[HN Gopher] There's a 30-year old dead Rabbit in Seven Sisters t...
___________________________________________________________________
There's a 30-year old dead Rabbit in Seven Sisters tube station
Author : edward
Score : 339 points
Date : 2024-04-12 06:14 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ianvisits.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ianvisits.co.uk)
| akie wrote:
| Great story, and that's a killer logo!
| antupis wrote:
| The logo is very cool I hope someone borrows this.
| selfie wrote:
| There is almost a unicode for it: R
| karaterobot wrote:
| Sort of the nerdy brother of the Playboy logo. It's the one
| Playboy calls when it can't get the dang printer to work.
| NeoTar wrote:
| At this point street furniture should achieve a level of
| protection as a reflection of our technological past.
| jl6 wrote:
| Actual street furniture on a street should probably be put in a
| museum, as streets are absurdly cluttered with posts, lights,
| cables, signage and adverts, each of which is terribly
| important to someone, but which adds up to oppressive
| distraction.
| tartrate wrote:
| Sigh, clickbait. No, not a real rabbit.
| jcul wrote:
| I actually enjoyed the misdirection on this one. And I really
| enjoyed the post itself.
| plorntus wrote:
| To be fair it's only kinda clickbait on HN. On their actual
| site the thumbnail is very clearly not a real rabbit and is
| visible before you access the article.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It was more interesting and less gross than a real rabbit so
| I'm not disappointed.
| dataengineer56 wrote:
| Good story but not a fan of the title. It should at least be
| "Rabbit" which would hint that it's not a literal rabbit.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| I wish this comment had revealed it was an early mobile phone
| antenna and not a Volkswagen Rabbit.
| mpweiher wrote:
| The VW Rabbit was a model only sold in the US, not in the UK.
| benjijay wrote:
| It's a 'Golf' in most areas
| TomK32 wrote:
| Having read the article: Yes, against Hutchinson will,
| customers kept buying the Rabbit that was about to be killed...
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Wouldn't be half as funny with a capital R.
| rplnt wrote:
| The title is thankfully not using the confusing (and frankly
| stupid) Title Case so it's obvious to the reader that it's not
| about a literal rabbit.
| dataengineer56 wrote:
| The title has since been changed, it was lowercase now it's
| uppercase.
| rplnt wrote:
| Ah, my bad. I'm just constantly confused by title case
| titles here with the weirdest product names mixed in. Can't
| edit or delete my original comment it seems, sorry.
| GJim wrote:
| How odd.
|
| Do you also have trouble thinking Python (with a capital P) is
| a literal snake and GIMP (all caps) is a gentleman in a rubber
| suit?
| penguin_booze wrote:
| If I read 'there's a dead Python under the table', the snake
| is what I'd think it is, not the language. Context matters.
| brnt wrote:
| I thought some 30 year old rabbit corpse was discovered, yes.
| I've never heard of Rabbit the company.
| selfie wrote:
| A dead rabbit would be plausible though: it could have been
| trapped in the foundations and found during remedial work,
| for example.
| dataengineer56 wrote:
| The title has been completely changed since I made my
| comment. My comment no longer applies but I can't edit or
| delete it.
| swarnie wrote:
| I like to believe in a world where these guys recognised the
| alternative use for early mobile phone non-audible alerting and
| pivoted their business in a more Rampant direction, hence the
| dead store.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Hah we had this too in Holland. Except it was called Kermit, the
| phone company actually paid millions for the Kermit the frog
| trademark. Eventually they renamed it to Greenpoint because the
| brand was so costly.
|
| It was only around a few years until it was made obsolete by
| mobile phones which became small enough to fit in a pocket too.
| But it looks like it lasted a lot longer than the UK variants of
| this system did. I think this is because the mobile networks were
| way too costly at first. Kermit was the poor man's mobile.
|
| The hardware was also different, Kermit used pretty thin flip
| phones that, like Rabbit, were also very popular as home phones.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Ribbit vs rabbit?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I'm surprised that The Muppet Show was well known outside of
| the US and Canada.
|
| Was it broadcast there in the 1970s?
