Subj : Re: barbed wire telephony
To   : hyjinx
From : poindexter FORTRAN
Date : Fri Jun 03 2022 07:11:00

-=> hyjinx wrote to Oli <=-

 hy> I mean, that's awesome and all, but if the phone system in USA is
 hy> anything like the UK phone system, then standard volage is +50volts and
 hy> ringer is 100V, so you wouldn't want to be touching it when a call was
 hy> being established!

Can confirm - I was a telecom manager in a former life, and have stripped 
silver satin cable that had run under partition walls I thought was 
unplugged from the jack.


 hy>  But yes, great ingenuity is often spurned out of
 hy> necessity. It was for this very reason that I used to use a 'cantenna'
 hy> for my early internet access in Edinburgh. I set up a dipole antenna
 hy> with a pringles can and got reasonably good (say 128k in 1999/2000)
 hy> bandwidth, stealing it courtesy of some rebels at Edinburgh University.
 hy> This was in the days that even achieving 56K V90 was pretty much
 hy> impossible in most exchanges in the area.

Back in the day, though, the web was text-only, mail was plain-text, and you 
could do a lot on 56K.

My first internet connection for 75 people (maybe 25-30 were really on the 
net, the rest using POP3/SMTP email) was a 56k leased line.

Later, I ran into problems with getting a T1 into a building for a startup 
company with 8 people; I nailed up a 56K dial-up line, set up a web proxy, 
and they got by with it for a week and a half.

Although I can't imagine going back to my first home ADSL line, 384K/128K, 
or 112k ISDN.  :)







.... When in doubt, predict that the trend will continue.
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