There’s a 30-year old dead Rabbit in Seven Sisters tube station

Loving that nothing in the rhyming slang rhymes.

I didn't want to do this… I don't want to be a weather forecaster.

I don't want to rabbit on all day about sunny periods and patches of rain spreading from the west.

I wanted to be…

A lumberjack!

Chaz and Dave entered the chat.

They might already be familiar with Dave’s bassline from Eminem’s “My Name Is”. My personal favourite bit of music trivia

I worked for a competitor to RR (Visionhire) when a teenager, BSkyB had started the first satellite TV series in the UK. Nobody wanted to buy it (why would I need more than 4 TV channels?) so they gave it free, including installation, for 6 months before charging money. Unfortunately so many people wanted to cancel after the 6 months there was a huge backlog waiting to get somebody to take the dish down.

People were unbelievable angry, I worked in the callcentre and we'd have people turning up threatening to kill us, others sent us boxes full of literal shit. Not the greatest job ever.

> losing £12 million yearly, and had never made a profit in its 24 years of existence

Blazing the trail for modern internet companies!

Once again young'n's think they invented everything, including such games of economic chicken, but we find nothing is really new.

The Muppet Show was actually shot in the UK at Elstree Studios, produced by Lew Grade at ATV. It was syndicated globally, including to the US, but it was not actually an American show.

We had sesame street in Holland and it was broadcast way into the 90s. But the muppet show too, yes!

Well known in Italy in the '80s.

It's tangential, but the Muppet Show was also shown in the 80s in Eastern Europe. I can only assume that it was a packaged deal of some sort, e.g. that licensing it and showing on state TV (there was no other at the time) was a condition for getting a loan or being allowed to sell local produce to the US?

Oh, Kermit wasn't just on The Muppet Show; he was on Sesame Street too, with dozens of local language adaptations. Though it's not always popular in other countries as it is in the USA, it has been a worldwide phenomenon for decades. It puts Kermit is in the same league as Mickey Mouse. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of people worldwide recognize him, certainly a large majority in the west.

Reruns of It & Sesame Street was broadcast on the Public TV Channel, in the early '00s. In the Anglophone African country I was currently residing in at the time.

The muppet show was huge in the UK in the late 70s/early 80s.

I grew up with it in Germany, dubbed of course. Late 70s.

Everyone in Belgium above a certain age (I was born in 1974) knows it, and I bet half of them could at least name 5 characters.

Update: I was once on a client mission in Rochester, NY, and when I told the people there that we are deluged with/very knowledgeable of American culture they were very surprised (which in turn surprised me very much).

Yes, to the extent that “muppet” is now common British English slang for a foolish person - e.g. “some muppet has parked badly and blocked the pavement again”.

Wait, what? The Muppets was a failure during pilots in the US and only became a worldwide success after it was bought by ATV in the UK - the Muppet Show was produced at Elstree studios in the UK...

Yeah in this case the company (PTT) paid a TON of money to Henson, so much that they eventually had to re-brand to Greenpoint (which mustn't have been cheap). Their logo was all green.

They were pretty bad at marketing in those days, they only got better in the 00's when they had moved from a state-owned telco to a private one. They had some hit adverts like one based on common spelling mistakes when texting on the old mobile phones in those days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuW6Q0NQmps (If you don't speak Dutch you won't get it though)

Hm, I don't understand, why not just carry the cell phone directly?

Isn't the term "rabbit ears" more of an American thing? Can't recall anyone using it in the UK.

I think the Rabbit name was chosen more because rabbit can be used as slang for talk and chatter, you might say some people were “rabitting away together” and so on if they were conversing at length[1]. In the UK most portable TVs used halo type antennas for reception AFAIk, this might be related to the UK only using UHF for 625 line colour TV (and digital)[2] whilst the US also uses VHF. The main living room TV was / is usually fed from a roof mounted yagi antenna though.

[1] Just don’t use the phase “at it like rabbits” to mean conversations. Unless you mean Ugandan discussions… [2] VHF was used for the old 405 line system, which was turned off in the ‘80s.

Approximately everyone over 50 in Germany uses a landline phone when at home, and of those just about all use DECT.

Back when it was at the BCC, I remember when they used to tell you to Absolutely Not buy one at Media Markt over across Alexanderplatz and just return it after the Congress. Phun times.

I have one or two DECT phones but no landline for them any more.

The last 'landline' was going out over the fiber anyway and was some kind of emulation. The router had a phone jack to plug an old school phone in.

A dead rabbit would be plausible though: it could have been trapped in the foundations and found during remedial work, for example.

If I read 'there's a dead Python under the table', the snake is what I'd think it is, not the language. Context matters.

The title has been completely changed since I made my comment. My comment no longer applies but I can't edit or delete it.

I thought some 30 year old rabbit corpse was discovered, yes. I've never heard of Rabbit the company.

The VW Rabbit was a model only sold in the US, not in the UK.

The title has since been changed, it was lowercase now it's uppercase.

   > but when my brain calmed down I realized network systems in the 19th century didn't really make sense.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappe_telegraph

Indeed! That was almost a decade before the founding of Nintendo, absurd.

Here's a video of those mobile phones in use: (warning: conspiracy content)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwy6gSs-ljA

I miss that SquareSoft era. The standalone Final Fantasy games were great. Still are should one forget a bit too much. Words and their context were often rich and intriguing.

Entry to an official building in FF12 featured a docent, not a receptionist or greeter or guard. Just one of many examples where Square found something a little obscure to spice the overall experience.