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| I grew up with it in Germany, dubbed of course. Late 70s.
| jameshart wrote:
| The Muppet Show was actually shot in the UK at Elstree
| Studios, produced by Lew Grade at ATV. It was syndicated
| globally, including to the US, but it was not actually an
| American show.
| detritus wrote:
| Well, Gosh! 'TIL', as they say.
|
| Turns out it was first aired in the UK too (according to
| the following link, anywa)!
|
| https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/The_Muppet_Show
| twic wrote:
| That was partly a hiring decision - most of the muppets
| themselves were alumni of the Royal Shakespeare Company of
| course.
| asveikau wrote:
| Jim Henson was American though and the Muppets were first
| on American television, first in local Washington DC
| stations and then apparently (just looked this up) the UK
| show had two pilot episodes on ABC in the US.
| jameshart wrote:
| Sure. Which indeed makes it natural that Americans would
| assume it was an American show and might not be known
| overseas.
|
| But the surprising truth is it ran first in the UK, and
| was filmed just outside London.
|
| I sense that you're reacting to this news as if I shared
| it with a tone of 'what idiot doesn't know that?', when
| my intent was to share it more in a tone of 'So,
| actually, fun fact...'
|
| If you ever wondered why the heck there was a muppet show
| with John Cleese as the guest star... this would be why.
| asveikau wrote:
| > I sense that you're reacting to this news as if I
| shared it with a tone of 'what idiot doesn't know that?'
|
| Not really. Just sharing why people may think of it as
| American. eg. Wikipedia describes The Muppets as: "an
| American ensemble cast of puppet characters".
| LaundroMat wrote:
| Everyone in Belgium above a certain age (I was born in 1974)
| knows it, and I bet half of them could at least name 5
| characters.
|
| Update: I was once on a client mission in Rochester, NY, and
| when I told the people there that we are deluged with/very
| knowledgeable of American culture they were very surprised
| (which in turn surprised me very much).
| toyg wrote:
| Well known in Italy in the '80s.
| retrac wrote:
| Oh, Kermit wasn't just on The Muppet Show; he was on Sesame
| Street too, with dozens of local language adaptations. Though
| it's not always popular in other countries as it is in the
| USA, it has been a worldwide phenomenon for decades. It puts
| Kermit is in the same league as Mickey Mouse. I wouldn't be
| surprised if the majority of people worldwide recognize him,
| certainly a large majority in the west.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| We had sesame street in Holland and it was broadcast way into
| the 90s. But the muppet show too, yes!
| djaychela wrote:
| The muppet show was huge in the UK in the late 70s/early 80s.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Wait, what? The Muppets was a failure during pilots in the US
| and only became a worldwide success after it was bought by
| ATV in the UK - the Muppet Show was produced at Elstree
| studios in the UK...
| ozymandias1337 wrote:
| Reruns of It & Sesame Street was broadcast on the Public TV
| Channel, in the early '00s. In the Anglophone African country
| I was currently residing in at the time.
| surfingdino wrote:
| It's tangential, but the Muppet Show was also shown in the
| 80s in Eastern Europe. I can only assume that it was a
| packaged deal of some sort, e.g. that licensing it and
| showing on state TV (there was no other at the time) was a
| condition for getting a loan or being allowed to sell local
| produce to the US?
| adolph wrote:
| Makes one miss gen-- Internet when things could be named
| Kermit, Archie and Veronica without involving the vertically
| integrated marketing apparatus. (I forgot about Jughead)
|
| "Kermit was named after Kermit the Frog from The Muppets, with
| permission from Henson Associates."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_(protocol)
|
| "The name derives from the word "archive" without the v. Emtage
| has said that contrary to popular belief, there was no
| association with the Archie Comics.[9] Despite this, other
| early Internet search technologies such as Jughead and Veronica
| were named after characters from the comics. Anarchie, one of
| the earliest graphical FTP clients was named for its ability to
| perform Archie searches."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_(search_engine)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah in this case the company (PTT) paid a TON of money to
| Henson, so much that they eventually had to re-brand to
| Greenpoint (which mustn't have been cheap). Their logo was
| all green.
|
| They were pretty bad at marketing in those days, they only
| got better in the 00's when they had moved from a state-owned
| telco to a private one. They had some hit adverts like one
| based on common spelling mistakes when texting on the old
| mobile phones in those days.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuW6Q0NQmps (If you don't
| speak Dutch you won't get it though)
| bbno4 wrote:
| amazing!!!
| kalleboo wrote:
| The Japanese equivalent, PHS, lasted 25 years from 1995 to
| 2020(!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Handy-phone_System
| lopis wrote:
| > ... was a mobile network system operating in the 1880-1930
|
| WHAT??
|
| > ... MHz frequency band
|
| Oh. Ok, I jumped in my chair for a moment, but when my brain
| calmed down I realized network systems in the 19th century
| didn't really make sense.
| lb1lf wrote:
| > but when my brain calmed down I realized network systems in
| the 19th century didn't really make sense.
