What effects would time travel have on wireless devices?

i wonder how much that thing weighed

No chances of working of wireless devices coz in the past there is no carrier for wireless devices.

Wasn't too bad--about 22 pounds, most of it battery.

I was playing with distributed digital control in 82/3 as a process engineer. We had one. Not the most powerful computers even then, but it was portable.

OS was same as today, is what I mostly worked with. Had a primitive spreadsheet, and BASIC that could drive seriel PCL's of the time. Could also up and download software from a DEC_10, which . And seeing I was a sub to the DOE I had ARPA.net access & it was a small world then.

Company paid full price--one must remember in 84', $3000/mo was a good wage. So $1800 was a lot of money. I bought a nice Harley Sportster in 82 for $1500.

Rap

Battery???? If I remember correctly it did not have a battery power supply

It was sold as a transportable computer that you could take back and forth between the office and the home or even take with you when traveling but it needed an outlet.



Was the OS not CPM?

Selective memory--I'm not a computer guy--to me it was a hammer, but somehow I remember it was DOS to load programs.

Battery power--we carried ours to the field. Electricity in the field was limited to 24v. Ours had it's own power source and it didn't last long (~1 hr).

Rap

In reading the image of the adv you was kind enough to post the computer came with the CPM OS however it did have a battery power supply!!!!!!!

Lord that baby must had drawn some real power indeed off the batteries.

How would you modify a cell phone to work with '80s phones?

No way in hell could you do so as the infrastructure for such a phone needs to work did not exist in that time period.

I was under the impression that we had already cover that subject for you on this thread.

Stick it in a shoebox and attach a rubber duck car aerial to the shoebox.

Rap

Take out the speaker and the microphone and connect them to a wired phone line.


The point you don't seem to get JG is that there was no system in place for the phones to work. It would be easier to use quarters in a pay phone than to try to modify a cell phone to make it work. You could build your own cell system that attaches to a hard wired line but you would have to find a hard wired line everywhere you go.

Really? I will have to go back and reread the thread then.

They had CDs in the '80s - which I never noticed or realized.
Would portable modern-day CD players be compatible with '80s CD players?

The name Red Book standards for audio CDs was introduce early on and any CD who meet such standards should work just fine with modern computers.

So the short address is yes 1980s audio CDs should work in modern computers.

J Goldman says:


I think the answer is "mostly". Bill is generally right, but I remember that there were some compatability issues with very early CDs and players--not every CD would play in every player. I'm not sure whether it was bad coding on some CDsor ineffective hardware. Also early CD players were much more prone to laser lock, the CD equivalent of a record stuck in a groove, than later players. On the other hand, I still use a sony player, vintage around '87 or '87, that's handled everything I've shoved down its throat ever since. Also most CD players today can handle CD-R and CD-RW discs, which the older ones couldn't. A few modern ones can also play MP3s recorded onto CDs, whic most new and all old ones couldn't.

Did you know they had laptop computers in the '80s? I just watched an episode of 227 in which they gave Brenda a laptop computer as a h.s. graduation present.

I had a PC in the '80s - I never noticed or realized they had laptops back then -I just learned something.

What were laptops like in the '80s? I never had one.