Voice Mail - 1967 Style: The Smith-Corona Mail Call
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 ก.ย. 2017
- A forgotten vision of the future of Long Distance voice communication.
My previous Playtape video is here: • Retro Tech - The PlayTape
I'll have one more video to follow on this topic in a couple of weeks.
If you want to hear some Playtapes being played - Oddity Archive also made a detailed video about the format recently. • Oddity Archive: Episod...
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Jerobeam Fenderson for the intro animation: oscilloscopemusic.com/
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Over Time - Vibe Tracks • Over Time - Vibe Track...
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ThatSFXGuy - • Six Million Dollar man...
Q) Can a playtape be played in a mail call
A) You can determine what happens from the section in the video regarding how a Mail Pack plays in a Playtape machine...it’s the reverse of that.
A music Playtape is recorded on two parallel tracks each taking up half the width of the tape. The Mail Pack records one track that takes up the whole width of the tape. So a Playtape played in a Mail Call machine will play the two parallel tracks simultaneously - you hear two recordings playing at the same time. - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
My grandma had one from my father when he was in Vietnam he says it was better then writing because he could hear grandmas voice it brought him comfort
Judging by the number of comments it would appear they marketed this somehow through the military. Very clever.
The moment I opened this video. I remembered that scene in the movie Hamburger Hill where one of the soldiers received a voice message form his girlfriend.
Sometime around year 2000 I used to send small VHS like that. LoL.
If you see a story with a detail that look uncannilly similar to your anecdote, know that it is nothing but a very very unlikely coincidence.
Hell 17 year old Lawrence Fishburne died in Apocalypse Now! listening to his mother's voice. It keeps playing as he's dying. That shit still breaks my heart.
@@laszu7137 So was it VHS-C or Video8?
My Dad made the Lancashire evening post by ringing my Grandad in Seattle in 67, "Preston man makes transatlantic telephone call".
how far we have come
...and how far we have to go
“Hello Corona? It’s Agent Smith. It’s time.” - The Smith-Corona call, December 2019.
At first i thought thr idea was rubish, but when i read the comments that it was marketed at the military. I changed my mind, it must have been very comforting and raised moral for a soldier in the Vietnam war to hear his loved ones voice rather than a letter.
@knowledge share BRUH MOMENT ALEART, REDDIT---SPY---IN THE--- COMMENT SECTION
A Techmoan I haven't watched yet?
No idea why this came up in my feed!
Wash your hands everybody!
I still have tapes from the early 1970's that contain the voices of my grand parents. It's nice to hear their voices again.
I made to sure to have a recording of my grandmother's voice before dementia really kicked in. I had her read a children's poem she used to read to us when we were little. (She's still alive, but it's very hard to have a conversation with her now. Ugh, it's not nice at all seeing loved ones deteriorate like that.)
gymnasiast90 you'll cherish those recordings one day and be glad to have them.
I already am glad, really. Especially since I did it in the nick of time.
@@gymnasiast90 / Open Roader
That's really nice and glad you both have audio to go along with the memories. I wish I had had presence of mind to do something similar with my grandparents. I ought to do similar where my mum and dad are concerned, they're not getting any younger 😔
You should back those recordings up if you haven't already . Just in case. ;)
Can't believe this was recommend because of corona in the title xp
Me too lol
Spot on, those colours were pure 2001 aesthetic. The future never looks like the future when it arrives!
Graham Ferguson usually just looks like a slightly shinier version of today
Graham Ferguson usually just looks like a slightly shinier version of today
Yes the time passed from future to present is equal to the time passed from the present to the past...
@Kali Southpaw The future ain't what it's going to be...
If it was REALLY 2001, the phones would be neon coloured and transparent like a Gameboy
My dad and I sent compact cassettes to and from each other when I was stationed in Korea. It was nice hearing each other's voice as well as the family and the children.
My girlfriend once sent me a bunch of tapes when I was overseas - I got a big 'ol care package one day while in the Mediterranean on a six-month deployment. Cookies, a big colorful ol' blob of what used to be gummi worms (still tasty, though), local newspaper articles of interest, photos, and so on - plus cassettes. Messages from friends, my parents, and one tape with a very special voice message from her (with instructions to listen to it with headphones, wink wink....). That tape with her special message was like gold in my hands; she had no idea how close I was to going AWOL after hearing it. To this day, I think the only thing that actually stopped me was the fact I was on a ship...... Our next port of call was definitely a temptation, believe me.
All of these old tape formats are simply fascinating. These companies put tremendous amounts of effort and R&D into these things for some of them to just be dead on arrival. Thanks once again for the quality content!
Tape has gotten pretty far since its early days. All the inventions, research, work done to make tape keep audio better. Finally able to put music on it in decent quality up to Dolby. But it began humbly as a way for the germans to be able to record and move spoken word around. The allies were surprised just how hitler could be at two places at the same time doing the same speech. In the same quality .. eerie indeed. I am happy that the american radio stations took magnetic tape and saw its potential for allot more.
