Pager hack faxed things up properly, again, and again, and again Ah, dear reader, how nice to meet you once again at the water-cooler analog The Register likes to call Who, Me? where we admit our past errors without fear of judgement. OK, maybe a little judgement. For your consideration this week, meet "Jack" who spent some time in the 1990s working for a large insurance broker – the type …
Whatever happened to Wang? I seem to remember - although the passage of time has not been kind to my memory, and I can’t find any hard evidence of this - that they were very proud of their customer support. So much so that in the early eighties they ran a series of adverts (for which I can no longer find any proof) claiming that “Wang Cares”
Probably just a false memory. But still. A fond one.
As to pagers and fax machines, I don’t know what happened to mine either - but I’m fairly sure that I can still put my hands on a fax modem (and what fun it was writing configuration scripts in the Hayes ‘language’).
Whatever happened to Wang?
To take your question rather more literally than perhaps you meant, DDG just found a website with this beautiful phrase:
OK, gang — here it is, without apologies: A place to give and get information on the unkillable Wang® VS™, a line of computers that has persisted for over 32 years in this confused world of unix and client/server experiments.
I worked for Wang from 1985 to 1994 so can answer both questions.
The company founder, Dr An Wang, put too many of his cronies in positions they weren't up to. He also wanted his older son, Fred, to take over but Fred wasn't interested. As a result, the company missed the switch to open systems. There was also insufficient marketing input to R&D which was happily making solutions for questions that hadn't been asked. So sales dwindled until the company went into Chapter 11 from which it never really recovered. UK staff levels dwindled from a peak of 1250 to 250 when I left. The UK decline wasn't helped by the appointment of a marketing manager who wanted telesales to be low volume, high margin when the whole industry shifted to high volume, low margin but his previous experience had been selling advertising.....
The US support operation was named Wang Cares and we had to explain to them very gently why they couldn't call it that here. It didn't stop one of our customers referring to the hardware as Wang Kit.....
From what I've been told, there are a series of alternative routes.
Ideally marketing hear what users need/customers want (not the same thing of course), feed it back to development, who try to provide this.
More often marketing imagine what the customers might want/ or/and hear about the latest new shiny and ask development for this.
Sometimes development/ C Suite come up with what they imagine the next new essential thing will be and tell marketing to get on with it. This IMHO appears to be the Microsoft way- ever since they nearly got burnt failing to spot the internet's importance.
FOSS appears to be a different route altogether. With the devs creating what they want to, which may or may not be what users want. And if it's not what some other devs want they may create a fork- irrespective of whether the public users want that.
At one point I had the job of writing modem firmware. It ran on an embedded 6502 and I wrote it in C with the Hayes commands interpreted by Flex, all cross-compiled from my 486DX2.
The fun part was that when it came to testing against as many different existing modems as we could lay our hands on (interoperability yer know), I found that not one of those modems met the CCITT specs; every single one of them was buggy. No wonder dial-up comms were unreliable
I'd almost completely forgotten about Hayes modem commands until a few years ago, when the scam/telemarketing calls on our landline became a near-hourly menace. (In the US, telcos profit from these and are disinclined to stop them. I don't know if that's an issue elsewhere.)
To my surprise, I found that I still had an old PCI 56K hardware modem, with the ability (among other things) to scan Caller ID data. Combine with a bit of C code, a check against the NoMoRobo database, and those calls got one ring and then were disconnected. (I played with having them responded to with a fax tone, but that didn't seem to help.)
It seems to me that having a PC (or, say, Raspberry Pi) be able to interface with phones, either landline or cellular, ought to be a straightforward thing, not requiring one to have kept some obsolete kit for ~20 years. Perhaps it is, and I didn't find the "current" solution. Admittedly, once I found one that worked, I didn't look much further.
My favorite off-label modem use: as a primitive speed-dialer.
1987. We badly, badly wanted tickets to the upcoming Pink Floyd concert. In those pre-Internet days [1], the way to get them was by phone. Problem: world+dog wanted the same thing we did, so getting through was a matter of blind luck. So we all sat at our phones, dialing and dialing and dialing.
Unlike my friends, I had a computer -- my first, an Amiga 1000 -- and so, an optimization was available. I got into the terminal program and used the modem to dial the ticket company's voice line [2], prepared to pick up the phone and then type <space> to make the modem hang up, should I actually get through. I got a busy signal of course, but then it was a simple matter of "a/" (which meant "redial the last number"), wait for busy, <space>, repeat. For at least a couple of hours.
