Instead of having a device sitting on the phone line, this just suctions on to the handset, and uses a microphone to pick up the sound vibrations. Similar to how a Jawbone headset works when clipped to your head!
”this […] uses a microphone to pick up the sound vibration”
It’s described as a ”Telephone Pick Up Coil with Microphone”, but I don’t see how one would need both a coil and a microphone to pick up the signal, and I would think a coil to be the more reliable method, so I suspect it only has a coil, picking up the signal though electromagnetic induction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_induction)
Coil: to pickup via electromagnetic induction the voice sounds of the remote speaker.
Microphone: to pickup the voice sounds of the local speaker (the person holding the handset to which this device would be attached).
You likely would stick the device to the end of the handset with the speaker, where the coil could pickup the relatively strong electromagnetic signals from the speaker mechanism within the handset. But as that end would put it about six inches away from the microphone portion of the handset, leaving little electromagnetic induction possibility available, the 'microphone' part would then be present to pickup the speaker directly.
Its just an inductive pickup. In most phones some of your voice is fed back into the earpiece, this is called sidetone and is used to make you self regulate the volume of your voice.
Some of these are a bit premature, surely they are on the decline but not dead yet eg, LTO tape, Bluray for optical disc.
And I can assure you that pagers are very much alive and well, I personally manage a technical team which uses paging technology to support 40000+ emergency services personnel. On our network they have coverage in many areas where 4G or satellite alone can not/do not.
Icons have become a real problem. Today, the icon for everything should be a smartphone. Which doesn't help. What would you use for "Save"?
Here's where it all started, with Susan Kare.[1] She designed the original Mac icons. The original Windows icons. And is still at it.
Some icons have changed in meaning. The envelope icon on web pages used to mean "Compose email to author of web page". Now it means "spam this page to someone else."
The fact that there's a unicode character for the entire word "Fax" is intriguing. There is also a character "Tel," which makes me wonder if these characters were intended to simplify the generation of e.g. fax cover pages by using a single character to prefix the caller number information. That said I can't find characters "From" or "Re" which would also be typical of that use.
This comes from legacy iconography of some old Japanese character sets. For round trip compatibility and politics many seemingly pointless/redundant characters survived into Unicode.
For example Greek capital alpha, Cyrillic letter A, and our Latin letter A all look the same but each has its own code point. There’s a ton of that.
The origin of emoji is not Japanese computers but mobile phones (keitai), which were quite advanced compared to what was available elsewhere until the iPhone, hence a lot of weird and obsolete images that appear in them.
As I understand, it's actually more or less the rule that same glyphs that are semantically different - e.g. letters in different alphabets - are represented by different codepoints. One exception was made for CJK, and that because they were trying to fit everything into the 16-bit space that Unicode had at the time. And that exception was itself extremely controversial.
Since I remember these debates as they unfolded: an existing code block for various alphabets was typically used for, as I said, round trip compatibility and what was seen at the time as reduced complexity for migrating old code.
“Han unification” was caught bitterly and the lack of alphabetic unification was cited by opponents that the motivation was racist. I have a strong opinion as to how Han unification should or should not have been conducted, if at all, however I recognize the strength of the counter argument as well so to avoid flame wars I don’t express my opinion.
Given that this comment is a deep reply to a reply and probably will never be seen this shows how hot tempers flared at the time, and perhaps still do.
Given that that story, with that specific wording, has been a running joke circulating around the Internet for years, I suspect your co-worker's kid has never said any such thing.
The name “floppy” is itself a fossil as the entire device is rigid; in the 5.25” version the disk itself is still flexible but the envelope is inherently rigid due to geometry; only in the original 8” version was not only the disk flexible but the envelope, while stiffer, was trivially deformable by accident.
The disk is still soft in a 3.5" floppy. It's just in a hard case.
5.25" floppies had a much softer case. They would, for example, sag and bend under their own weight if you held one end, or bend due to air resistance if you waved them around. They didn't have rigid envelopes.
The device is rigid but the disk inside (note the device is a square, not a disk) is very much deformable. This can be verified by sliding the metal springdoor to the side and handling the floppy disk revealedd underneath
Yea, the author is probably from the USA where MiniDiscs never took off.