|
| -Now, in the 18th century, on the other hand, the Chappe
| telegraph network was king. [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappe_telegraph
| NeoTar wrote:
| I was about to comment similarly that this is totally a
| wireless telegram system!
|
| For anyone who doesn't want to click the link, it's a
| visual telegram system similar to semaphore codes, or the
| 'clacks' in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.
| peterleiser wrote:
| The Chappe telegraph supported 98 possible signals with 6
| of those being reserved for service purposes (like
| signalling end of message), so 92 possible message signals.
| If you could get that to 96 then you could transmit ASCII
| characters using one signal from Decimal 32 to Decimal 126,
| and use one signal to enter the original "two signals per
| symbol" mode for the rest of ASCII and other symbols. Then
| automate it with machine vision and we'll have an 1800's
| style steampunk Internet.
| twic wrote:
| Indeed! That was almost a decade before the founding of
| Nintendo, absurd.
| msh wrote:
| They launched a few years later with a technically superior
| platform.
| kelnos wrote:
| And now I know why the option in the menu in Final Fantasy 7
| for "calling" other player characters (to rearrange them / form
| a new party) is titled "PHS". Mystery solved, 23 years later.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Reading this thinking "it's amazing that this outdated technology
| was so recent" and then realizing 1992 was more than 30 years ago
| :-/
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| > So, inside Seven Sisters tube station, there's still a Rabbit
| base station sitting on the wall, more than 30 years after it
| last broadcast a radio signal.
|
| I wonder what the chances are that it's still plugged in, waiting
| to receive connections from Rabbit phones that will never come.
| rob74 wrote:
| Pretty high I would say, seeing that it apparently hasn't been
| touched since it was installed... although someone may have
| thought about flipping its circuit breaker to power it off (but
| not sure about that either).
| ornornor wrote:
| You never know... There was this tale of a neon sign that
| stayed plugged in inside a wall for something like 40 years
| and that was only discovered when they tore the place down.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| You got a link to that? I REALLY want to read about it!
| ornornor wrote:
| There: https://thefactsource.com/neon-light-hidden-
| behind-a-wall-wa...
| bombcar wrote:
| You could have an elaborate plot point for a tv show that would
| hinge around firing up the ancient rabbit battlestations for
| comms that wouldn't be seen by the cell monitoring spooks.
| deckard1 wrote:
| sounds like Slow Horses. Though I could easily see it being a
| 007 plot line
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Plugged into what? Can't be more than power because the rest of
| the infra is all gone.
|
| It'd be interesting to see if it's still transmitting beacons
| though yeah.
| psnehanshu wrote:
| It thought this was about a literal "dead rabbit".
| sebtron wrote:
| Same. I was wondering if the rabbit had just died at the age of
| 30 or if it had been there for 30 years after dying.
| djaychela wrote:
| Glad to see I'm not the only person who thinks sentences like
| that are unclear!
| larodi wrote:
| Fascinating reminder from the future where streets be littered
| with tech junk from forgotten eras... Just take a look at wires
| in arbitrary mega-polic, fantastic. I'm in the process of
| collecting pictures of routers and other net equipment hanging in
| obnoxious manner in the most unexpected places. Some of it even
| powered.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Some of it even powered.
|
| Old redundant stuff powered on in network cupboards and server
| rooms must be a fairly common occurrence. Shared spaces are
| perfect for it.
| larodi wrote:
| Well I'm really talking about boxes hanging like crazy on the
| outside of a buildings still having a green light on. I
| presume most of these have been patched directly into the
| electric net skipping all kinds of metered use.
|
| The amount of wires you can find in some cities in India is
| also mind blowing... not because they are there, but because
| we've only been like less than 50-70 years into wiring stuff.
| aembleton wrote:
| I heard that when the cleared out the old BBC Television Centre
| there was masses of cabling that nobody had used for decades.
| As new tech arrived; new systems were put in place but the old
| cables remained. Probably a fair bit of copper in there.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Costs more labor to pull it out than you'd get for it as
| scrap. At least if you're using union-scale electricians as
| your labor. But maybe even at minimum wage.
| ProxCoques wrote:
| Would this have qualified for the Dead Media Project?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Media_Project
| b800h wrote:
| I remember these antenna points being rather ubiquitous in London
| when I visited as a child.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| Wow. That tech should have worked.
| datascienced wrote:
| It did. It was OS/2 of mobile I guess!
| bombcar wrote:
| It's weird to think that cell phones didn't really become
| ubiquitous until after we started do everything with them
| _but_ make and take calls.
