth, thus consolidating ownership of Cingular to AT&T, thus allowing them to rebrand Cingular to AT&T Mobility. I'm guessing that your area was originally covered by AT&T Wireless Services, then Cingular Wireless, then AT&T Mobility.
tl;dr: Cingular purchased AT&T's original wireless service, then one of the partners of the former bought AT&T and the other partner, thus allowing Cingular to become AT&T. Complicated, I know.
I'm amazed on how much history I'm learning from your channel. I'm subscribed to both of your pages. Thank you for the videos!
Is there any place I can find the samples/TTS for that voice synthesis chip? It sounds amazing.
It is more of a "complicated tape recording system" (in the wods of the Computer Chronicles). The speech synthesizer gets fed with compressed data based off a recording (instead of TTS)
nrdesign1991 That's interesting. Any specific device you're referring to? Though some of the earliest synths were based off mathematical models of a resonant tube.
The majority of modern speech synthesizers are based on recorded samples of varying complexity.
The extreme case of this being the multi-gigabyte sample sets that consitute Yamaha's most advanced synth, otherwise known as vocaloid. (it's most distinguishing feature, aside from the characters created by a licence holder of the technology known as Crypton Future Media for marketing purposes, is that it's designed to replicate singing, rather than conversations. The basis of the technology is still fundamentally the same though.)
nrdesign1991 I've got the Speak and Spell samples, it's possible to make sentences yourself with those alone, albeit it's not the same. Which is why I asked if there was a TTS in the vein of Microsoft Sam that used this chip as a basis.
Yes! I just want to have this voice synthesis as a Siri option!!
The voices you can get nowadays are much more realistic sounding. I have the _Voice Dream_ app on my iPhone using the Ivona voice 'Amy'. She sounds very realistic - harposoftware.com/en/english-uk/88-s2g-en-amy.html
I have to say, your videos are what I watch when I first wake up. They help stimulate my brain and get it working faster than much else :D
6:28 You could do this with a normal phone line. You would dial your own phone number then hang up. Moments later your phone would ring, and everyone in the house could pick up.
Prior to having some good ole 10base-2 hardware, this is a feature my brother and I would exploit to create a connection between two computers to play a game that had a builtin dialer. The software was expecting a dial tone, and the receiving instance of the game was expecting a ring before it would answer. So we would tell the game to dial our own number, then quickly disconnect the line from the dialing computer and connect another wire which we had at the ready for a direct connection. Right after the phone line rang and the second computer picked up, we would disconnect the line from that computer and plug in the other end of our straight wire. Now we had one wire between both computers and they were communicating as if it were a normal modem to modem call.
That's awesome.
Wait. The fact you had two computers in your house back then is even crazier. :D
I don't remember if it was part of the standard AT command set but on some modems I had back in the early 90s there was a command to make the modems ignore the presence/absence of the dial tone and to simulate a RING. I used that feature to transfer files between some computers much in the same way you did, except without out the swapping of phone cables around.
In Australia back in the day the callback number was 199. Handy for testing your ringer etc. This even worked on ancient public phones, before they removed the ability for them to accept incoming calls. (Number is now 12722199 on a Telstra line)
At that age, we didn't know anything about AT commands. I was going to say I wish we did. But nah, I'd rather have the fond memories of yelling at each other for getting the timing wrong. We did eventually figure it out, but that was short lived because we decided we wanted a real permanent network. (mostly because we wanted to be online at the same time, and you cant get online if your modem is busy talking to the computer in the other room) So that's when we bought the 10base-2 nics.
You really have nice content. i appreciate you doing this to teach every kid, teen, adolescent and elder to learn more! i been watching you since 2015! and i still have no shame
My great grandmother (who was 101 when she died back in 2014) still used those rotary dial phones from when she first got her house to when she died.
I have that exact same yellow rotary dial phone. The sound quality is the best I've ever heard on a phone.
what a gorgeous piece of tech 😊
As a telecom guy myself, I found this video immensely satisfying.
Love that classic voice synthesis!
That thing is so cool. I’ve never been fascinated by technology from the 1980s
I still had a rotary phone in 1986.