5:20 Looks like James May 20 years ago.
I thought the same thing ahhaha
I'm gonna get a wig. Hair makes one look much younger
C'mon, i want wrote that right now :D
thinking back to the moment you point out, lol, yeah i def see it.. haha
I just watched James May review the Countach in season 3 and it's eerily similar to Techmoan's character.
Anyone else notice that the previously perfect PlayTape player grille now has a conspicuous dent in it, like every shiny speaker grille gets from mysterious dent fairies?
My phone has a dent in the speaker grill (or grille, I'm not sure what the spelling is).
They also remind me of the props in The Prisoner - I can just see Patrick McGoohan growling into one!
The "Mail call" was marketed to military, and that's how I got my pair. A neighbor was in Vietnam and he and his wife were sending these tapes back and forth using the military postal system. I was given a pair of these with a box of tapes I was told to erase (as there were still recordings on them). Some of the tapes were relabeled playtape cartridges, so I figure this was a way to take advantage of an unsuccessful format to use existing parts stock.
Do did you erase the tapes?
@@dcan911 Oh yeah.
When you mentioned the price differential ($5.50 vs $0.10) my immediate thought was "it's gonna be some absurd gizmo that plays a recorded voice message at 50x speed over the phone line where a second device receives it and slows it down for listening". Just snail-mailing tapes back and forth seems disappointingly sane by comparison.
That's an interesting idea, lol.
Something similar was done with electronic forums before the widespread advent of the Internet. You could log into a BBS and 'download' a compressed message packet that a bit of software called an Offline Mail Reader would decompress, parse, and display for you. This was a big deal because most BBSs had limits with regard to the time you could be logged in. You could reply to messages in the software, then compress a reply packet to upload, minimizing your connect time.
That idea was first used during WWII to shorten the length of radio transmissions so that the enemy couldn't use radio direction finding techniques. It's called a burst encoder. It was later used by spies to evade detection.
+straightpipediesel That is interesting. I did not know that. It makes sense, though. I just love learning new things. Thank you for the information.
I think if you came up with that idea 60/70 years ago you might have made your millions 🙂 Basically a simple commercial version of a burst encoder for home use that allowed you to send long-ish messages over a normal but very short and cheap phone call using a device at both ends.
Yeah, looks totally like a 1960's sci-fi gadget
Techmoan: Every day I look to see if you have made a new video. The things you talk about just fascinate me. I just waned to thank you for what you do. You are my favorite channel. Don't stop. Thanks again for what you do.
DangerNut while my favorite channel is Braille Skateboarding, this channel is definitely in my top 5, heck top 3 even. I really like vsauce too so it's kind of a tie for 2nd. But I agree whole heartedly with everything else that you have said.
It is a great channel isn't it. I've always had a fascination with old technology even as a child in the 80's I was always curios about old computers, punch card storage and 8 tracks. I like watching old technology programs where they try to predict the future.
this and Oddity Archive are my 2 favs
This made me think about that scene in Apocalypse Now when Mr. Clean dies while his audio letter from home plays...
Me too! I think this may have been marketed to American soldiers & their families. That guy in the magazine ad looks like a GI to me. The name Mail Call is further evidence.
Reminds me of the armrest controls on Picard's centre seat on the Enterprise-D... :P
twocvbloke haha, absolutely. Great spot!
twocvbloke - I thought that too.
Reminds me of A Clockwork Orange.
Or perhaps the foreshadow of the Personal Digital Communicator phone. ;)
Analog heaven! And I'm so glad you mentioned 2001 Space Odyssey. You snatched the words from my mouth. I used to have a Major Matt Mason set, and his spacesuit was exactly the same colour. Well done.
How is this comment 19 hours old on a 4 hour old video??
He's a time traveller.
Yes, he invents time travel next year.
My first thought was actually Space 1999 but yeah 2001 is an even closer match. These things just scream 1960's - don't think any other time period would have produced such a design. Fascinating to get a glimpse of this technology though... would probably have never known about them during my lifetime if not for this video. Thanks Mat!
Ah makes sense.
I guess this was uploaded and shared only with Patrons before being released to the public.
I binge watched nearly all of your videos! My favourite is the RCA CED videodisc. A vinyl with moving pictures, you say..? Smashing! :)
Super Cat I had one as a teen that I got from Radio Shack.
It's a great channel to binge watch :) ✅📺
I imagine a lot of people loved the videodisc feature, I had never heard of it and was totally mesmerised by video on vinyl lol
@@DanChasingTheGlobe If you like Techmoan, you should check out databits -- it's where a lot of the ideas seem to come from, though techmoan vehemently denies this.