| datascienced wrote:
| In the UK they were heavily used for voice and text and
| were almost ubiquitous circa 2002
| wkat4242 wrote:
| In Holland and Ireland and Australia too. Way before they
| became 'smart'.
|
| In those days we didn't use them for everything, people
| still used landlines sometimes. But everyone had one.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Right up until the iPhone the USA was miles behind Europe
| and Japan for cell phones, infra, cultural penetration etc.
|
| When I moved here in 2005 people didn't even T9 text.
|
| At least they didn't ubiquitously like they did in the UK
| where I moved from.
|
| It wasn't even a massive thing with the young people which
| at 27 I think I still qualified!
| datascienced wrote:
| Rabbit was (is?) slang for talking. That maybe behind the name.
| Also love the storytelling and research here.
|
| And Rumbelows is another blast from the past. Is that still
| around?
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| Rumbelows was bought by Radio Rentals, who then merged with
| Granada plc, who then merged with Carlton to become ITV.
| buggeryorkshire wrote:
| I worked for a competitor to RR (Visionhire) when a teenager,
| BSkyB had started the first satellite TV series in the UK.
| Nobody wanted to buy it (why would I need more than 4 TV
| channels?) so they gave it free, including installation, for
| 6 months before charging money. Unfortunately so many people
| wanted to cancel after the 6 months there was a huge backlog
| waiting to get somebody to take the dish down.
|
| People were unbelievable angry, I worked in the callcentre
| and we'd have people turning up threatening to kill us,
| others sent us boxes full of literal shit. Not the greatest
| job ever.
| mattl wrote:
| BSB was first (Squarials!) and Sky second and then they
| merged pretty early on.
|
| Rumbelows went out of business, many stores became Escom
| and they too went out of business pretty quickly.
| memsom wrote:
| Escom acquired the Amiga brand and distributed Amiga
| hardware (till they went out of business.)
| mattl wrote:
| Commodore brand too.
|
| I very nearly bought an Escom Amiga in May 1996 but got a
| Pentium 60 Commodore branded PC instead.
|
| By July Escom was done.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Remember the name but not the store - according to Wiki they
| closed in 1995. I have to give them credit for making a valiant
| effort though:
|
| > Rumbelows had been losing PS12 million yearly, and had never
| made a profit in its 24 years of existence
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumbelows
| dspillett wrote:
| _> losing PS12 million yearly, and had never made a profit in
| its 24 years of existence_
|
| Blazing the trail for modern internet companies!
|
| Once again young'n's think they invented everything,
| including such games of economic chicken, but we find nothing
| is really new.
| b800h wrote:
| This would be an ideal opportunity to introduce American
| readers to Chas'n'Dave, here performing their song "Rabbit"
| which is indeed about talking:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGNojF9qKS0&pp=ygUUY2hhcyBhb...
| brickers wrote:
| They might already be familiar with Dave's bassline from
| Eminem's "My Name Is". My personal favourite bit of music
| trivia
| defrost wrote:
| with your incessant talking, you're becoming a
| pest,
|
| On the same theme, more recently, _Leave Me Lonely_
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKifJ4Q5ph0
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Wasn't Eminem's nickname, "Rabbit?"
| toyg wrote:
| In _8 Mile_ , yes.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Rabbit cages are called "hutches", which may have inspired a
| pun on Hutchinson Telecom.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Definitely is still slang, as in "what are you rabbiting on
| about?"
|
| From rhyming slang "rabbit and pork = talk" apparently.
|
| https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/rabbiting+on
| bombcar wrote:
| Loving that nothing in the rhyming slang rhymes.
| closewith wrote:
| It does, just maybe not in your accent.
| strken wrote:
| I'm actually having difficulty working out in which
| accent they don't rhyme. Presumably talk is different,
| but I'm not sure how.
| MistahKoala wrote:
| I think he might be referring to the words themselves -
| 'rabbit' and 'pork' - in that, despite not rhyming,
| together they are nonetheless described as rhyming slang.
| lupire wrote:
| The rhyme is "pork" and "talk". In rhyming slang, the
| slang term rhymes with the original meaning word.
|
| Example: "comment and post" for "eat toast".
| bombcar wrote:
| It's pork and talk, I can't make them rhyme even with a
| Boston accent ( which could do "car park" and "talk").
| shawn_w wrote:
| I'd love to hear someone pronounce pork and talk in a way
| where they rhyme because I sure can't picture it.
| toyg wrote:
| Just watch EastEnders, mate.
| lupire wrote:
| Hi, shawn_w: Pronounce the or in pork and the al in talk
| like the aw in shawn.