Reason: We were a family of six.
(plus it was kind of a fixture: large (>ft high), nailed to the wall, center of the house)
Cool, but one thing I'll never understand is - just how do you prevent the receiver from falling off the telephone unit?
We've had rotary phone in our home till 2005 or 6 i believe so yeah
@@taygadesign If I were to do it, I'd bet a small notch on the lower part of the upper receiver would be enough...that or the ear side expanded a little outward. I was only 6 at the time so I never checked, but I know I'd hung it upside-down a few times just to try and it wasn't exactly stable. Of course, the cord's weight and elastic pressure being exerted on the microphone side probably also contributed to that.
Ha. A family member of mine had one of these in the 80s. I remember calling and dialing in my number for him to call me back. This was high tech stuff back then and quite impressive!
There is one benefit to rotary style analog phones (or at least there was 10 years ago), if you live in a place prone to power outages the analog rotary phones would still be able to place a call assuming only the power was out and the phone lines weren't damaged. Since phone lines and power lines often run along the same poles it's possible both would be knocked out by a fallen tree branch, but if just a transformer blew or something like that happened the phone line powers the old rotary phones.
The basic tone dialing phones would work just fine as well in any situation the rotary phones would.
The touch tone phones like the ones shown in the video were also 100% line powered. The oscillator takes some of the phantom power from the line to operate. Later Trimline phones (both Rotary and Touch Tone) also used a LED powered by the line and you can still get Trimline style phones with illuminated keypads powered by the line.
That thing seems really advanced for it's time. Also it is great that it is still working 34 years later.
Last time I was this early it was still the ibookguy
lord and savior gaben the last time I was this early I was watching "the first digital answering machine"
lord and savior gaben more or less
Last time i was this early people wearnt using old and unoriginal jokes. People used to make their own jokes, but i guess not anymore, now it's just the age of autism and sheep.
CodeX words of wisdom.
So you complain about people not making their own jokes but then go on to use the word autism as a sign that you're so hip and cool you're using only the freshest and most interesting memes. Respect.
Thank you for this video, and all your videos in generel. This one however was very interesting because even though the "answering machine" is old, the premise of it still seems cool.
I've been a subscriber since you had ca. 3000 subscribers, I'm really stoked to see how many people have begun to follow you as well. Also I have great respect for your decision to go full time as a YT'er. I wish you the very best.
Andreas, Denmark. :)
"Please hang up"
This was super interesting! This is why you remain one of my favorite channels on TH-cam. Because you present it in a way that is not alienating folks. Info for all. ✊😌❤️
always interesting getting a slice of history. I had no idea 911 wasnt around back then.
In the UK we had been using 999 for years at that point.
I honestly thought 911 dated back to like teh 30s or even earlier.
911 came out in 68, but wasn't well known until the 70s. It didn't make it to some areas though until the 80s. Prior to the introduction of rotary phones though, you would just tell the operator if you had an emergency.
rollout is still ongoing, the US is almost complete but still has regions where it is not available yet.
In the UK we now have short numbers for non emergency calls to your local police station, and to the NHS helpline.
Police are contactable for non emergencies on 101, and I think the NHS is 111. Most people don't know that, and would probably Google the numbers anyway! 😂
don't you just love this guy's channel, that's some real rare old tech.
Great Vid and the MUSIC at the end !
Yeah, wonder what it was.
Love how the stuff in the background is 100% functional, decorative, and uncluttered/untangled at the same time
Whoa! This would have given someone essentially an internal phone network very similar to what I use at work with an IP phone. Internal extension dialing, "parental controls" etc.
Hook up a phone in your kids' rooms that could only call internally, emergency, or your phone number.
Hook up a phone in your office, kitchen, and room that could access the main box as well as call your kids for dinner or check on them.
Just a few more years of development and maybe they could add a core voicemail box or per-internal-line voicemail.
In the 90s my dad actually installed a system similar to this on our Windows 3.1 home PC that took a phone line into our modem and acted as our answering machine. I wish I knew what that software was. It recorded messages digitally in *.wav format on Windows. It's too bad there are so few landlines and everyone has a cell phone. We live in such an advanced age now, there's very little reason to have central home phone/computing hardware like this.