That shortened the retry interval a lot, vs manual dialing -- and so, I figured, greatly improved my chances. Even so, it wasn't me who finally got through, but one of the others who, all that time, had been redialing the hard way.
Not only didn't I ever connect, but in all those hundreds(?) of attempts, I only once or twice got a normal busy signal. The rest of the time it was fast busy, which meant upstream network congestion -- that's how swamped the system was.
[1] Yes, I know. I'd even heard tales of it. But as far as the general public were concerned, including my long-out-of-university self, it might as well not have existed.
[2] I can't recall whether that was still BASS (Best Available Seating Service) or whether they were already Ticketmaster by that point.
"I can't recall whether that was still BASS (Best Available Seating Service) or whether they were already Ticketmaster by that point."
Jerry Seltzer's BASS was "Bay Area Seating Service", from 1970. The Aussie BASS "Best Available Seating Service", later called Ticketek, came later ('79?) and was derived from the Yank version. Yes, the Jerry Seltzer of Rollerderby fame.
Ticketmaster started in '83, and had a licensing agreement with BASS ... they never actually took over BASS.
The Bay Area BASS was bought out by Advantix (of Los Angeles) in late '97.
Source: I did computer & comms work for all of the above. Dates from memory. Have a beer for the reminisce.
The BASS I'm referring to wasn't either of those. It operated in (at least) Southern Ontario, and perhaps more widely in Canada, but I wouldn't know about that.
I had no idea there were other BASSes, so thanks for that.
The thing I never understood was how the modem in my PowerBook, way back in the day when a hot PowerBook was packing a 33MHz 68030, was capable of 14.4kbps as a fax but only 2.4kbps as a modem. Which made it fine for plaintext email and telnet but not a lot else.
Officially it was the International Consultative Committee for Telephony and Telegraphy but in French which accounts for the order.
But, according to a friend who was European Support Manager at Hayes and on the committee, it was the Cosy Club for International Talk and Travel.
The last time I had one of these doohickies on my belt was 1998, and was never so happy when I took it off for the last time, and left it on the owners desk, that 25th anniversary will be coming around soon! And as for FAX, I put them in the same hopper as printers... The devil's devices! To put it nicely ;-}
We had "the phone of doom". When a machine was on a long term test someone was given this phone overnight, the closer to work you lived the more often you had to take it. If the machine went wrong the phone rang and you had to go in to fix it and start it up again.
Always a stressful night (and unpaid) but luckily I lived a hour away so only had it rarely and doom never struck me.
Faxes are/were vaguely useful (if only for sending customer drawings through about 6 times to blur the details, then claiming this is what we recieved when we screwed something up)
Printers should burn in hell.. along with the creators of their device drivers.
Flames..... for obvious reasons
Faxes were useful when companies actually had customer service departments. A fax couldn't be ignored in the way that an email could, and you didn't have to sit on hold for two hours to tell them of your dissatisfaction with their crap service.
But then they discovered fax direct to PC, which was easier to ignore than a sheet of paper, followed in short order by getting rid of fax numbers and indeed contact details (and customer service depts) altogether, or hiding them behind lots of obfuscation and dark patterns. I miss those days.
Exactly! Once I had a cable TV installation crew break a transom window in my flat (the guy got shocked and flew from the ladder into the window) They said they would get in touch to fix it and I tried contacting the company several times being told over and over that they would "look into it".
I got fed up and one morning faxed the company's CEO complaining about it and had a (his?) secretary call me that same afternoon scheduling a glazier's visit the next day.
"getting rid of fax numbers and indeed contact details (and customer service depts) altogether, or hiding them behind lots of obfuscation and dark patterns"
Which for me, as a customer, is a cue to not consider them as a potential supplier, or consider taking my business elsewhere if they're an existing supplier.
Fortunately I'm in the lucky position of mostly dealing with small, committed suppliers.
One day, many years ago, I left my pager in my car. The car was broken into and the pager and one or two other items were stolen, including an early mobile phone. I called the police and gave them a list of the items, and also told them the number to activate the pager. Two hours later, I got a call from the police. They'd apprehended some suspicious lads, and one of them was carrying a little black item.
