Hah we had this too in Holland. Except it was called Kermit, the phone company actually paid millions for the Kermit the frog trademark. Eventually they renamed it to Greenpoint because the brand was so costly.
It was only around a few years until it was made obsolete by mobile phones which became small enough to fit in a pocket too. But it looks like it lasted a lot longer than the UK variants of this system did. I think this is because the mobile networks were way too costly at first. Kermit was the poor man's mobile.
The hardware was also different, Kermit used pretty thin flip phones that, like Rabbit, were also very popular as home phones.
Makes one miss gen-- Internet when things could be named Kermit, Archie and Veronica without involving the vertically integrated marketing apparatus. (I forgot about Jughead)
"The name derives from the word "archive" without the v. Emtage has said that contrary to popular belief, there was no association with the Archie Comics.[9] Despite this, other early Internet search technologies such as Jughead and Veronica were named after characters from the comics. Anarchie, one of the earliest graphical FTP clients was named for its ability to perform Archie searches." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_(search_engine)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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...
If you drive through a lot of small towns in the American west (east of California, such as Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Northern Arizona/New Mexico) you can often find some real fascinating relics of time like this. Depending on the area you get a little different era. In the southwest you can find a lot of cool stufef from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and early 80s. Up north is more 80s and 90s and early 00s.
One I really enjoyed seeing is a little ghost "town" in Southern Idaho that I had a blast exploring a couple years ago. It was a gas station, a restaurant, and a couple of houses and a small warehouse off the interstate a bit. It went out of business decades ago and was abandoned. It's remote enough that vandalism has been minimal (though certainly existent), so some things look fairly "pristine" the way they were last left. Seeing the desk in the office, with filing cabinet and desktop corded phone was a real nostalgia kick. There was a box that had clearly been picked through that I'm sure would have contained a lot of treasures. I found a barely readable instruction manual for a dot-matrix printer that would have been neat to see. You do have to be very careful because there are lots of sharp object galore, especially broken glass.
Local "wildlife" has also been in and out once the door stopped staying closed, but for the most part it is just scratch marks (that could have been done by dogs or cats). The bathroom is a toxic bio-hazard though, so don't go in there. People clearly kept using for many years, long after the water was shut off.... Overall was a really fun experience. If you decide to explore though, be aware of where you go because a lot of old-looking stuff that might seem abandoned, actually isn't (it just hasn't been maintained), and usually the owners aren't too welcoming of trespassers.
Little town of Washington Iowa has a closed cafe, Wingas, that was a 40's-style cafe (actually opened in 1940) that simply closed their doors in 2018. When the old couple retired they just locked the doors and went home. And there it sits.
You can see the napkin dispensers on the tables, the dishes on a shelf behind the counter. The colorful booths and light fixtures, a little dust but it's been airless and closed up. After 78 years in operation. A lot of nostalgia there.
Toilets are an interesting invention. It seems like we have an instinct to want to shit in the same place every time. Toilets are one of those old inventions that I can't imagine ever uninventing. The people who are around 500 years from now will still want to shit in the same place every day. I suppose when we were nomadic then we'd designate a corner of the cave for all of us to go shit in. Maybe the instinct has lasted so long because it's so closely related to disease. For example, our instinctual hatred for the smell of shit is highly functional at disease prevention. Perhaps the desire to shit in a designated corner, away from our usual activities, has a similar functional basis. (I don't know enough about evolution to know whether I'm, well, talking out of my ass.)
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.
Why is that weird? HN is a global community, and antiques are something that exist pretty much everywhere on Earth, people who are interested in them also exist pretty much everywhere on Earth. It's hard to even think of a more universal and culture spanning topic than antiques. I would think it a lot more weird if only people from the UK cared and commented about TFA.
Nevertheless, if you think it's wrong and only people from the UK should read and/or comment about a story from the UK, how do we accomplish that? Should we start putting country code tags on all of the posts, so that way only people from specific countries read and comment on them?
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.
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.
The name "Rabbit" almost got genericized - I heard DECT phones being referred to as "rabbit phones" just this year.
DECT in general (the successor to CT-2 which Rabbit used) is still going strong, though in some bubbles people are shocked to hear anyone uses anything other than a mobile phone.
DECT still has its uses. I've encouraged more than a few people to buy multi-handset base units that have Bluetooth built in for elderly parents (mine is Panasonic; they call it Link2Cell). Leave cell phone in kitchen (or wherever base is) to charge, carry a DECT handset on you at all times. If you fall and break a hip, you're never without a phone. It can make and receive calls from two different cellphones.
> DECT in general (the successor to CT-2 which Rabbit used) is still going strong, though in some bubbles people are shocked to hear anyone uses anything other than a mobile phone.
A lot of modern baby monitors use DECT. Works much better than the old timey one-way radio type too, You'll get alerted if the connection drops, and on a lot of models you even get two-way communication.
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.
In Germany, many people love routers from AVM called “Fritz!Box”. They all can act as a DECT base station to use with either normal landline or Internet telephony.
AVM also has a line up of smart home devices based on the DECT standard that work in conjunction with their routers.
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.
In case a non-freq-wonk comes by: This a callback to the mm wave part of 5G. It's signal covers an area so small, you can quickly exit it at a walk. Mobile PR says it's awesome while you're in it.
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.