I remember going over to a friend's house around 1994 once and they had call boxes in every major room and a central voice center in the kitchen. Sort of like a baby monitor, but all 2-way radios that would be networked by the central unit instead of one pairing.
Nowadays everyone has a cell phone and can just text or message on various web platforms, so such a grand internal network is pointless.
Great video, 8bitguy. It's nice to have a variety of different tech talk on one channel!
The 8-Bit Guy You should make a video about TTY/TDD
I just love watching your videos while having lunch or dinner :D
Keep up your great work! Your videos are one of the best on youtube!
Greetings from Germany :D
isnt that speech synthesys chip related to the one on the Mattel IntelliVisiion's Intellivoice?
Dragonfire511 Great sound quality too!
yes! for the time it was an awesome technological advancement.
sadly that came when the crash of videogames was on its peak. Poor IntelliVision.
Dragonfire511 The speech synthesis is even better than Microsoft Cortana in my opinion. I don't like Cortana pretending being a women too.
I've heard you can get different voices for those things. But I've never used them. Personally I'd like something like what was in this video. Morgan Freeman would be cool too. Or Bender.
Yep! you can. Space Spartans had a female voice if i remember correctly.
and yes it would be awesome getting something like Morgan Freeman!
YES!!! I CANNOT GET ENOUGH! You call. No one answers. Instead, you are greeted by LINEAR PREDICTIVE CODING!!! I LOVE THE SOUND OF THIS KIND OF SYNTHESIS!!! OK, enough excitement for now.
I wish this would also allow you to leave a message with your voice encoded as LPC. That would be amazing.
Honestly kinda surprised it didn't have a slot for a cassette tape to record messages too, I feel that would have been really useful, and maybe made it sell better.
Then it wouldn't be the first one without a cassette tape and you wouldn't be watching this video.
man, you could make a really neat 80s inspired movie with all this old gear you have. every time I see a video of yours I craft a scene in my head that would make use of that tech! I love it!
Machine might have made it if they put a tape recorder in it.
OM G We are talking about the 80s back than tape was everyware but even if they decited to add a mini CD the equipment would be way to expesive
this machine is from WAYYY before RWcds lol, but yes, tape would have been a good idea
It would have set the standard for whole house answering machines, face it nobody wanted that extra box laying around at the side table in the living room beside the couch where their phone was, unable to check the messages from their bedroom phone.
vinyl recorders do excist, sadly they cant be written more than once ;)
Those existed in the 1940s but they sucked.
This explains one of my childhood mysteries. Like almost 40 years ago, I was 9 or 10 or something, we visited some relatives, and I was hanging out doing something, and the person I was with picked up the phone, dialed a number, and then hung up. The phone rang, and they picked up and talked to their mother in another part of the house. And I could not wrap my head around calling yourself, and talking to other people in the house. For years I would try to make that work at my house, or other people’s houses, trying to figure out how to make that happen. Now I know it was one of the these magic boxes in the 80s that made it happen.
Do you think you will ever do an episode of different analog video connectors and how they work. i.e. RF, composite, s video, component, RGB, and VGA
Keep on the good work with all the interesting topics
When he entered the time "11:42 AM" it is exactly 11:42 AM where I live.
Whoa, I'm watching this at exactly 11:42 PM, but a different year
Wow, this is something out of the blue. Which is why I love it, great vid.
An other visitor stay a while say for ever ....anyone else getting an impossible mission vibe from this thing
YES IM OLD DANG IT
This looks like a pretty awesome video! Thanks for all the great content!
Ahh!! Setting voice guide is soooo vintage....
Unlike many vintage voice synthesizers, this one sounds comforting and more human to me. Interesting...
Also the WE mark on the mystery chip indicates its a proprietary Western Electric chip
I certainty did find this episode interesting. Thanks a million 8-bit Guy!
