Short meme

[altivo]

From calydor:

The first time you communicated in real-time between continents, what was going through your mind?

It was an amateur radio contact with a station in Europe, using very little power and a simple piece of wire as an antenna. My thoughts both during and afterward were largely centered on the feeling that it was simply impossible. How can the amount of electricity needed to power a night light bulb be adequate to send a clear signal over 4000 miles? It still amazes me, and makes it easy to understand why demonstrations of both the wired telegraph and later wireless telegraphy were treated as hoaxes by so many people. It looks and feels like pure witchcraft.

Comments

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I didn't really think anything special, but I guess IRC is a bit different :)

But it is interesting to see how a low-strength signal can travel around th world like that.

*nuzzles* And there is that 30/30 icon again. Have you seen any BraveStarr episodes yet? ^.^

[altivo.livejournal.com]

My limited IRC and chat room experiences at that time were all within the US, so I never even thought about the potential for intercontinental communication in the net.

Nope, haven't yet seen any actual BraveStarr episodes.

[hellmutt.livejournal.com]

Here's the intro. Magic horsey with blunderbuss! I loved that angle as a pup.

Bravestarr

[thedeere.livejournal.com]

OMG I'd never heard of it before, just watched that intro! That is SO COOL. I mean I can't answer as to the quality of the plot (though, space-cowboys is always fun and I liked Cowboys of Moo Mesa) but that horse ROCKS. :)

Re: Bravestarr

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Yes, 30/30 is someone you just don't mess with, but he is loyal to his friends, and has a heart of gold. He is adorable :)

Re: Bravestarr

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Adorable?

*puts on 30/30 suit and goes to visit SoanoS*

Re: Bravestarr

[soanos.livejournal.com]

YAY! 30/30! \o/

*runs to the cutie cyborg horse and licks, hugs and nuzzles all over*

Yes. Adorable :)

Re: Bravestarr

[altivo.livejournal.com]

*squirms*

Eek! Ack! Wait! *pant* Stop, that tickles!

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Well, actually, he is a cyborg horse, and his gun is called "Sara Jane", the finest handheld positronic cannon on the planet of New Texas. And she is dearly loved ny 30/30. :)

[hellmutt.livejournal.com]

Aha, Sara Jane. I forgot her name.

[soanos.livejournal.com]

My first online communications experience was the lobby of Diablo, the online hack'n'slash game. Then I got on ICQ, and from there I started adding more and more protocols into my repertoire.

And yes, you definitely need to watch Bravestarr. :)

[calydor.livejournal.com]

That is the most appropriate icon for a post I've seen in a long time. :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Luckily I just created it over the weekend. Serendipity.

[doco.livejournal.com]

Pff, wireless radio, how quaint.

I still remember how when connecting to an international call you'd have that little beep indicating that you're successfully connected via satellite... I think the first instance of actual real-time communication was when I used to dial into some manufacturer's mailbox (I think it was National Semiconductor or Texas Instruments or something) by way of the AT&T calling card service. You could call them for free in Germany, then tell the automated system to connect you to an 800 number, which, due to a terrible miscalculation on part of the owner of tne number, was actually reachable for free from AT&T's service, then connect to the bulletin board that was running on that number and navigate to the live chat. I think I used this thing a few times to discuss stuff with a person I met on Fidonet, and I think they closed this loophole circa late 1994.

This was, of course, back in the day when the standard tariff to the US was DM 4 a _minute_. When I last had to use dial-up extensively in 2004, it was actually cheaper to dial into an ISP in Seattle (for 1 cent a minute) than to connect to a local modem pool at 2.9ct/minute....

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You may think it quaint but it requires no infrastructure at all, unlike the internet or telephone system which has huge amounts of dependencies.

"Wireless radio" is still the technology that we depend upon for satellites, space probes, and outer space communication.

Witchcraft!

[megadog.livejournal.com]

Thinking of how such technology must have first appeared, I'm reminded of a short SF story in which a space traveller teleported down on to a primitive planet (let's say something developmentally-equivalent to Earth a couple of millennia ago) and was promptly clubbed-to-death by the locals who considered he must be a devil after they saw him using a match to start a fire.

Re: Witchcraft!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Arthur C. Clarke's third law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." XD

non-sequitur

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

You have no idea how many different things my brain made out of the article's icon before I got my glasses onto my face.

Re: non-sequitur

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It is a bit on the tiny side, isn't it? ;p

[saythename.livejournal.com]

I had an AST 6600d. I'd upgraded the sound card
and wanted to test it. So I did digital telephony.
This was about, oh, 94. I "called" a guy in London
and chatted for awhile. He told me about the weather
and he turned out to be an American ex-pat. I
got him to agree to work for the NS

*test tone*

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Of course, one could also conclude that night bulbs are absolutely, horribly, utterly inefficient in their use of energy... :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Compared to LEDs, they are. Even so, bridging 4000 miles with less than 7 watts of energy, and at the speed of light without any infrastructure at all, is darned impressive I think.

