Back in the late 1800s Andrew Hallidie came up with a crazy idea of a loop of steel rope that ran under the streets of San Francisco. He figured out how to pull horseless cars up and down the hills by using a giant pair of pliers in the cars to grip the moving cable. Those ridiculous cable cars have been climbing halfway to the stars since 1873. #explainvintagetechnology
#Notification#apps: Early #messengers walked with a bell through villages and towns. We still have this bell symbol on Mastodon!
People used this technology especially before the beer was brewed. Their voice system intoned aloud: It is announced that from tomorrow morning onwards, no one will be allowed to shit in the stream where the honourable Council brews beer the day after tomorrow.
Once upon a time, if you wanted to know something, you couldn't use Google & Co.
You had to move your whole body to one of the centers that offered the adequate technology: in form of objects called books, searchable by a catalog of written cards or even with the help of peoples' brains.
These people were called #librarians, the centers were called #library. Their datas were not forbidden or censored, and worked even without electricity.
In olden days, people used paper printed and coins minted by the government to exchange for goods and services, this cash register was where the amounts that were required to pay were totaled up and the tokens kept.
We used a one bit signal technology for sending alarm signals over long distances in Switzerland. There where stacks of prepared inflamable biostuff on points of higher altitude. Line-of-sight propagation was used to have agents set the stacks on the peer-to-peer-hills aflame. By this means a signal could cross the country in as little as 3.6 Kiloseconds.
A decentralized communications technology that does not depend on routing digital packets through a physical network of towers, gateways, microwave beams, and optical fibers. The text to be transmitted is encoded with a multiband frequency/amplitude modulation scheme, transmitted by molecular density waves, and decoded with a pair of miniaturized spectral filter banks implanted under the receiver's skull. Range up to tens of meters.
If you wanted to send a longer text message to someone else you used this machine to punch holes in a long paper strip. Later you dialed the recepients phone number and passed the paper strip through the reader, you did this to maximise the speed of transmission. You had to pay for the dial-up-conection by short time units.
The message was printed on a simmilar machine on the recepients side.
This wonder of technology got replaced by our modern fax-machine later.
If you wanted to know what the time of temperature was, you could call a local phone number, often run by a local bank, which would tell you these things.
Some of these still exist and one in Cincinnati was recently getting more than a thousand calls per day.
A form of personal transportation, like a Tesla, but produced with simple bio-engineering out of proteic polymers rather than metal and plastic. Normally for a single passenger, but could carry two in a pinch, and some modest amount of goods. Totally green-powered, and could be recharged even in transit. Superb off-road agility and can drive through 3-foot-deep water. Drive-by wire and voice activation. Available in several colors.
Put the disc in the slot at the top, press the lever on the right side, and look through the lenses: you'll see the first of seven #stereoscopic views. Press the lever again to see the next image. The description of what each slide shows is printed on the disc, and is visible through an opening above and between the lenses. For more information, read the included 16-page booklet. #Viewmaster
#ExplainVintageTechnology#hashtaggames You put spirit fluid and special paper in this machine and crank it by hand (or if you were lucky enough, your school had an electric one). This is how your teacher made copies. They smelled delicious!
Payphone: A phone placed randomly out in public places which required a quarter or a dime or collect service.
Quarter / Dime: Round metal objects manufactured by our government and used to procure goods and services. Before CC, ATM, and Crapto.
Collect call: Used to be only one party paid to make a phone call. The receiving party never paid. This is the biggest scam the phone companies ever pulled and we just took it in the face without question.
#ExplainVintageTechnology#HashtagGames If you wanted to wake up to music, you would turn the dial to your favorite radio station, then set the alarm. In the morning your “alarm” was the radio station playing. The bright red numbers always let you know what time it was, even in the dark. Everyone had one of these!
.... and if your battery is all run down you can still start the car by making your kids push it until it goes fast enough to pop it in second gear and you don't need the starter motor to get it going.
An electron beam would hit a phosphor coated sealed glass tube and cause the phosphor to glow. Magnetic fields would bend the electron beam back and forth in descending rows. This was called a TV.