"So what's that then?" says Mr Plod.
"Ah", says lad, "that's a pager, and it's mine."
"Oh really?" says the cop. Rings the number I'd given him and asks for a test message to be sent. Pager vibrates....
The phrase "caught bang to rights" springs to mind. Unfortunately, they had already offloaded the mobile phone and other items and denied any knowledge of them :(
I had one of the f***ing things back in the early 2000's for a while.
One day I was at a customer's site trying to fix a broken Windows server. The entire company of about 100 people was dead in the water without this server. Needless to say there was a lot of pressure to get the thing up and running. The owners were pacing back and forth behind me, hoping to get it fixed fast.
My pager started going off repeatedly. By about the 6th time it went off (in less than 10 minutes), I calmly got up and headed for the front door of the office. The owners started to panic, thinking that I'm leaving, but I calmly opened the front door, and tossed my pager into the middle of a busy 4-lane street, then came back and sat down again at the server console. One of the owners broke down into hysterical laughter.
When I got back to the office I explained that my pager had an accident. I said that it "accidentally flew off of my belt and into a busy street" They got the message, and I didn't get another one.
There's the old adage "if it's not broke, don't fix it". Old tech is still used in some places because it still performs the task originally specced, bugs have been worked out, limitations learnt, workarounds developed, etc. New systems take ages to properly bed in, something you want to avoid in say an A & E department.
There's also sometimes curious external factors. Legally, a fax of a signed document is as valid as the original. There was a couple of decades before a modern equivalent was legislated for (digital signatures) - a scan of a document sent by email whilst being physically equivalent to a facsimile isn't legally.
Then there's a security aspect, and emergency protocols that haven't been updated. In the beginning of the corona pandemic, German health authorities were receiving data via fax...
"if it's not broke, don't fix it".
Yeah, that's just fine. Until you have to move files from a 1994 Win95 PC to a brand new (2020) Win10 PC for an accountancy practice, and you realize the ONLY medium that's usable is a 3.5" disc, using a USB external floppy drive on the Win10 box. For 26 years worth of data.
Darn straight they did my taxes for free that year!
"and you realize the ONLY medium that's usable is a 3.5" disc, using a USB external floppy drive on the Win10 box."
I'd have pulled the hard-drive out of the Win95 box and installed it into an external HDD case, and then plugged that into the Win10 box. That's assuming the Win95 machine didn't have ethernet of some description ... or ethernet couldn't be added fairly painlessly.
There are spectrum analysers from last millenium that can only write to 3.5" floppies, and do so in a proprietary binary format. The converter software was designed for Win95 and won't run under 64 b windows. My colleague uses a Win XP VM, but I found the software worked fine under WINE in a Debian VM. USB floppy drives are finally useful for something.
That's what happens when a cheap manager buys test equipment that was end-of-life 25 years ago. And it's still in use now.
Pager messages get through when SMS get backed up. I worked for a power company and one of the managers was being chewed out about not responding to a major storm. He had a work phone, so they used SMS for him. Us plebs on call played pass the parcel with a pager. While getting chewed out the storm alert/call in arrived. After that all the people that needed to respond got pagers.
At one stage I had two phones of doom for volunteer emergency services (one for a leadership position and one as duty officer) and a pager (for the power company). Don't miss being on call, but the double time on a Sunday for storm was quite nice.
Technically illegal in some countries to monitor pagers, but I've -- heard from a friend -- that certain software is available and can be fed with a scanner or SDR and messages flow in pure text. With private contact info for all sorts of people. So I've heard.
I watched two episodes of Secret Life Of Machines last night, as a matter of fact. I was sad thinking about Rex, as I watched. I'm glad to see Tim still making videos. The Secret Life Of Components is entertaining to watch. Watching Tim hold metal part together bare handed while he welds them was a hoot!
"... try again. And again. And again. And again. And they'll keep on doing that, relentlessly, until someone tells them to stop."
Hmm, maybe. Given wrong numbers are a thing, it's not a sensible default. The last time I tended a fax machine, perhaps 2009, it would only retry a small number of times. I don't remember exactly, but it was like three or five times, and the call report wasn't endless. Maybe Jack could have adjusted a setting or something? Tell it to stop before it starts.