In Japan they were huge! It's still frustrating that at end of their life some of the final models would run for 230hrs on a single charge! I know of zero mp3 players or phones that do that.
I grew up in Italy. I started using them in 1998 or thereabouts. I was the first one amongst my social circle who adopted them, and a couple (literally two) of friends followed suit. Everybody else was stuck with CDs and CD-Rs. They seem to have appreciated the MiniDisc’s advantages but regarded it as something not quite of our time, some kind of science fiction thing that you saw in movies but couldn’t actually buy or own.
I used mine until about 2003 or thereabouts when I got a 3rd generation iPod.
A relative of mine tried to sign up for unemployment online yesterday. Her state requires additional documentation. The only method offered by the state was by fax.
I had to sign up for an e-fax account to help her send her paperwork in. Hopefully it worked!
What keeps annoying me is the number of times I come across situations where people refuse scans but accept faxes. As if a fax they receive from me won't be a scanned document passed to something like efax. Yet they cling to the illusion that a fax is more authentic.
Another fun one I've come across is refusing to accept a photo of a document but accepting a scan or faxed copy.
My kids (ages 10-22) think the floppy disk icon means "save". They had no idea that it was a floppy disk. Only the 22 year old was alive when floppies were common. Perhaps the solution to no save icon is just to use the 3.5 in floppy icon and call it save.
I like the nitpicking in the comments about what a MODEM is. Early MODEMs were 'acoustic couplers' and the terms should never be confused lest anyone not understand the emoji.
Anyway there is nothing obsolete about any of these symbols. Context is everything and sometimes you need diagrams of how things used to be done. The symbols are handy for explaining the past.
The acoustical coupler was literally the coupler/adaptor to a headset; the modem itself was an electronic package connected to the coupler (if needed).
I have used all manner of acoustical couplers including some built into terminals, some attached to modems and some that could be connected to a modem (like a Bell 103)
The comments in the article did point this out, that the 'acoustic coupler' and the MODEM were not the same thing.
I just found it funny that people should get so nit-picky about such things when it is just a matter of emoji symbols and when there are so many other conventions such as the save icon that we don't need to so triggered by.
Some people in the comments just could not let it go, they had to hammer on about the difference between the MODEM and what an acoustic coupler was when the world has utterly moved on and nobody cares.
The early modems required acoustic coupling, so the two functions were built into the same device. Because of that it was common to use either term to refer to the same device. It was only later when US federal law was changed that modems could connect directly to the phone line without requiring acoustic coupling.
IMO it's a huge mistake to make Unicode a repository of random clip art. Of course that ship has sailed and if there is a taco character then someone will complain that there isn't a lasagna character and a broccoli chicken character, and those will be added as well, until the entire character space is full of clip art. And each person that got their favorite variety of cupcake or flavor of ice cream included or the addition of a unique character for gluten free vegan lasagna will proudly add to their resumé that they have contributed to the Unicode standard.
IMHO the main problem is that this ever-growing mass of random clip art needs to ship on every embedded system that renders user-generated text.
Text rendering has become a lot more complicated and memory-intensive. Glyphs used to be plain quadratic Bézier paths, but now there’s hundreds of full-color images — and if your drawings don’t look as pretty as Apple’s copyrighted emoji designs, someone will complain.
The upside is that it significantly improved the adoption of Unicode in general. On desktop and mobile devices, this mostly meant more glyphs - "Unicode" fonts we had in common use in early 00s often wouldn't even have many common alphabets, much less math and science characters. I remember how some third party fonts specifically advertised full coverage of the BMP. But these days, the default system font will usually have close to full coverage.
For embedded specifically, this forced Unicode into many systems that previously didn't have it, and sucked at non-ASCII (or non-Western European) text as a result. 10 years ago, I still had to use transliterated titles for my music files to get the in-dash system in my car to show them properly; not anymore.
BTW, I don't think emojis have to be full-color images. On some platforms, sure. But e.g. on Win10, emojis are clearly vector images.
It’s because of products like this: https://www.summitsource.com/Eagle-Telephone-Pick-Up-Coil-wi...
Instead of having a device sitting on the phone line, this just suctions on to the handset, and uses a microphone to pick up the sound vibrations. Similar to how a Jawbone headset works when clipped to your head!