| shawn_w wrote:
| I can see /park/ and talk rhyming with a transformation
| like that (like a Boston accent), but the o in pork is a
| completely different sound. Going from pork to pawk isn't
| something I can wrap my tongue around.
| jdietrich wrote:
| As luck would have it, "pork" and "talk" are rhymed in
| the first verse of Ian Dury's superb song _This Is What
| We Find_. I suspect the rest of the lyrics will only add
| to your confusion, unfortunately.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKoh1J84uCU
| lupire wrote:
| In most USA English, both the vowel part ("long" vs
| "short" in our goofy classification system) and the r/l
| part are different.
|
| Most of these accents have a rhotic r but not a rhotic
| (lotic?) l in this position.
| robinhouston wrote:
| They will fail to rhyme in any rhotic accent (e.g.
| general American, most Scottish accents, etc), where the
| 'r' in pork is pronounced.
| umanwizard wrote:
| "pork" and "talk" sound basically nothing alike in most
| American accents, for two reasons:
|
| 1. The "r" in pork is pronounced in most American
| accents,
|
| 2. The vowel is not the same.
| zarzavat wrote:
| It does if you're from southern England.
|
| /pkok/ and /tkok/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English
| taneq wrote:
| It's like that "orange you glad I didn't say banana" joke
| which makes _no freaking sense_ unless you 're from some
| tiny corner of the USA.
| _joel wrote:
| > Chaz and Dave entered the chat.
| pimlottc wrote:
| I didn't want to do this... I don't want to be a weather
| forecaster.
|
| I don't want to rabbit on all day about sunny periods and
| patches of rain spreading from the west.
|
| I wanted to be...
|
| A lumberjack!
| closewith wrote:
| I think it's a combination of slang for talking, the
| association of rabbits with rabbit-ear TV antennae, and the
| fact the parent company was _Hutch_ inson.
| nprateem wrote:
| I like a good rabbit down the dog and bone.
| odanalysis wrote:
| Maybe it's because it is a [Hutch]ison product...
| srmarm wrote:
| Rumbelows went bankrupt in 1995 apparently. I was a kids and it
| sticks in my mind as I used to get my mum to take me into the
| electrical shops after school as a treat and they had a proper
| fire sale with everything being sold off cheap.
|
| I find those liquidation sales quite depressing now but at the
| time it stuck out as being really exciting and we got a stereo
| quite cheap.
| buggeryorkshire wrote:
| IIRC, this was the first attempt by Hutchison Whampoa, a big Hong
| Kong company, to enter the UK. They gave up on this and
| eventually started Three, who are now one of the biggest mobile
| networks in the UK.
|
| I remember them trying to sell Rabbit when I was a kid, and even
| I was bemused. Why would I want to stand outside a hotspot in a
| shop when I could use a phone booth?
| mprev wrote:
| In between Rabbit and Three they launched Orange, too.
| dazc wrote:
| Indeed, and one of the best advertising campaigns I can
| remember even though their claims of a wire-free future were
| somewhat optimistic.
| aembleton wrote:
| I learnt from the article that they started Orange before
| Three. I always thought that was France Telecom but I guess
| they must have sold it to them.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Three is so horrible though. I had them in Ireland and they put
| all our internet traffic behind a super slow proxy so they
| could ban porn and gambling, none of which is required by Irish
| law.
|
| Then you had to go to the shop with photo ID to get unblocked.
| Also their support was absolutely terrible, their agents were
| so dumb. One time I had an issue with logging into their web
| portal (to change my plan) from my computer and their agent
| insisted they needed to put my handset in for service (which
| worked fine, of course). I asked for their supervisor and they
| said the same. They were real scriptmonkeys.
|
| At that point I simply unlocked my handset and switched to
| vodafone.
| namanyayg wrote:
| I can't stop marvelling at the Rabbit logo, and also the
| mysterious icons under the text "RUMBLELOWS" in the print ad.
| What do those beautiful icons mean??
| bombcar wrote:
| Looks like a department store or big box store.
|
| I can read some of the fiery symbols - play, record, film,
| medicine, power, but then I get less certain. There may be a
| pause button.
|
| I wonder if it was made to be reminiscent of a tape deck.
| NamTaf wrote:
| They were a UK electronics retailer. There's a wiki article
| with some info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumbelows
|
| Sadly, it doesn't touch on the symbols of the logo
| walthamstow wrote:
| The frost icon is likely freezers, and the spiral is laundry
| washing machines
| Digit-Al wrote:
| Rumbelows was a white goods store, so didn't sell medicines.
| I think some of the symbols may refer to duplicate items.
