In the course of various discussions involving RHS Wisley, it has come 
to my attention that my sister's mobile phone appears to be able to 
access the Internet somehow. Does anybody happen to know how that's 
possible?

Obviously the entire purpose for a mobile phone existing is to perform 
wireless communications. Back when my mum was a travelling engineer 
(many, many years ago), her works laptop had wireless Internet access. 
The way it did this was to basically use a normal dialup modem, but 
instead of plugging it in to a land-line, it effectively made a call via 
GSM.

It's still modulating the digital data into audible tones and sends them 
to a server somewhere which demodulates them into digital data before 
sending it over the Internet. It's just that the connection is GSM 
rather than copper.

Oh, and if you thought a 56k modem was slow, try doing it over GSM. Then 
you will know what "slow" actually is. :-P

I'm also aware that various wireless LAN technologies exist. But that 
requires you to either find a location with free Wi-Fi, or somebody with 
an unsecured wireless access point. Neither of these things are 
especially rare (although the latter is strictly speaking "theft"). But 
I'm not sure that's how the phone actually works.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> In the course of various discussions involving RHS Wisley, it has come 
> to my attention that my sister's mobile phone appears to be able to 
> access the Internet somehow. Does anybody happen to know how that's 
> possible?

  Cellphones send and receive digital data to/from the phone company.
What's so strange in supporting the reception of web pages in addition
to digitized voice?

  If you want the nitty gritty details, start here and navigate the links
as needed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 08/07/2011 9:27 AM, Invisible wrote:
> In the course of various discussions involving RHS Wisley, it has come
> to my attention that my sister's mobile phone appears to be able to
> access the Internet somehow. Does anybody happen to know how that's
> possible?

Magic! Before making an internet connection someone must kill a chicken 
and study its guts... ;-)

Mobile phones are no longer analogue and have been digital for some 
while. This makes it easier. And if you thought a 56k modem was slow 
then you should have been around when 9k6 bit/s was standard.

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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On 08/07/2011 09:40 AM, Warp wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> In the course of various discussions involving RHS Wisley, it has come
>> to my attention that my sister's mobile phone appears to be able to
>> access the Internet somehow. Does anybody happen to know how that's
>> possible?
>
>    Cellphones send and receive digital data to/from the phone company.
> What's so strange in supporting the reception of web pages in addition
> to digitized voice?

Not "strange" - obviously from a theoretical point of view this ought to 
be quite simple - I'm just surprised that the practical stuff required 
to do this has actually been implemented now.

>    If you want the nitty gritty details, start here and navigate the links
> as needed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G

Oh, is *that* what 3G actually means?

(I somehow came away with the impression that 3G was a meaningless 
marketing buzzword with no technical basis.)

Post a reply to this message

Stephen <mcavoys_at@aoldotcom> wrote:
> Mobile phones are no longer analogue and have been digital for some 
> while.

  The last analogue cellphone probably died a horrible death in the
mid-90's.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

On 08/07/2011 9:56 AM, Warp wrote:
> Stephen<mcavoys_at@aoldotcom>  wrote:
>> Mobile phones are no longer analogue and have been digital for some
>> while.
>
>    The last analogue cellphone probably died a horrible death in the
> mid-90's.
>

No, I'm sure it was put out to pasture. :-)

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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Le 08/07/2011 10:41, Stephen nous fit lire :
> Magic! Before making an internet connection someone must kill a chicken
> and study its guts... ;-)

I thought it was a goat that was to be killed, and the study of its liver.

Now, where are my bones of sheep and would you mind if I burn a hellfire
over here ?

3G: the G is for Generation, the third.

Nothing related to Dilbert 26 march 2010.

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Le 2011-07-08 04:49, Invisible a écrit :
>
> I'm just surprised that the practical stuff required
> to do this has actually been implemented now.
>

NOW!?!??  I realise you live in a backwoods third world country, but 
here in the civilized world, phones have been hable to browse the 
Internet since the early 2000s or so...