It is weird that there is still no obvious comments about abundance of such objects in Japan (with fan community around them), or from even bigger “urban exploration” crowd.

When I was a teenager, my curiosity led me to do urban exploring, so I felt a lot more pulled in by freedomben's story than the one about cordless phones. If there were photos, it'd definitely be blog post worthy. Although that might spoil the visuals my imagination has already created. For example, I remember visiting Pleasure Beach and exploring all the dollhouses in that ghost town which was abandoned when the bridge burned down. I remember feeling so afraid when I discovered that one guy was still living there, just sitting back and forth in his rocking chair. I also think Bridgeport, having so long been a beacon of American values, teaches us what we can expect from America in the future once more critical infrastructure breaks down.

How so? I accept stories about time capsules from any location. Just below is a comment from Holland. Less weird?

Americans probably make up a larger portion of HN visitors (especially in the currently awake time zone), and it is also a very big country, so stories from there are more likely overall.

Really curious as well. I'm from Rockland myself (but now live in Boise)

edit: Oh shoot, I'm guessing from your handle your a nelson from Holden :D. I'm sure your familiar with Rockland.

You never know… There was this tale of a neon sign that stayed plugged in inside a wall for something like 40 years and that was only discovered when they tore the place down.

sounds like Slow Horses. Though I could easily see it being a 007 plot line

I think Person of Interest already did it. Involved ASI systems though.

It's the exciting part of 5g everyone talks about despite its somewhat narrow application. I guess busy subway stations are a good fit as they have large numbers of people in a tiny area. And in larger stations you can deploy multiple cells with minimal overlap to split the load.

Mobile PR says it's awesome while you're in it.

It is! Even better, I live across the street from one. I get 5G home internet at 1GBps, faster than my cabled provider can achieve.

Well I’m really talking about boxes hanging like crazy on the outside of a buildings still having a green light on. I presume most of these have been patched directly into the electric net skipping all kinds of metered use.

The amount of wires you can find in some cities in India is also mind blowing… not because they are there, but because we’ve only been like less than 50-70 years into wiring stuff.

Costs more labor to pull it out than you'd get for it as scrap. At least if you're using union-scale electricians as your labor. But maybe even at minimum wage.

Indeed, and one of the best advertising campaigns I can remember even though their claims of a wire-free future were somewhat optimistic.

France Telecom bought Orange (then a UK company) and decided several years laters to rebrand the french "Itineris" mobile brand "Orange" and progressively did the same across most of its business lines, both domestic and abroad.

Everything from landlines to datacenters to service centers is operated under a unified brand, Orange, originally stemming from this UK mobile operator. (I think there's a few things here and there such as live tv broadcast that have not been rebranded but I'm not entirely which and why).

The "France Telecom" brand has, I think, completely disappeared.

Funnily enough, through hoops of corporate history and divestment, there are now completely separated business entities in completely different sectors than telcos that operate under the "Orange" brand, such as Orange Bank in several countries, mostly sub-saharan Africa, that do not have anything todo with Orange/France Telecom anymore.

There is almost a unicode for it: ʁ

Here's Playboy's version of it for their Rabbitar NFTs:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/6aQAAOSwB3Ri~Cps/s-l1600.webp

It’s weird to think that cell phones didn’t really become ubiquitous until after we started do everything with them but make and take calls.

The frost icon is likely freezers, and the spiral is laundry washing machines

They were a UK electronics retailer. There's a wiki article with some info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumbelows

Sadly, it doesn't touch on the symbols of the logo

Rumbelows was a white goods store, so didn't sell medicines. I think some of the symbols may refer to duplicate items. I'll give you my guesses using the letter above to refer to the symbol.

The R, U, and L symbols are all from a tape deck, and are play, stop, and pause respectively. The M is a roll of camera film. The B is a frost symbol, and most likely represents fridges / freezers. The E is an on/off symbol; it may just refer to generic electrical equipment, or could possibly represent cookers. I have no idea what the O and W are supposed to be, but if I had to make a stab in the dark I would say one may be microwave ovens and one may be radio or TV. The S is most likely washing machines, as someone else has mentioned.

How prevalent were pagers in your area? I was a college student with one in the late 90s. There was a Mountain Dew promotion that gave you a pager and a year's service for X number of proofs-of-purchase, which was easy to get if you just went to a gas station and asked if you could dig through the boxes, but I didn't know anyone else who had one. Crucial item for certain fields (first responders, healthcare, IT, drug dealers), but for an average person?

I don't miss carrying a pager, but the alphanumeric ones we had when I was a resident physician were pretty cool. Need to send a one-way message? They had a web interface, so you could. One or two months of service on a single AA battery. Worked everywhere. Far more than I can say for smartphones.

I recall having one in the late 90's, just before PAYG phones made their debut and SMS mopped up the market for them. Easy way for your Mum to tell you to get back for tea, or else! :)

The clutter has it’s own charm

Glad to see I'm not the only person who thinks sentences like that are unclear!

Yep! The tiniest little thing I've got blows me away. And it can do 32kbps tethering!

... You wouldn't happen to have worked on the STAR WIT would you have? ;)

But it was working already - the alternatives then were

- landline

- landline + cell coverage in certain locations

For most people a "regular" cell phone was not an option at all. So this hybrid landline phone could have incrementally gained traction and out competed analog cell phones, but for a tiny watershed moment in history.

Also, this digital handset was light. Pretty cool tech. I think dense places like Singapore and Hong Kong could have ran with this tech.