A Ham Radio Answering Machine
For those who grew up with a cell phone in their hand, it might be difficult to imagine a time where the phone wasn’t fully integrated with voicemail. It sounds …read more Continue reading A Ham Radio Answering Machine
Category Archives: answering machine
An Echo Dot for the 1980s
There’s so much obsolete technology out there with great design. It’s really sad to see it end up in the landfill, because even though the insides may be outdated, good …read more Continue reading An Echo Dot for the 1980s
The Bad Old Days of Telephone Answering Machines
Telephone answering machines were almost a fad. They were hindered for years by not being allowed to connect to the phone lines. Then a mix of cell phones and the phone company offering voicemail made the machines all but obsolete. Unless you are really young, you probably had one at some point though. Some had digital outgoing messages and a tape to record. Some had two tapes. But did you ever have one that didn’t connect to the phone line at all? Remember, there was a time when they couldn’t. My family had one of these growing up and after …read more
Continue reading The Bad Old Days of Telephone Answering Machines
Retrotechtacular: The Modern Telephone
We take recorded telephone messages for granted in these days of smartphones and VOIP. Our voicemail lives on an anonymous server in a data centre in the cloud somewhere, in a flash memory chip on our DECT base station, or if we’re of a retro persuasion, on a micro-cassette. Wherever we go, we now know our calls will not go unanswered.
Today’s subject takes us back to a time when automatically recording a phone call was the last word in high technology, with a British Pathé newsreel piece from 1959 entitled “Modern Telephone”. Its subject is the Ansafone J10, one …read more