-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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On 08/07/2011 02:48 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:
> Le 2011-07-08 04:49, Invisible a écrit :
>>
>> I'm just surprised that the practical stuff required
>> to do this has actually been implemented now.
>>
>
> NOW!?!?? I realise you live in a backwoods third world country, but here
> in the civilized world, phones have been hable to browse the Internet
> since the early 2000s or so...

When I said "it works now", I didn't mean to imply that this happened 
recently. I don't follow mobile technology particularly closely; it's 
not something of great use to me. (Also, I'm presuming that this 
requires an extremely expensive phone with an extremely expensive 
service plan. That would be another reason why I've never heard of it.)

Post a reply to this message

On 07/08/2011 11:33 AM, Invisible wrote:
> On 08/07/2011 02:48 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:
>> Le 2011-07-08 04:49, Invisible a écrit :
>>>
>>> I'm just surprised that the practical stuff required
>>> to do this has actually been implemented now.
>>>
>>
>> NOW!?!?? I realise you live in a backwoods third world country, but here
>> in the civilized world, phones have been hable to browse the Internet
>> since the early 2000s or so...
>
> When I said "it works now", I didn't mean to imply that this happened
> recently. I don't follow mobile technology particularly closely; it's
> not something of great use to me. (Also, I'm presuming that this
> requires an extremely expensive phone with an extremely expensive
> service plan. That would be another reason why I've never heard of it.)
>
most plans have free phone associated with them now ... didn't pay a 
dime for mine, also my plan isn't that much (don't recall) as I don't 
use the cell for primary communication. I'm in rural area and just have 
the phone in case I get stranded on some out of the way country road ... 
particularly a good idea to have a cell during winter.

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On 7/8/2011 1:41, Stephen wrote:
> should have been around when 9k6 bit/s was standard.

That pretty much *is* standard for pre-"G" phones. Basically, voice 
conversations got squashed down to 9600Kbps for transmission, so it's very 
slow on the original GSM and AMPS phones.

Now, of course, you have much higher bandwidth.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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I've been replying to several posts here and elsewhere from my smartphone, even
from inside the bus, like this one.  Even older very cheap cellphones could at
least browse pages via WAP...

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On 08/07/2011 2:14 PM, Le_Forgeron wrote:
> Le 08/07/2011 10:41, Stephen nous fit lire :
>> Magic! Before making an internet connection someone must kill a chicken
>> and study its guts... ;-)
>
> I thought it was a goat that was to be killed, and the study of its liver.
>

Certainly, goats if you are in a low thaumaturgic area.

> Now, where are my bones of sheep and would you mind if I burn a hellfire
> over here ?



No I don't mind  and over by the CDs

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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On 08/07/2011 5:05 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 7/8/2011 1:41, Stephen wrote:
>> should have been around when 9k6 bit/s was standard.
>
> That pretty much *is* standard for pre-"G" phones. Basically, voice
> conversations got squashed down to 9600Kbps for transmission, so it's
> very slow on the original GSM and AMPS phones.
>

You live and learn. :-D

> Now, of course, you have much higher bandwidth.
>

:-D

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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On 7/8/2011 11:33, Stephen wrote:
> You live and learn. :-D

Even now, I think the codec runs at 14.4 or 32Kbps for normal voice calls. 
Data of course is faster, and there are usually codecs for things like MP3 
and MP4 that run a lot faster on data already in the phone.

You'd be absolutely amazed at how much stuff gets stuffed into a cell phone 
chip. Three or four different radio interfaces (i.e., GSM and 3G and 4G and 
CDMA and etc etc), multiple USB root hubs, H.264 and MP4 and MP3 and 
128-channel surround sound and multiple multi-gigahertz cpus and ....

I wouldn't be at all surprised if you could drive a decent laptop off what's 
in a cell phone chip these days.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 7/8/2011 11:27, nemesis wrote:
> least browse pages via WAP...