| I'll give you my guesses using the letter above to refer to
| the symbol.
|
| The R, U, and L symbols are all from a tape deck, and are
| play, stop, and pause respectively. The M is a roll of camera
| film. The B is a frost symbol, and most likely represents
| fridges / freezers. The E is an on/off symbol; it may just
| refer to generic electrical equipment, or could possibly
| represent cookers. I have no idea what the O and W are
| supposed to be, but if I had to make a stab in the dark I
| would say one may be microwave ovens and one may be radio or
| TV. The S is most likely washing machines, as someone else
| has mentioned.
| oniony wrote:
| The article mentioned Mercury too. I distinctly remember working
| for a company that had Mercury telephones and their wall sockets
| were strange: they had this bare filament of wire that glowed
| blue. Was very alarming when you first saw it: something clearly
| electrical with a bare glowing wire.
| martijnvds wrote:
| I wonder if any of the old Dutch CT2 system ("Greenpoint") is
| still around.
|
| They refurbished all the bus stops that still had stickers for it
| a few years ago.
| rasz wrote:
| Amazing article on Hong Kong/Shenzhen CT2 system in Wired by
| NEAL STEPHENSON
|
| In the Kingdom of Mao Bell FEB 1, 1994 12:00 PM
|
| https://www.wired.com/1994/02/mao-bell/
| dmurray wrote:
| The name "Rabbit" almost got genericized - I heard DECT phones
| being referred to as "rabbit phones" just this year.
|
| DECT in general (the successor to CT-2 which Rabbit used) is
| still going strong, though in some bubbles people are shocked to
| hear anyone uses anything other than a mobile phone.
| closewith wrote:
| I think that's because rabbit was slang for antennae in
| general, due to rabbit-ears TV antennae.
| orangewindies wrote:
| Isn't the term "rabbit ears" more of an American thing? Can't
| recall anyone using it in the UK.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| It was a missed branding opportunity to make the Rabbit
| mobile phone with a pair of rabbit ears antenna.
| closewith wrote:
| Not sure about the UK, but was common in Ireland.
| fredoralive wrote:
| I think the Rabbit name was chosen more because rabbit can be
| used as slang for talk and chatter, you might say some people
| were "rabitting away together" and so on if they were
| conversing at length[1]. In the UK most portable TVs used
| halo type antennas for reception AFAIk, this might be related
| to the UK only using UHF for 625 line colour TV (and
| digital)[2] whilst the US also uses VHF. The main living room
| TV was / is usually fed from a roof mounted yagi antenna
| though.
|
| [1] Just don't use the phase "at it like rabbits" to mean
| conversations. Unless you mean Ugandan discussions... [2] VHF
| was used for the old 405 line system, which was turned off in
| the '80s.
| Steve44 wrote:
| > I think the Rabbit name was chosen more because rabbit
| can be used as slang for talk and chatter
|
| There was a 1981 song in the UK by Chas & Dave called
| Rabbit which was about people endlessly rabbiting on.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGNojF9qKS0
|
| edit as I see this has been posted further down.
| Vespasian wrote:
| The only time I come into contact with DECT is during the
| yearly CCC hacker congress in Germany.
|
| And of course I bring an old phone just for the fun of it.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Approximately everyone over 50 in Germany uses a landline
| phone when at home, and of those just about all use DECT.
| nottorp wrote:
| I have one or two DECT phones but no landline for them any
| more.
|
| The last 'landline' was going out over the fiber anyway and
| was some kind of emulation. The router had a phone jack to
| plug an old school phone in.
| shmeeed wrote:
| Back when it was at the BCC, I remember when they used to
| tell you to Absolutely Not buy one at Media Markt over across
| Alexanderplatz and just return it after the Congress. Phun
| times.
| devilbunny wrote:
| DECT still has its uses. I've encouraged more than a few people
| to buy multi-handset base units that have Bluetooth built in
| for elderly parents (mine is Panasonic; they call it
| Link2Cell). Leave cell phone in kitchen (or wherever base is)
| to charge, carry a DECT handset on you at all times. If you
| fall and break a hip, you're never without a phone. It can make
| and receive calls from two different cellphones.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Bubbles like most of the world?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| A reminder that sometimes it's by chance more than anything what
| products get popular. This could have developed much further if
| the product were not cancelled. In a way it's closer to 5G in
| that it requires many many small cells to get coverage.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| Exactly what I was thinking. I guess sometimes you have to
| prove something at wide range tower level before you ask to put
| blinky boxes in every ceiling throughout a whole country.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| But it was working already - the alternatives then were
|
| - landline
|
| - landline + cell coverage in certain locations
|
| For most people a "regular" cell phone was not an option at
| all. So this hybrid landline phone could have incrementally
| gained traction and out competed analog cell phones, but for
| a tiny watershed moment in history.
