My first home was built in 1970 and I rewired about 8 of those 4 prong jacks to RJ-11. Kind of funny to think about that the RJ-11s are now mostly obsolete. I think I still have a 4 prong to RJ-11 converter* left. Kept it as small and a weird curiosity.
Most likely bought at Radio Shack another Ubiquitous thing that is now fading away.
I removed almost every last piece of phone wire from my current house. Along with far too many old Coax cables. Though I still have a flat 2 wire antenna wire hooked up to my stereo. That I had to wire back together as it had a break in two places.
Speaking of Radio Shack, I was looking for images of the converter and saw this familiar package:
Archer brand, manufactured for Radio Shack.
This week I was in a conference room with 8 people ages 23 to 60 and some zoomer was under the table trying to plug in the conferencing device. He said it would fit. I told him there would be two ports one RJ-11 and one RJ-45, make sure to use the RJ-45 be. He had no idea what I was talking about, but neither did anyone else. Many of them are in IT or Engineering including a EE grad.
Not knowing the codes doesn’t mean much though. That wasn’t really common knowledge. I feel like I was lucky if people knew the difference between a telephone jack or network jack. I recall too many times describing the difference as a network jack or wire was roughly twice as wide as a standard telephone jack or wire.
Or a serial port. It used to be the universal port before USB, though most computers had only one that mostly was used for the mouse, so if you wanted to connect another device (often a modem in those days), you had to install an extension serial card. As a programmer, I loved them, serial connections were easy to code.
Yes, probably I’m not accounting for the fact that while I’m not in IT/Engineering I was in the Telecom industry off and on from 1992-2003. So I probably picked up more jargon than most.
About five years ago, I was subbing for a middle school computer class where all of the (fairly new) computers still had PS2 ports. Nothing to plug into them, of course.
Heck, I looked like gramps in that illustration when I was 40!
But, yes, people showed their age earlier in bygone days, but then, they often didn’t appear to age much from that point on.
My grandparents are prime examples. They looked ~75 when they were 60, but when they turned 90, they still looked 75. I can look at photos of them taken 30 years apart, and I see little difference.
I think a lot of that has to do with clothes/hairstyles. I have a relative who kinda resembled Gramps in that illustration when he was 50ish. Balding, white hair, mustache. He didn’t (and doesn’t , although he is now at least 70) look as old as Gramps in that illustration - but might have in a photo where he was wearing a vest ,dress shirt and tie while his wife was wearing a housedress with a printed bib apron.
Yeah, that’s why Loretta Young said she never changed her hair style. But she got bent out of shape when some channel (back in the old days of broadcast TV) wanted to replay old episodes of a show she’d made years before. She said the fashions she wore would age her.
Has all the old microfiche been digitized? I loved learning about microfiche from my degreed-librarian cousin who taught me a lot about life, but microfiche isn’t something I’ve needed since the mid-1980s, so, I don’t know. If I want to look up the Times Herald from 1948 in the St. Clair County library, I think I’m either going to have to pay a subscription to that newspaper, or maybe it’s still on microfiche if I drag my butt to the library. I’m conjecturing, though. Anyone in the know, know?
I remember those old 4 prong phone plugs from the movies. Back in the day, if you were really a big-shot, the waiter would bring a phone to your table at the polo Lounge or such and you could conduct business (yell at someone) over lunch. Total power status symbol.
I checked and it’s on Newspapers.com, but that’s paying subscription, too (though the front page does have a “try for 7 days free” I can’t comment on the ease or difficulty of canceling). I don’t see it on Chronicling America or the Digital Michigan Newspapers Archive. At least, Michigan was the first state that came up when I searched a state with that county and that name.
You may need to go to your library once and have a librarian show you their data base of resources and how to access then on line at home in the future.
I just did that last week and now can sit on my couch with my iPad and access a huge range of community newspapers. It was not a very obvious or intuitive process but once she showed me and I practiced it a few times with her standing by I know can read my local paper the day it’s printed without paying the outrageous on line subscription fee. Newspapers can choose to put on images of the page so it’s just like reading a paper while you drink your coffee or select text only articles. The papers are then archived and searchable through the library’s resources data base.
I pay for the New York Times daily and it’s worth it. My hometown paper is no longer written by reporters living in my hometown or printed here so I won’t pay 3/4th of what the NY Times costs for their 16 pages of homogenized pablum but at least this way I get a glance at what people are talking about. Good enough.
TL:DR, ask your librarian what papers you can read through them
In my case I asked a staff associate in my home branch in person “through the library website can I read the Lincoln Journal-Star at home on my iPad?” She said yes. I said, “can you show me how?. She was happy to.
We went over to a library computer and she walked me through it a couple of times til I had it down. I had to sign into the website with my library card number and then went to On Line Resources and then into a drop down menu to magazine and news resources. If she hadn’t been standing next to me to coach me I never would have found it. The process was pretty oblique unless you knew the magic words. I’m not at all tech proficient. It’s possible you could get the needed info talking to a librarian on the phone. I had to be there and do it in person to get the muscle memory.
This is exactly what librarians enjoy most, unlocking information for you. Just show up and ask.
