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Thursday, December 11, 2014
Never Obsolete
"640K of memory should be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates
Okay, Bill Gates never actually said this, but eMachines did. eMachines was a US company founded in 1998 and offered PCs for the home consumer between the $400 and $600 price point, far less than those manufactured by Compaq, HP and IBM at the time. Because of this, they became very common in retail stores.
I remember when my sister bought one. I remember because it made the claim of "never obsolete" and came with ~500MHz processor, CD-Rom, between 10 - 50GB hard drives and between 32 - 128 MBs of ram. To put that into perspective, PCs today often come with 3.6GHz quad core processors, DVD or BluRay recorders, 2TB hard drives and 8GBs of ram.
I would love to find one of these old machines, try to get a newer version of Windows on it, either 7 or 8 and see how well it performs.
Okay, Bill Gates never actually said this, but eMachines did. eMachines was a US company founded in 1998 and offered PCs for the home consumer between the $400 and $600 price point, far less than those manufactured by Compaq, HP and IBM at the time. Because of this, they became very common in retail stores.
I remember when my sister bought one. I remember because it made the claim of "never obsolete" and came with ~500MHz processor, CD-Rom, between 10 - 50GB hard drives and between 32 - 128 MBs of ram. To put that into perspective, PCs today often come with 3.6GHz quad core processors, DVD or BluRay recorders, 2TB hard drives and 8GBs of ram.
I would love to find one of these old machines, try to get a newer version of Windows on it, either 7 or 8 and see how well it performs.
The eMachine, Never Obsolete.
Remember that? I sure do. The PC actually performed very well at the time under Windows 98 SE and I remember spending many hours gaming and browsing the web on one.
OH HOW FAR PHONES HAVE COME
There isn't much thought given to the evolution of the phone by many people, and if there is, it is probably because they just bought a new cell phone. But what about the home phone, yes, they still exist.
For many of us, it's hard to think back to a time when phones looked like this,
but trust me they did up until the mid-60s. They also worked on what was called pulse dialing, basically, when you dialed a 3 for example, the phone would interrupt the circuit with three short pulses and you would hear three "clicks" in the ear piece. If you want to read more on the old technology click here.
Most of us remember more modern home phones, but here are two worth mentioning.
The mid-90s brought about change for most home phones. Many of you that lived in Canada, or more so Ontario, will remember the Vista line of home phones, such as this one,
Oh the rotary phone....
but trust me they did up until the mid-60s. They also worked on what was called pulse dialing, basically, when you dialed a 3 for example, the phone would interrupt the circuit with three short pulses and you would hear three "clicks" in the ear piece. If you want to read more on the old technology click here.
Most of us remember more modern home phones, but here are two worth mentioning.
The mid-90s brought about change for most home phones. Many of you that lived in Canada, or more so Ontario, will remember the Vista line of home phones, such as this one,
The Vista 150.
The Vista 150, circa 1994. It included a display and many new features that took the household by storm. Some features worth mentioning are Caller ID, Call Waiting, Hold, the ability to change the ringer and ringer volume and memory keys or more commonly known as speed dial. If you want to relive the past, browse the User Guide.
With the introduction of the Internet as we know it today also brought change to the home phone. In 1995, the Vista 350 was released. It not only brought about new features but it also allowed people to connect to the internet through their phone.
The Vista 350.
With the Vista 350, people now had the ability to have news delivered right to the display on their phones. They could also search for content and buy products through the menu system. I'm not going to lie, it was a bit clunky and the text formatting wasn't always the best, but it was still cool for it's time.
Both of these phones, and most other home phones work on Dual-tone multi-frequency signaling or Touch-Tone. This replaced the pulse tone system but both worked over analog.
Another interesting thing to mention is how expensive these phones were. A Vista phone would easily set you back $350 outright, but like mobile phones the service providers would subsidize a portion of the phone if you signed up for a 3 year service contract.
Fast forward to today and more and more households are moving away from these types of phones and are moving to VOIP digital home phones.
VP530
On the front end, these phones operate much the same as Tone-Tone phones, however they actually work over the internet (VOIP is voice over IP) and are fully digital. As you can see in the picture above, some offer video calling and high definition sound. These phones connect to your home internet and offer battery backup to allow emergency calling during a power outage unlike traditional plain old telephone service (POTS) that uses such low voltage so your phone will still work during a power outage, but note that any feature that requires regular voltage will not work including the fancy ringer (this is why some phones need to be plugged in to electrical).
As you can see, home phone systems have come a long way, and have offered many of their features to that little hand held mobile phone that you carry with you daily.
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