The ones we had at my employer kept trying. I know this because we used that to stop sales people from using the spare desks we kept for experiments and to host contractors - they had a profound ability to ignore the signs that stated they were reserved.
As soon as one of these guys landed (recognisable because they wore suits and ties) and failed to ask for permission we'd work out who they were and what their contact number was, at which point one of the fax machines was put on duty. Of course with a proper fax in it (white sheets are harder to explain away as a "mistake"), but they dutifully kept at it. Pro tip at the time was to kill off the speaker, because hearing the angry rant emanate from the machine was a bit of a giveaway :).
Some, however, were always allowed on account of having the decency to ask if we didn't mind. Courtesy got a long way with our lot.
And beer :).
Back when cell phones only made voice calls my mobile phone number must have been fat fingered into a fax distribution list somewhere, and I would periodically get those calls with the beep. It was infuriating.
At some point I realized it wasn't going to stop retrying until it had gone through successfully. I hurriedly forwarded the call to the office fax machine and managed to catch it after a few attempts. I believe it was a travel agent or some other spam fax. An angry phone call later to the contact info on the fax and it was more or less sorted out.
It felt like the Star Trek movie where they got vger to finally transmit it's info and stop destroying the universe.
My faxophone seemed to be a magnet for Nigerian princes who needed my help to get their money out of the defense budget.
But the worst fax incident was when I used to work at home with a shared fax/voice line, and a supplier set their system to send invoices ... at half past three in the morning. After a few times of not getting to the machine quickly enough to receive the fax, I found out who it was. They got a proper bollocking the next day.
Back in the day I worked at a so called post 1992 university otherwise known as an ex Polytechnic. I had got myself promoted from desktop to a being a sys admin for the core administration systems. There was a plan to roll out oe of those hideous reporting packages to the departments. It was my job to do the installation so I could be reminded that not everything revolved around a handful of Sun boxes and a DEC Alpha.
I went to one of the designated departments and started to install it on the departmental admins PC. The PC was rather elderly and in need of some TLC which I did. Said admin was so pleased with my work as the local desktop support team were less than helpful that she insisted on buying me lunch. 22 years later we celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary.
I had an occasion when somebody had misdialled their fax and was trying to fax my phone at work.
After I had answered and listened to the telltale noises a few times I redirected my phone to the office fax machine.
A few minutes later the usually silent machine dutyfully started printing an purchase order that appeared to be to a builders mechants on the other side of the country.
The PO went in the floor bound round filer and I was able to remove the redirect from my phone.
I was expecting a lot of wasted paper - check - repurposed as wedding confetti - nope. Probably just as well, as paper confetti is frowned on now, even when it is professionally appropriate.
And if it's thermal fax paper, that's got some nasty additives. Referring to Wikipedia, it's liable to be "bisphenol A" (BPA) or "bisphenol S" (BPS).
When pagers were introduced at our power station for shift engineers they were not much loved or cared for.
At the end of a 2/10 shift the group of engineers retired to the local pub for a wet or two as usual then off home a lot more relaxed.
A little later the night shift received a call from the pub, "One of your old guys has left his hearing aid here' which turned out to be his pager.
Place I am currently working for replaced their Wang VS (6000?) about 10 years back as the operator was about to retire and there was no-one left in NZ who claimed any knowledge of how to administer one*. So instead we got a green fields Windows/VMWare rollout and for me a job offer to look after all the new kit at the end of the install (which I grabbed with both hands as a 10 minute commute to work is really hard to say no to).
The Wang itself got flogged off on TradeMe a couple of years later with the sales title of "Buy some Wang" for a couple of hundred NZ pesos.
* There were still a couple of crusty old blokes at various locations but they were either also close to retirement or had cushy jobs and no intention of moving.
>>> Ahhh Pagers
>>> Do you still get these in this day and age?
Yes, the NSW State Emergency Services and NSW Rural Fire Service (both volunteer organisations) use them for callouts. They use a separate network to the phones and SMS and hence are seen as being slightly more reliable. We also get the callout messages on SMS.
... Dr. Wang told a roomful of Silly Con Valley luminaries and hangers-on that he got over the locker-room derived humo(u)r of his name during his first year at Harvard, but we should feel free to snicker at it if we liked. In his opinion, it said more about the person doing the snickering than the owner of the name. He further said this applied to any name.
Smart man, Dr. Wang.
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