|
| Also, this digital handset was _light_. Pretty cool tech. I
| think dense places like Singapore and Hong Kong could have
| ran with this tech.
| thom wrote:
| After the network didn't really work out, you could pick up the
| base stations and phones pretty cheaply so my family had these as
| our home phones for a while. They were very chunky and tough,
| with an aggressive beep when you pressed the buttons. I suppose
| that was due to lugging them round outside. Surprising in
| retrospect that smartphones look like they do instead of
| Panasonic Toughbooks.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| This makes me wonder if there are any Metricom Ricochet[0]
| poletops still hanging on light poles in US cities.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)
| tmoretti wrote:
| There are some around my neighborhood in San Jose, CA.
| russdill wrote:
| They are ubiquitous in the Southwest
| _joel wrote:
| Worth mentioning for all those that wondered why this didn't take
| off like the mobile phone network, proper... You could only make
| calls, not receive them and coverage was limited. I grew up in
| Manchester and remember seeing the base stations about but hardly
| anyone used them (10,000 subs was the max accroding to Wikipedia)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yes you could only use them at hotspots like train stations and
| shopping malls.
|
| Technically they could receive calls, but because that would
| only work in range of a hotspot, few operators offered this
| function. There was too limited radio spectrum to offer service
| across a wider area (reutilisation of cells not practical).
|
| In some cases the phones had a built-in pager to provide some
| form of reachability.
| eddieroger wrote:
| I didn't live in the UK in the 90s, but if beepers/pagers were
| as prevalent there as they were in the States, that's not such
| a hinderance, and maybe still easier than finding a payphone to
| return a page?
| devilbunny wrote:
| How prevalent were pagers in your area? I was a college
| student with one in the late 90s. There was a Mountain Dew
| promotion that gave you a pager and a year's service for X
| number of proofs-of-purchase, which was easy to get if you
| just went to a gas station and asked if you could dig through
| the boxes, but I didn't know anyone else who had one. Crucial
| item for certain fields (first responders, healthcare, IT,
| drug dealers), but for an average person?
|
| I don't miss carrying a pager, but the alphanumeric ones we
| had when I was a resident physician were pretty cool. Need to
| send a one-way message? They had a web interface, so you
| could. One or two months of service on a single AA battery.
| Worked everywhere. Far more than I can say for smartphones.
| _joel wrote:
| I recall having one in the late 90's, just before PAYG phones
| made their debut and SMS mopped up the market for them. Easy
| way for your Mum to tell you to get back for tea, or else! :)
| regularfry wrote:
| Interestingly, the "you had to be within 100 yards of a base
| station" doesn't sound entirely dissimilar to 5G.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I really like this observation.
|
| In case a non-freq-wonk comes by: This a callback to the mm
| wave part of 5G. It's signal covers an area so small, you can
| quickly exit it at a walk. Mobile PR says it's awesome while
| you're in it.
| wongarsu wrote:
| It's the exciting part of 5g everyone talks about despite its
| somewhat narrow application. I guess busy subway stations are
| a good fit as they have large numbers of people in a tiny
| area. And in larger stations you can deploy multiple cells
| with minimal overlap to split the load.
| dehrmann wrote:
| My hope is mm wave cells start springing up at music
| festivals. Those and sports venues are the main use cases.
| bm-rf wrote:
| Even with regular 5G (sub 6 ghz) you'd take advantage of
| improvements over LTE like massive MIMO and more precise
| beamforming. All leading to more people using a network
| at the same time. Also anecdotally I've found that at
| music festivals, when cellular data doesn't work, texting
| or calling usually works fine (At least on AT&T)
| afavour wrote:
| > Mobile PR says it's awesome while you're in it.
|
| It is! Even better, I live across the street from one. I get
| 5G home internet at 1GBps, faster than my cabled provider can
| achieve.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Nice. Cap?
| dghughes wrote:
| Love the logo!
| athenot wrote:
| In France it was branded Bi-Bop and ran from 1991 to 1997; many
| public places had the stickers to identify where service was
| available. Apple even had a Bi-Bop modem to go in the PowerBook
| laptops. Futuristic at the time but pricing pretty much kept it
| from getting much traction.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CT2
| kotaKat wrote:
| There's a weird twist of fate lately -- I had a lead on a Rabbit
| base station and handset recently that I'm importing into the US,
| now this discovery? ;)
|
| I already collect weird "personal cellular" stuff in my house --
| probably one of the only running PHS home phone base stations
| incl. data, a bunch of NTT Personal handsets, and now this
| Rabbit.