Technically, they could browse WML pages via WAP, which are nothing like 
HTML. (Or TCP even, for that matter.)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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Le 2011/07/08 12:05, Darren New a écrit :
> On 7/8/2011 1:41, Stephen wrote:
>> should have been around when 9k6 bit/s was standard.
>
> That pretty much *is* standard for pre-"G" phones. Basically, voice
> conversations got squashed down to 9600Kbps for transmission, so it's
> very slow on the original GSM and AMPS phones.
>
> Now, of course, you have much higher bandwidth.
>

9600Kbps?

I think that there is an extra "K" there... it's realy only 9600bps.

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On 7/8/2011 12:27, Alain wrote:
> I think that there is an extra "K" there... it's realy only 9600bps.

Indeed.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> You'd be absolutely amazed at how much stuff gets stuffed into a cell phone 
> chip. Three or four different radio interfaces (i.e., GSM and 3G and 4G and 
> CDMA and etc etc), multiple USB root hubs, H.264 and MP4 and MP3 and 
> 128-channel surround sound and multiple multi-gigahertz cpus and ....

> I wouldn't be at all surprised if you could drive a decent laptop off what's 
> in a cell phone chip these days.

  One argument that some of the moon hoax theorists say is that all the
technology in the lunar module can fit in a cellphone. Supposedly this shows
how "primitive" the technology in the lunar module was.

  That's one of the most idiotic arguments I have ever heard. We are talking
about the 60's here. If there was as much technology in the lunar module as
there is in a modern cellphone, that's actually quite an impressive feat for
the 60's engineers. What surprises me is not that technology has progressed;
what does surprise me is how advanced the technology was in the 60's, if the
claim is true. (In fact, I'm pretty sure that the claim isn't actually true.
They are making an exaggerated claim that, rather ironically, actually makes
the 60's technology look *better* than it probably was.)

  (Of course this is yet another example of dishonesty from the part of
the conspiracy theorists. They abuse the fact that the average person has
no knowledge about how efficient dedicated hardware can be compared to
generic non-dedicated hardware. I'm pretty certain many of these people
do understand this, but they still make the claim, just to have yet another
argument in their shotgun.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 9/07/2011 4:15 PM, Warp wrote:
>
>    That's one of the most idiotic arguments I have ever heard. We are talking
> about the 60's here. If there was as much technology in the lunar module as
> there is in a modern cellphone, that's actually quite an impressive feat for
> the 60's engineers. What surprises me is not that technology has progressed;
> what does surprise me is how advanced the technology was in the 60's, if the
> claim is true. (In fact, I'm pretty sure that the claim isn't actually true.
> They are making an exaggerated claim that, rather ironically, actually makes
> the 60's technology look *better* than it probably was.)
>

According to a quick reading, the LM computer had 36,864 * 15 bit words 
of ROM (actually hard wired) and 2,048 * 15 bit words of writeable 
memory (equivalent to RAM).

Say about 74Kb of ROM and 4Kb of RAM.  MUCH less than any modern 'smart' 
phone.

It had multiple purposes including running the auto-pilot and being used 
for navigation calculations.  It had concurrent tasks and time sliced 
amongst the highest priority ones.  Memory locations were re-used since 
there was so little available.

On the descent stage there were multiple data overloads causing the 
computer to be reset - while controlling the rocket, radar and all of 
the information displayed to the astronauts (apart from their own 
eyeballs).  It was restarted several times in the few critical minutes 
while they were in the midst of decelerating to land.

It had been designed and tested to do this if needed.

As amazing as the computer was for its time, I think the most incredible 
bit of engineering in the LM was the all important descent rocket 
engine.  It could be throttled and had to fire and shutdown for the 
de-orbit burn then fire again for minutes during the descent to slow 
down and land.  14 tonnes of spacecraft (less the ~8 tonnes of fuel 
consumed) brought to rest safely on the surface.

Post a reply to this message

On 7/8/2011 23:15, Warp wrote:
>    One argument that some of the moon hoax theorists say is that all the
> technology in the lunar module can fit in a cellphone.

All the computronium would certainly fit. The computers back then sucked.