*boring day*
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*sees the 8-bit guy video*
_day saved_
Thanks, it makes you appreciate how far along telephone systems (VOIP) have come along since the 80s.
Loving your videos!
Also you have yet to do your history of apple mice video
You always make my day ! You have the most cool and awesome old toys and tech and have an awesome know how for all these things ! Keep up the good work man ! I love all your videos !
This was the one of the last vestiges of when Western Electric made bullet proof stuff that worked. The quality of this device versus consumer cr*p that was available at the time is amazing.
This looks like it was designed at the time when WE / AT&T was still the Bell System and would lease or rent the equipment for a monthly fee. They made money when the equipment would work for YEARS without need for repair of any sort. Everything they made had design life in decades, not years.
Sounds crazy now, having a phone (or associated equipment) that would last decades, but up until the 1980's a phone from 40 years earlier, wired with a new modular plug (trivial), provided the exact same voice service and quality as a new phone off the line.
There is something about that Western Electric style and build quality that mesmerizes me...
Did you just censor yourself from saying 'crap'
This was the odd time in the Bell System where you had the choice to rent or buy and had the option of purchasing from Ma Bell. It was also in the early 80s that Bell also started selling telephone equipment not manufactured by Western Electric. The Bell Nomad telephones were manufactured by Uniden as AT&T did not manufacturer their own cordless phones.
That synthesized voice sounded pretty damn good for an antique one. It was clear and I understood every word and it didn't mispronounce anything.
That answering machine voice reminds me of that AVGN episode lol.
_BEEEEEEE SEHVEN TEEN BAAAAHMER_
2 videos in one week? You pamper us so much
So what kind of impact does this have on a modem attempting to connect? Usually these kinds of devices weren't the "cleanest" pass through given the voltages and quality of components used to bring prices down to consumer acceptable levels...
I don't think this was a concern for very many people in the early 80s. Except businesses or others who had dedicated lines for that, in which case they would not have the Telstar connected on that line.
But assuming you were a person who had a computer that you would use for some kind of online activity in the 80s, you could presumably disconnect the telstar and connect your modem, then swap it back when done (if it is not modem compatible which I guess it probably was not).
Very interesting.
Greets from the V8Lounge in Germany.
The TI chips always had really cool digitized speech, but they're pretty useless as vocalists. I've used an emulator of this chip to add vocals to some of my music and all the consonants are really muffled.
Now the Votrax SC-01, that's got a good tone. And given decent enough pitch control, you can get almost a "talkbox" sound out of it :)
I love old electronics! Your videos make me want to go scrounge for projects
The voice sounds like KITT
KITT? What is that?
The talking car in Knight Rider.
I'm actually impressed at how clean the voice synthesizer sounds.
I think that Apple, Samsung, and Google should ditch their “unnatural” in the name of “natural” voice of voice assistants and adopt this synthesized version for the sake of good voice
In 1984/5 we had a hybrid answering machine (likely Phonemate) that had digital voice prompts and menus, and ability to remotely retrieve messages, but which recorded the actual messages to audio cassette (full size audio cassettes). Your greeting, though, was stored on another endless loop cassette. The nice thing about the setup is the caller never had to wait after the greeting to leave a message since separate cassettes were used (unlike single cassette solutions once messages accumulate) and you never had to remember all the remote control code sequences, just your PIN code since all the menus were voice prompted. I believe the model also served two lines, though could only service one at a time if both were to ring at the same time. Ten years later (1996) and I had a two-line fully digital answering machine that I still use to this day (21 years later!) as it does very nicely with good quality speech and audio and can accept around 17-20 minutes of recording time in all (shared between greeting and messages) and allows you to delete messages individually and return that memory to the recording pool, unlike with tapes where you had to erase everything to recover recording time. Never had to pay the telco for voice messaging service in all those years as it did everything they could offer.
I remember when this channel was called the iBook guy
I do as well.
Soviet Man ye
And did he still do gun reviews :)
Milsurp Mike I remember his video on how to conceal a carry!
I do too
That synthesized voice actually sounds pretty darn good!