Actual street furniture on a street should probably be put in a museum, as streets are absurdly cluttered with posts, lights, cables, signage and adverts, each of which is terribly important to someone, but which adds up to oppressive distraction.
Worth mentioning for all those that wondered why this didn't take off like the mobile phone network, proper... You could only make calls, not receive them and coverage was limited. I grew up in Manchester and remember seeing the base stations about but hardly anyone used them (10,000 subs was the max accroding to Wikipedia)
Yes you could only use them at hotspots like train stations and shopping malls.
Technically they could receive calls, but because that would only work in range of a hotspot, few operators offered this function. There was too limited radio spectrum to offer service across a wider area (reutilisation of cells not practical).
In some cases the phones had a built-in pager to provide some form of reachability.
I didn't live in the UK in the 90s, but if beepers/pagers were as prevalent there as they were in the States, that's not such a hinderance, and maybe still easier than finding a payphone to return a page?
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! :)
In France it was branded Bi-Bop and ran from 1991 to 1997; many public places had the stickers to identify where service was available. Apple even had a Bi-Bop modem to go in the PowerBook laptops. Futuristic at the time but pricing pretty much kept it from getting much traction.
I think it's a combination of slang for talking, the association of rabbits with rabbit-ear TV antennae, and the fact the parent company was Hutchinson.
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.
Rumbelows went bankrupt in 1995 apparently. I was a kids and it sticks in my mind as I used to get my mum to take me into the electrical shops after school as a treat and they had a proper fire sale with everything being sold off cheap.
I find those liquidation sales quite depressing now but at the time it stuck out as being really exciting and we got a stereo quite cheap.
Readit News
It was only around a few years until it was made obsolete by mobile phones which became small enough to fit in a pocket too. But it looks like it lasted a lot longer than the UK variants of this system did. I think this is because the mobile networks were way too costly at first. Kermit was the poor man's mobile.
The hardware was also different, Kermit used pretty thin flip phones that, like Rabbit, were also very popular as home phones.
"Kermit was named after Kermit the Frog from The Muppets, with permission from Henson Associates." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_(protocol)
"The name derives from the word "archive" without the v. Emtage has said that contrary to popular belief, there was no association with the Archie Comics.[9] Despite this, other early Internet search technologies such as Jughead and Veronica were named after characters from the comics. Anarchie, one of the earliest graphical FTP clients was named for its ability to perform Archie searches." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_(search_engine)
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)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_(protocol)
Was it broadcast there in the 1970s?
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).
One I really enjoyed seeing is a little ghost "town" in Southern Idaho that I had a blast exploring a couple years ago. It was a gas station, a restaurant, and a couple of houses and a small warehouse off the interstate a bit. It went out of business decades ago and was abandoned. It's remote enough that vandalism has been minimal (though certainly existent), so some things look fairly "pristine" the way they were last left. Seeing the desk in the office, with filing cabinet and desktop corded phone was a real nostalgia kick. There was a box that had clearly been picked through that I'm sure would have contained a lot of treasures. I found a barely readable instruction manual for a dot-matrix printer that would have been neat to see. You do have to be very careful because there are lots of sharp object galore, especially broken glass. Local "wildlife" has also been in and out once the door stopped staying closed, but for the most part it is just scratch marks (that could have been done by dogs or cats). The bathroom is a toxic bio-hazard though, so don't go in there. People clearly kept using for many years, long after the water was shut off.... Overall was a really fun experience. If you decide to explore though, be aware of where you go because a lot of old-looking stuff that might seem abandoned, actually isn't (it just hasn't been maintained), and usually the owners aren't too welcoming of trespassers.
You can see the napkin dispensers on the tables, the dishes on a shelf behind the counter. The colorful booths and light fixtures, a little dust but it's been airless and closed up. After 78 years in operation. A lot of nostalgia there.
edit: Oh shoot, I'm guessing from your handle your a nelson from Holden :D. I'm sure your familiar with Rockland.
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.
Nevertheless, if you think it's wrong and only people from the UK should read and/or comment about a story from the UK, how do we accomplish that? Should we start putting country code tags on all of the posts, so that way only people from specific countries read and comment on them?
DECT in general (the successor to CT-2 which Rabbit used) is still going strong, though in some bubbles people are shocked to hear anyone uses anything other than a mobile phone.
A lot of modern baby monitors use DECT. Works much better than the old timey one-way radio type too, You'll get alerted if the connection drops, and on a lot of models you even get two-way communication.
And of course I bring an old phone just for the fun of it.
AVM also has a line up of smart home devices based on the DECT standard that work in conjunction with their routers.
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.
[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.
In case a non-freq-wonk comes by: This a callback to the mm wave part of 5G. It's signal covers an area so small, you can quickly exit it at a walk. 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.
Technically they could receive calls, but because that would only work in range of a hotspot, few operators offered this function. There was too limited radio spectrum to offer service across a wider area (reutilisation of cells not practical).
In some cases the phones had a built-in pager to provide some form of reachability.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CT2
And Rumbelows is another blast from the past. Is that still around?
From rhyming slang “rabbit and pork = talk” apparently.
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/rabbiting+on
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!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGNojF9qKS0&pp=ygUUY2hhcyBhb...
> Rumbelows had been losing £12 million yearly, and had never made a profit in its 24 years of existence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumbelows
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
I find those liquidation sales quite depressing now but at the time it stuck out as being really exciting and we got a stereo quite cheap.