I was thinking about it, and I realized the giant mainframe I learned to 
program on had 512K of memory to run the entire college, both administrative 
and teaching.  Back then I never really thought of it - you had the memory 
you had and if something didn't fit you made it smaller.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> I was thinking about it, and I realized the giant mainframe I learned to 
> program on had 512K of memory to run the entire college, both administrative 
> and teaching.  Back then I never really thought of it - you had the memory 
> you had and if something didn't fit you made it smaller.

  I still remember the time when 4 MB in a PC was a pretty decent amount
of RAM (and more expensive than 4 GB or RAM today). The notion of having
1 GB of RAM seemed completely unthinkable back then (there were no RAM
chips even *nearly* that big, no PC motherboards that would have supported
that much RAM with RAM chips of the time, and even if there had been, such
a motherboard would have costed a fortune, and the RAM itself would have
probably costed as much as 100 entire top-of-the-line PCs.) Today 2 GB of
RAM is a typical minimum configuration, and a chip of that size has become
ridiculously cheap (haven't checked, but probably less than half of what
4 MB of RAM costed in the 90's).

  OTOH games (which is usually the only reason you need that much RAM) look
slightly better than they did in the 90's, so it's warranted.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 10/07/2011 06:55 AM, Warp wrote:

>    I still remember the time when 4 MB in a PC was a pretty decent amount
> of RAM (and more expensive than 4 GB or RAM today). The notion of having
> 1 GB of RAM seemed completely unthinkable back then

I'm sitting a few feet away from an Amiga 1200, sold for approximately 
£300 (which was "worth more" 20 years ago than it is today), and 
advertised as providing "2048 K of RAM". Which, considering the 
Commodore 64 we bought it to replace, seemed like one hell of a step up! o_O

(On the other hand, *my* A1200 has been upgraded to 34 MB RAM. At 
considerable cost, I might add. I also installed a 850MB HD, which 
probably cost another £400 or so. And a CD-RW drive, which was 
probability similarly expensive. I still rememer the awe when I realised 
that with 34 MB of RAM, I could actually edit an entire 2-minute CD 
track *in RAM*!)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On 10/07/2011 6:55 AM, Warp wrote:
>    I still remember the time when 4 MB in a PC was a pretty decent amount
> of RAM (and more expensive than 4 GB or RAM today).

And I remember when you had to add an additional 384k to the 640k 
conventional memory to make it 1 meg. Now my laptop has 8 Gig

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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On 09/07/2011 04:25 PM, Darren New wrote:

> I was thinking about it, and I realized the giant mainframe I learned to
> program on had 512K of memory to run the entire college, both
> administrative and teaching. Back then I never really thought of it -
> you had the memory you had and if something didn't fit you made it smaller.

I wonder how many octets you can fit on one side of A4 paper? You could 
probably *print out* 512KB and not use all that many trees...

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On 7/11/2011 1:56, Invisible wrote:
> I wonder how many octets you can fit on one side of A4 paper? You could
> probably *print out* 512KB and not use all that many trees...

The source code to the OS was a shoebox full of microfiche.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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Le 2011/07/10 17:25, Stephen a écrit :
> On 10/07/2011 6:55 AM, Warp wrote:
>> I still remember the time when 4 MB in a PC was a pretty decent amount
>> of RAM (and more expensive than 4 GB or RAM today).
>
> And I remember when you had to add an additional 384k to the 640k
> conventional memory to make it 1 meg. Now my laptop has 8 Gig
>

I remember when having 48K of RAM was huge. I also remember an ad for a 
5Mb hard drive for $5000. It's size: 18.5" x 8" x 4.25". It had it's own 
power supply.

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Alain <aze### [at] qwertyorg> wrote:
> I remember when having 48K of RAM was huge. I also remember an ad for a 
> 5Mb hard drive for $5000. It's size: 18.5" x 8" x 4.25". It had it's own 
> power supply.

  I don't remember it, but I have been told that such hard drives used to
be the size of a fridge at some point. (And probably more expensive than
a car.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 12/07/2011 07:17 AM, Warp wrote:

>    I don't remember it, but I have been told that such hard drives used to
> be the size of a fridge at some point. (And probably more expensive than
> a car.)

I don't know about hard drives, but the old drum memories used to be 
huge, so I'm told. As you say, about the size of a fridge.