60's space age sci fi looking device for sure. Kind of a neat idea. I could see this being useful as a dictation device or for taking voice memo's on the go.
Man, I love that design aesthetic from the '60s and '70s! Even useless equipment like this just looked awesome.
A similar thing is still seen today - mailing USB drives for people with poor internet, for some "linux ISOs" ;-)
Fed-Ex still has more bandwidth than the internet.
To paraphase a old saying . never underestimate the bandwidth of a ISO shipping container full of 10TB HDDs on a train ;)
man, i just go to my know dude with fast internet for that.
Its quite common in Cuba and other countries with little to no internet. It's usually hand couriered...
- Richard
hardly worth it with modern broadband speeds though ,but sure going back to dial up, a cd of goodies was a weeks worth of downloads
I actually vividly remember my dad and his Sony DC-5 out at any family occasion. With us camping, any time we went anywhere, any time the family got together. He'd record 90 minute cassettes and then every six months or so he'd send a box of them to our relatives in Germany and we'd get a box back around the same time from them. He did this all the way into the 2000s because it was the format all the older folks were used to. Still got all the tapes - they're in my fireproof safe as some of my most treasured possessions nowadays.
Just want to say tis is one of those channels that just has nice quality content
Love it
Reading that title in 2020 really is weird.
Yan Uehara I know. I had the same thought.
+Techmoan I would LOVE if you could do a video on the fascinating *Sound-In-Syncs system* devised by the geniusses at the BBC R&D department. That was a system where analog studio radiosound would be digitized, then converted to a regular black-and-white analog television signal which was then send to an FM transmitter, where the digital "disguised-as-analog" signal would be converted back to analog FM sound.
This made it possible to avoid the quality-loss of picking up regular FM transmissions and then re-broadcasting them onto another transmitter where each signal overtake would lead to more and more quality loss. Now, the staggering thing about this: the BBC had this pre-DAB digital radio system running... in *1970*! They made their first digital tape recorder and A/D convertors in 1967 and this technology and knowledge also led to the NICAM digital stereo system.
There is a lot of information about this on the wonderful BBCeng.info website and BBC R&D has also a lot of their original technical papers available for download. I think those first DAC's from the sixties alone would be worthy of a video, if they still excist today (I know Philips and Denon made them in those days too).
Sound-in-Syncs was at the basis of digital broadcasting, formed the basis for NICAM, DAB and MP3 and given the fact that the first digital recording for CD also used ones and zeroes recording as black and white on regular videotape with the aid of a PCM processor it also had a major influence on the CD format! To me it's right up there with color televison, stereo sound, widescreen, high definition and HDR.
I love the advert. Baring this was in 1967 it look's like she was probably talking to some poor kid out in Vietnam or 'son in service' as the ad says.
This is one of my favorite channels! I have a 3340s myself still in working condition, with the mixer, meter bridge, and remote too.
I think the REAL reason it failed is the cartridges were too heavy to be carried by carrier pigeon.
But, you could have tied it between two swallows.
When my grandparents were stationed overseas in England and Germany in the 50s and 60s, my grandmother would send audio recordings back to her parents on reels.
Your videos are a real joy. Thanks, man.
I remember my mom making a reel-to-reel tape to send to my grandmother when we lived in Japan in the early '60s.
key takeaway: "Predicting the future is a tricky business" .. you nailed it, man! :-)
Conenion Your comment reminded me of the great, late danish humorist, Robert Storm Petersen, colloquially known as Storm P, who once said "It is difficult to make presictions, especially about the future."
Greetings from Denmark :D
presictions => predictions
Yeah, I know that quote. It's brilliant. Didn't know from whom it was. Greetings from Germany. Cheers
I started watching your channel since 808 keychain cameras. Since then you kept simple but meaningful and enjoyable, well done! Thumbs up from me, again!
I really like your channel. These old-time-gadgets are pure gold! *thumbsup*
Your videos are so well made! Just wanted to tell you, how impressed I am. So professional!
I have been watching for videos for years and I just realized that I wasn’t subscribed! I am now ❤️
It never ceases to amaze me where you find these things! Great to see and it would make a fantastic TV programme.
I really love the retro-futuristic aesthetic of those devices.
I'd love to use one of these, even today. Great review! Keep it up Techmoan, I love your videos
I love your outro. I always sit through the whole thing. The combination of the song and clips in the background makes me feel nostalgic for old tech. Great video as always
I'm always looking forward to your videos.
No matter what the topic, "device".
I find them highly entertaining.
Thank you for making such fun videos!
As always, I love your videos, sense of humor, and interesting vintage gadgets!
Another great video. You're pretty much my favorite channel on TH-cam. I love how in-depth your research is.