[thedeere.livejournal.com]

My first long-range communications aside from telephone was Fidonet (net 159. :)) and that was shockingly awesome. :)

As for LED lightbulbs: HELL YES! I've got a little pocket-luxeon flashlight that's utterly startling when turned on at night, it's like a 5-cell Maglight... Yet it's tiny and takes 3 AAA cells. I've been watching things like this: http://store.lsgc.com/ They have a 60-watt equivalent but it's still pretty steep, 150 bucks. Soon as they can manage 100 watt equivalent in Warm White for under a hundred, I'm gonna be ALL over 'em!

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Heh, I was on FidoNet, too - net 240 (in zone 2, though). 2:240/2120.31, to be precise. ^_^

Incidentally, FidoNet was also the facilitator for my first cross-continent communication attempts, too - although IIRC, the very first attempt actually failed (I'd send a PM to a US-American guy posting on the English AD&D board on Fido, but never received a reply). Still, fun times.

[thedeere.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Fido was just a bit like putting a message in a bottle and tossing it into the sea! It'd float from island to island toward it's destination... But it OFTEN worked which was astounding. :)

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Yeah - quite so. :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought. But that means that Fido doesn't qualify as real time communication, does it not?

[schnee.livejournal.com]

It is, yes...

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

Technology is odd really. The more I know about it, the more I'm amazed all these things even bother to work. Bit flipping devices running at radio frequencies. Infrastructure on same invisible waves connecting people around the world, to that same device in your pocket, listening atom clock pulses coming from orbit and deducing from that where you are.

But the simplicity of good old radio traffic still beats all that. =)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, the simplicity of particularly the morse code signal over radio is amazing. With one transistor and a nine volt battery, a bit of wire and a key... Of course it didn't look quite so simple in Marconi's time, but he hadn't figured everything out yet.

Even more amazing today are the digital radio modes that use a computer sound card to generate the signal and receive it. Not as fast as some analog modems, but able to get a signal through or hear and decode it under incredible conditions. My computer is able to find and decode transmissions that I can't even hear in the headphones. (And I have above average hearing, too.)

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

Yep, computers have a pretty good hearing, once someone teaches'em a bit about signal processing. Maybe some day even those SETI systems manage to nab something odd off the sky. :-)

I gather it's something about sending and listening the signal in broad spectrum amidst the background noise. Requires a bit more than one transistor though, but it's still fancy.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It's done by phase shifting the RF signal. Yes, doing that trick requires more than one transistor, unlike simple morse. But it actually uses less bandwidth than simple morse, which is amazing in itself. Add in the ability of DSP to pick out inaudible signals and decode them, and its quite astounding.

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

More interesting things happening in the radio world, even though testing or even developing some of those might be a bit questionable these days... this open source GSM connectivity thingie is curious too, or rather the possibilities of the multi-use radio gear used with it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yep. Dig through that to GNU Radio and then to the various actual real live applications of software defined radio. The very concepts make my brain wilt, but apparently it does work. Brought to you by today's extremely high speed processors and computer hardware...

[megadog.livejournal.com]

Whereas I can remember using a "Piccolo modem" on HF radio circuits some 30 years ago - like modern stuff, this could give solid RTTY copy on a channel that to the human ear sounded like white-noise. Unlike modern gear, this 'modem' took up a good proportion of a full-height 19-inch equipment rack.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. You've been licensed longer than I. My first actual experience with digital radio started with packet around 1990. I didn't get into old-fashioned RTTY until some time after that, and wasn't really successful with it until 2000. ;p

So, I've only used a PK-232 hardware interface and more recently the various sound card based programs. The largest and heaviest equipment I've actually seen or touched was an old ASCI teletype "pedestal" machine with a 300 baud analog telephone modem in it. ASR-32? Someone gave it to me back in the mid-90s and it sat in the basement of the house for a couple of years before being passed on to someone else.

[heavens-steed.livejournal.com]

You have a 30-30 icon!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yeh, I got a handpainted cel from the original animators off eBay for about $8 plus postage. When it came, I made this icon by scanning it and adding the little lightning bolts and morse code "73".

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Ooooo... I wonder if they still have any cels left. :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I believe so. Check eBay regularly, or put in one of those searches that runs daily and sends you the results. This one is on there right now:

http://cgi.ebay.com/BRAVESTARR-Original-Animation-Art-Cel-Draw-30-30_W0QQitemZ270294636104QQcmdZViewItem?hash=item270294636104&_trkparms=39%3A1%7C66%3A2%7C65%3A1%7C240%3A1318&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14