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On 7/11/2011 23:17, Warp wrote:
>    I don't remember it, but I have been told that such hard drives used to
> be the size of a fridge at some point. (And probably more expensive than
> a car.)

Drums were very big, as Andrew said.

Disk drives when I started were about 80cm wide, a meter or more deep, and 
about chest high. The disks themselves were maybe half a meter diameter, a 
third of a meter tall, had six platters (and top and bottom of course) and 
were heavy enough they were inconvenient to carry with one hand, altho you 
could lift them. Oh, and they held four meg. (We had two drives, a CPU, a 
printer, and one other thing I forget what it was, and each cabinet was 
about that big, except the printer was somewhat bigger because it had to 
hold the 132 paper and all, and the CPU had the card reader and keyboard on 
it as well as the front panel switches.)

Drives for a CP/M machine that could hold 8 meg were the size a color laser 
printer is today.

When the high school finally replaced the old NCR-50 mainframe (such as it 
was) with a PR1ME, the disk drive was in a cabinet literally as big as a 
fridge. However, if you opened it up, the cabinet was empty but for some 
wiring and a disk drive maybe 10cm high. The head of the department couldn't 
stop laughing for about 20 minutes.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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Le 2011/07/12 02:17, Warp a écrit :
> Alain<aze### [at] qwertyorg>  wrote:
>> I remember when having 48K of RAM was huge. I also remember an ad for a
>> 5Mb hard drive for $5000. It's size: 18.5" x 8" x 4.25". It had it's own
>> power supply.
>
>    I don't remember it, but I have been told that such hard drives used to
> be the size of a fridge at some point. (And probably more expensive than
> a car.)
>

That one was one of the very first ordinary consumer hard drives available.
It was colour and style matched for the Apple ][. It was made to stand 
on top of the Apple ][ case. Same width and hight. The other dimention 
matched the depth of the cover.

The ad put "More storage than you could ever use"... I have many 
individual files that just wont fit on that one.

Post a reply to this message

On 7/12/2011 17:23, Alain wrote:
>  I have many individual files that just wont fit on that one.

I remember when Myst came out on CD, I thought "Well, there's the end of 
pirated games. Where would you possibly put so much data?"

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

Post a reply to this message

Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> When the high school finally replaced the old NCR-50 mainframe (such as it 
> was) with a PR1ME, the disk drive was in a cabinet literally as big as a 
> fridge. However, if you opened it up, the cabinet was empty but for some 
> wiring and a disk drive maybe 10cm high. The head of the department couldn't 
> stop laughing for about 20 minutes.

  Maybe back then it was a questio of vendors thinking that customers would
think "if it isn't (physically) big, it can't be good".

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

On 13/07/2011 01:23 AM, Alain wrote:

> That one was one of the very first ordinary consumer hard drives available.
> It was colour and style matched for the Apple ][. It was made to stand
> on top of the Apple ][ case. Same width and hight. The other dimention
> matched the depth of the cover.
>
> The ad put "More storage than you could ever use"... I have many
> individual files that just wont fit on that one.

It probably *is* more storage than you could ever use... WITH AN APPLE 
][! ;-)

Post a reply to this message

On 7/12/2011 23:47, Warp wrote:
> Darren New<dne### [at] sanrrcom>  wrote:
>> When the high school finally replaced the old NCR-50 mainframe (such as it
>> was) with a PR1ME, the disk drive was in a cabinet literally as big as a
>> fridge. However, if you opened it up, the cabinet was empty but for some
>> wiring and a disk drive maybe 10cm high. The head of the department couldn't
>> stop laughing for about 20 minutes.
>
>    Maybe back then it was a questio of vendors thinking that customers would
> think "if it isn't (physically) big, it can't be good".

Yeah, we weren't sure what it was. There were wires running from the box to 
lights at various places on the front panel, so it wasn't like we had an 
entire rack with one U filled or something like that. I suspect it was 
indeed the marketing department.  I suspect you could have put four drives 
in and wasted about half the space with wires running to lights far from the 
drives, tho.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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