Old Head

Kid told me that he just watched “some crazy old movie” about how a kid hacked into NORAD.

My 10 year old niece asked me what my RJ45 wall socket was while I was fixing her mom’s computer.

“It’s for old telephones”

She then asked me if I had an adapter for it so she could charge her phone.

I almost died.

Rj11/12 are for telephones, rj45 is for ethernet

Oops, yes. Thats what I meant. STILL died.

Won’t work anymore. Our phone line is completely replaced with fiber. On the other hand i can’t remember any unwarned outages in the last 20 years.

Technically, if it’s a land line port and still connected to an exchange that hasn’t gone completely VoIP (that’s a thing where I am), it might actually be possible to build a charger module that plugs into that port.

Would it be worth it, though? … No.

Low power is supplied over old land-lines for the purposes of making telephones ring and powering other handset bits and pieces, within reason of course. Using it for anything else is undoubtedly illegal as phone lines aren’t rated for huge power draws.

(If you’re interested, there are videos online where people have hooked up LED lamps etc.)

But, let’s say that module existed and was legal. Your niece still wouldn’t be happy with it.

To avoid burning out to the telephone line, any such device would have to be a r e a l l y s l o w trickle charge.

I wouldn’t even think about it for emergency power outages. A battery backup is a better option.

Would it make you feel better that literally today I had to troubleshoot a RS-232 at work?

RS232 is functionally immortal. Its market share in the niches it fills has never – and I’d argue will never – go away, or even shrink all that much. It’s like those lobsters that don’t age at all but if we splice the genes that do that into humans it gives us cancer.

Comparing RS232 to cancer is a good analogy.

I hate it but as you said it has its niche and there really aren’t better options for what it does. If someone else has a means to wire up +100 sensors to one system that doesn’t involve enough wiring to encircle an entire city or an unbelievable reliable means to do M2M between two machines that’s secure simply because everyone who knows how to tap it has a high paying job I am all ears.

Could work in theory. Back then there it had sonething like 40 volts going through the line and you needed some decent power to make the bell in the phone ring.

But I don’t know if that’s still in use these days.

Those old POTS phone lines did carry a few volts.

I swear my kid thinks we were all hand starting our Ford Model-Ts before 2012 (his birthday).

Kinda like I perceive the 70s I guess. The dark ages, the before time before I existed.

I was born in the 70s. :(

“Time is running out!! 🤣” - Brought to you by the 80s babies gang.

It’s not your fault pal. hugs

That’s not old you’re good.

Completely off topic to the thread, but you just reminded me of a time I snuck onto a movie set and got to actually do that. I posed as a driver for the car company and got to start/drive one of those bad boys with the hand crank. Inside was all switches too which was wild. The most uncomfortable ride of my life.

My kids are convinced that we didn’t have cars when I was a kid. I was explaining to them what the before GPS times were like.

The dark time before time existed.

I remember time before time existed, on cold winter mornings we’d gather around in front of our Model T and turned that crank just below the grill.
Back then we also had to crank-watch television in black and white, uphill, backwards both ways, during snowstorms… just to get to bed.

That movie is WarGames (1983)

The kid was blown away by the modem. For those who don’t know it’s a cradle type dial up modem where you place the (land line) phone on a receiver instead of plugging the computer into the cat4. You could get up to 150 bits per second on one of those bad boys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

That’s about the speed you can read text…it’s why pre-internet sites like BBSes weren’t all flashy, you had to keep it loadable. Actual downloads you would plan overnight and hope you didn’t lose connection. The first big breakthrough was resumable downloading where you left off. Huge.

I have memories of watching pictures back then being transfered by modem. It was one pixel row at a time, being rendered at approximately reading speed. So as a teenager being into hot celebrity girls, I got to watch the image being unveiled during about 3 minutes of watching those pixels appear left to right, one pixel row at a time.

It was cool :)