reminds me that my first taste of the internet was the days where you pretty much had t have a university account. I used a friend's, and was blown away by what I found on Usenet
I got the black Kickstarter-only version. I got interested in coding in C again. My (now) ex broke up with me over this thing on the mistaken notion that I was messing with her somehow electronically. I got told i had to leave. Tonight. And take all my electronics with me. She cited having her "black hat friend" looking into it and he said it was pretty evil. I am sure she is reading the recent news with some level of satisfaction.
I bought another a couple months later and if I can get over my ADHD, I still hope to make the radio chat useful.
Born in 1961 and these articles don't touch on one thing that I remember when I was a kid: you only needed 5 numbers to dial if you were calling someone else in the same thing. This was the case at my grandparents in Bay City, Michigan in the late 1960s. My cousin's number was LIncoln 2-9729
I have never understood how that worked despite my father working for the phone company. Dad explained a lot of things, but that wasn't one of them.
I'm from the UK, but IIRC I think the US phone numbers originally used the 2nd digit to discriminate whether the first 3 digits were a local (7 digits) or national (10 digits).
Not sure where your 5 digit example fits into that though, that'd suggest there was actually 3 levels of discriminators originally. It's certainly plausible when there were relatively few numbers used, with the push to 7 and 10 digits only when the number space was getting fuller so that those prefixes could be reused.
In the European countries in familiar with, there would be a prefix digit (usually 0) to show a call was not local. (And a different prefix to make an international call, usually 00.)
So if you live in London and have a landline phone, you can call Westminster Council by dialing 7641 6000. Outside London you'd need to dial 020 7641 6000.
The 0 isn't really part of the number, so from abroad you typically dial 0044 20 7641 6000 (but the international prefix varies, so it's written +44 20 7641 6000.)
I tried the Ian way once, but didn't like it, but once i figured out that i was grannying my shoes all my life and fixed it, I don't have to tie the loops together like i did all my life.
Example of this is that one of these recordings, listed as "Kmart 1973 Reel To Reel" has an address of 3020 East Grand Blvd in Detroit. Motown's original studio was on West Grand Blvd. It's intriguing to consider who the voice talent was, and what if any crossover there was during those days.
Googling the address shows that the former recording studio is now a residence.
>> "This is a 2 bed 1 bath 1700 sq. ft., Mid Century concrete block building which was purposed as a recording studio, called the Danny Dallas Studio and also Special Recordings."
>> "Situated a mere thirty yards along the road from D Town's office, these studios were used frequently by the legendary Producer, Richard Popcorn Wylie."
Special Recordings is on there with the address. It's a bit early in the morning for any more in-depth research, but now I'm very curious about the possible intersections of Detroit legends and K-Mart background music recordings.
I worked for Oracle in their Broomfield, Colorado campus. There was an alcove off a hallway that had bookshelves and a library that had been apparently inherited from StorageTek, an acquisition of Sun Microsystems before Sun was in turn bought by Oracle. It was a fascinating snapshot of mid-90s (mostly) tech books, but there were some interesting cultural books including African American studies. Basic HTML books, several O'Reilly books with the bear postcard in them still (I stole one =) ) but the best one for me was a book about OpenVMS Digital Command Language, on which I cut my teeth in the 1980s. It was a favorite place for me to spend a few minutes after lunch in the cafeteria on my way back to my desk.
I currently work for Western Digital and recently someone put a bunch of tech books out on a credenza in one of the collaboration areas with a note inviting people to borrow them. Not exactly a library, but it reminded me of the nostalgia people are expressing here about the big batches of books we used to lug around from cubicle to cubicle (often using an office chair).