|
| It'll be very fun to make a call from a PHS handy to a Rabbit
| handset and vice-versa for probably the first time in the world
| very soon...
| relwin wrote:
| I worked on PHS gear in the US for the Japanese market. We even
| had an experimental license to operate within our dev building.
| We tied into our office phone network so we could makes calls
| just like a desk phone. Nifty little handsets were tiny
| compared to early AMPS/CDMA chunkers....
| kotaKat wrote:
| Yep! The tiniest little thing I've got blows me away. And it
| can do 32kbps tethering!
|
| ... You wouldn't happen to have worked on the STAR WIT would
| you have? ;)
| silverkite wrote:
| I have noticed something similar in stockholm sweden where I
| live, in a shadowy corner of metro station you can find the
| remains of a phonebooth with a logo of the then national telecom
| company
| duxup wrote:
| Kinda a cool sign to keep around. Little piece of history.
|
| Did the US have an equivalent short range only / tied to a base
| station / could use at home setups?
|
| I don't remember any.
| freedomben wrote:
| If you drive through a lot of small towns in the American west
| (east of California, such as Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming,
| Colorado, Northern Arizona/New Mexico) you can often find some
| real fascinating relics of time like this. Depending on the area
| you get a little different era. In the southwest you can find a
| lot of cool stufef from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and early 80s. Up
| north is more 80s and 90s and early 00s.
|
| One I really enjoyed seeing is a little ghost "town" in Southern
| Idaho that I had a blast exploring a couple years ago. It was a
| gas station, a restaurant, and a couple of houses and a small
| warehouse off the interstate a bit. It went out of business
| decades ago and was abandoned. It's remote enough that vandalism
| has been minimal (though certainly existent), so some things look
| fairly "pristine" the way they were last left. Seeing the desk in
| the office, with filing cabinet and desktop corded phone was a
| real nostalgia kick. There was a box that had clearly been picked
| through that I'm sure would have contained a lot of treasures. I
| found a barely readable instruction manual for a dot-matrix
| printer that would have been neat to see. You do have to be very
| careful because there are lots of sharp object galore, especially
| broken glass. Local "wildlife" has also been in and out once the
| door stopped staying closed, but for the most part it is just
| scratch marks (that could have been done by dogs or cats). The
| bathroom is a toxic bio-hazard though, so don't go in there.
| People clearly kept using for many years, long after the water
| was shut off.... Overall was a really fun experience. If you
| decide to explore though, be aware of where you go because a lot
| of old-looking stuff that might _seem_ abandoned, actually isn 't
| (it just hasn't been maintained), and usually the owners aren't
| too welcoming of trespassers.
| holden_nelson wrote:
| What town in Idaho? I live in southern Idaho. Feel free to DM
| if you don't want to post it publicly. If you don't mind :)
| cogman10 wrote:
| Really curious as well. I'm from Rockland myself (but now
| live in Boise)
|
| edit: Oh shoot, I'm guessing from your handle your a nelson
| from Holden :D. I'm sure your familiar with Rockland.
| Teever wrote:
| Isn't it kind of weird how the top comment on a post about an
| antique and interesting electronic system from the UK is about
| rural America?
| anyfoo wrote:
| How so? I accept stories about time capsules from any
| location. Just below is a comment from Holland. Less weird?
|
| Americans probably make up a larger portion of HN visitors
| (especially in the currently awake time zone), and it is also
| a very big country, so stories from there are more likely
| overall.
| cesarb wrote:
| > So, inside Seven Sisters tube station, there's still a Rabbit
| base station sitting on the wall, more than 30 years after it
| last broadcast a radio signal.
|
| Is that the base station itself, or is it just the antenna, with
| the real base station sitting in a closet somewhere? And if
| that's just an antenna, the base station might have already been
| removed, leaving just the antenna and its cabling (though it
| wouldn't surprise me if you open the right closet and find the
| original base station still plugged into that antenna).
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| >Is that the base station itself, or is it just the antenna,
|
| You mean the rabbit ears?
| whyenot wrote:
| It's a really nice logo. I wish someone would clean away the dust
| and cobwebs.
| butler14 wrote:
| We had one of these as a house phone at one point when I was a
| kid!
| WorldPeas wrote:
| someone should convert all these into meshtastic hubs, that'd be
| a cool second-lease on life
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-04-12 23:01 UTC)