So the US didn't have a standard emergency number until the 90s?! Wow. Britain has had 999 since the 30s!
yeah just use 999 it was pretty bloody logical wasn't it yeah it actually was here's why.
australia's 000 and america's 911 would be stupid on rotary phones due to being At the far side that's why Britain uses 999 as 9 is the closest number to the end of the phone, meaning it would be very effective, americans weren't thinking straight clearly, they should've used 999 until they left rotary phones.
999 ? That's horrible when using a classis round dial. 9 pulses for each number. In Germany it was 112 which means it was even possible to dial it without touching the wheel only by using the hook (Yes I'm that old that I knew how to dial only by switching with the cradle)
I've read somewhere that 9's or 0's in the emergency number were used to avoid accidental calls to it. Placing the earpiece (or what do call it) on and off the hook repeatedly when hesitating making the call, could have been interpreted as dialled '1' or '2'. Also connecting extension cords while earpiece would be off the hook could have induced some dialing pulses.
galier2 I can dial any phone number with the cradle button as well.
The city I live in had them. You just called 911. So as a kid I didn't think much of it. Until I stayed over my aunt's house in a different county. She lived out in the middle of nowhere and told me about all the numbers you had for emergency and how you had to pay for trash pickup instead of it being part of the city taxes directly because she was in a rural area. I assumed at that age the trucks just always came everywhere. It was a bit mind blowing.
I didn't know you could use the hook to dial. My grandparents had a rotary phone until well into the 90s. Then when they finally got a touchtone my grandfather wouldn't pay to have the rotary line switched. It was like an extra 50 cents to have touchtone and he thought it was a waste of money. So every time you pressed a number you had to wait for the tick tick tick sounds to stop before you pressed another. It was very slow and very annoying. Thankfully he finally decided to pay the fee.
My mom and grandma both worked at Western Electric in Indianapolis assembling those old telephones. When that plant closed in 1984 they transferred to the AT&T fiber optic plant in Norcross, Georgia and most of my family moved from Indianapolis to the Atlanta area.
My grandma retried from AT&T in Norcross in 1994 after 35 years (including her time with Western Electric). Mom finally got laid off from what was by then Lucent Technologies/OFS in 2002.
Nothing to do with this video really, but seeing those names and logos sparked my memory.
Make an episode about old-school speech sythesis!!!!!!!!!!! ;D ;D ;D
Holy crap, that speech synthesizer sounds _really_ good, especially for 80s speech synth.
The media came out with the television show Rescue 911 narrated by William Shatner to get the word out about 911, which helped greatly to get people on-board with using 911.
Penfold8 Various segments of the show are on TH-cam maintined by various uploaders. I think the channel called allgood2000 is a place to start.
I remember that show, and I can imagine how effective it was. It was also shown in Finland, and as result many people in distress would try first to dial 911 instead of the 112 that's actually used here, and in many outher countries.
Pauli Vaara must cell phones win people dial 911 in the wrong country it connect to the countries emergency system to wherever the number the post down there. It be easy for county's to program there system to we direct the calls to the right emergency system with someone dials 911 one from the wrong country and by versa
Oh and I remember they have really emphasized that it's 9-1-1 and not 9-eleven so kids don't get confused in case they had to dial it, since there's no eleven key on the keypad. he-he
I LOVE THAT TV SHOW!
Nice episode, I liked it! It was a master piece back in these days..
At 1:01 the subtitles should spell it "Ma Bell" not "Maw Bell"
Mah nikka, nah nikka!! lmao
I love the voice, sounds very good for that kind of old machine. Very interesting.
Anyone else wish he had used 867-5309 as the test number.
I am imagining Tommy TuTONE ...
Jenny Jenny "The first call was from 867-5309.
Kacper Skornicki You got the format correct. It's 10 numbers. For example (123)-456-7890. Also in case you're wondering the () symbol indicates area code.
Believe it or not this number 1-234--567-1234 is a valid number since the area code 234 is out of somewhere in Ohio. he-he
Kacper Skornicki that is correct. the 1 is for long distance.
Kacper Skornicki
You got really close. It's actually +1 (000) 000-000
man, your videos are the best quality per content