Your channel is so unique...No one has anything even remotely close....Love it!
i gotta say that your channel is one of my favorites. seeing all this retro tech, gets my imagination going for designs of retro tech props. Like with this one I could see customizing the case and making a Retro Sci-Fi device
Audio was out of sync with the picture on this video, Mat. Otherwise my first thought was that I used to to what we called Tapesponds on cassette, with Talking and music on them Between my friend Paul and Myself. We kept this going for about Fifteen years, with maybe two tapes each per month. This was quite ridiculous really, because we only lived about a quarter of a mile apart, and we used tyo hand the tapes to each other personally, but it was fun and we must have enjoyed it enough to keep it going for Fifteen years didn't we? Mad, eh?
I absolutely love your videos. They are top quality.
this is a grate channel i all ways learn something thanks for over 2 years of good stuff cheers to u mate
The best way to wake up ❤️ thanks, Techmoan, that was a very nice video
Great video once again! Keep up the fantastic work!
Great video as always, I kept a smile on my face because of the 2001 anecdote and YES, it totally looks like a prop from that movie.
The design is awesome 😍
Looks like a prop from the original Star Trek
Erik Hansen
Indeed it does a bit like a tricorder device.
Have to be fair, I only clicked on it because I thought it was a Star Trek communicator.
I just Shatnered myself
@@watershed44 This does not look like a Star Trek tricorder, although it wouldn't look out of place if it was part of a control panel.
@Alex Jamieson
Actually they had some other tools that did look a bit like this one here, but true it doesn't look too similar to the tricorder.
This intro has me the most intrigued that I've been in a while! Also wooohoooo double upload!! Fantastic!
I think I've said this before, but you just get the neatest stuff. Love your videos.
I used to do this back in the 80's using regular cassette tapes.
Another awesome find. You never cease to amaze me. I look forward to your videos more than anyone else on TH-cam. Plus you ride a NC700x DCT, which is what I ride here in California.
I had a Playtape back in 1968, but somehow never heard of Mail Call...thanks so much for posting this!
I'm always interested in every review of technology in the past..Good job bro!
Informative , funny and professional as always Techmoan
Excellent topic! Thanks for continuing to focus on "lost tech"!
this guy really loves his details on his videos , he know so much about the items even the sales man back in the day dont know this much info :)
As always, thanks for making!
Yet another excellent video you have made Techmoan!
Awesome as usual! Thanks, Techmoan!
I learned about so much tech I didn't even know existed on this channel!! Makes me wonder if we have an super obscure tech even now that many don't use or even know about!!
Techmoan your spoiling us today..
2 vids
Great stuff as always 👍
Your videos are amazing, I watch them before going to sleep.
Where did you dig up the vintage footage of that crazy cat with the groovy threads listening to his granny, man? Loved the styling in popular contemperary media references, Matt. And as always... thank you for the making of the videos.
Love your videos!! Totally reminds me of 2001. Love that TH-cam follower counter, i even saw it turn over a few times during the video. :)
I love these obscure pieces of technology. Great stuff Mat!
What a coincidence, my dad was born on September 21st, 1967.
Love your videos, stay awesome.
Two videos in a row...what a treat!
Your content is fantastic! I love your videos!
Looking at one of your older videos, i will say they age very well. Thanks.
Two techmoan videos in one day.....is it Christmas? Haha
I love this retro stuff, I already bought a old flip clock, it's so beautiful!
Corona Voicemail...will i get a virus listening?
Your new LG screen is looking pretty swag. Loving the way you’ve mounted it so cleanly
Techmoan, i just bought a walkman because of you! Thank you!
excellent research.. Excellent script and production... thanks.
Yeah, the design is amazing, iconic thing. Its in all industrial design books. Thanks
I never heard of these. Thanks!!!
I am a big fan!!!!!!
Same here... as soon as I've seen these devices, I had flashbacks of 2001: a Space Odissey - and then you mentioned it, it's almost spooky (but I see many others tought the same). ;) Great video as always, thanks!
Great video as always. Loved the wig!
I wish there was more through-back 60s designs. I would love to own a desktop computer designed like this.
"the cost.. will cost you..."😀 Youre attention to detail is so impressive I couldn't believe that slipped out :) Anyway I love your videos! Keep up the good work! Cheers from Romania!
Love your acting, old chap. The wig and the acting, great!
This is why we need Techmoan in TH-cam.
lovely use of the screen in the background.
techmoan video uploaded drop everything and watch! love this channel
Oh boy, the video and audio are descyned now. Lovely.
They’re groovy and with it man!
For a moment I expect a recording of "I'm speaking to you through the media of Wax"
WOW I love the look of that device! It looks straight out of the brady bunch or I dream of Genie!
Love your techlondgey video's I learn so much from your video's
My father had one of those Mail Call devices. Unfortunately, us kids may have played with and destroyed them. I haven't seen them again since, but your video brought back memories about the device's loud beep in the morning while recording on it.