
Obsolete Technology in Unicode (2018) - edent
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/03/obsolete-technology-in-unicode/
======
CaliforniaKarl
Ha! I think I think I know why ⌕ is the symbol for “telephone recorder”.

It’s because of products like this: [https://www.summitsource.com/Eagle-
Telephone-Pick-Up-Coil-wi...](https://www.summitsource.com/Eagle-Telephone-
Pick-Up-Coil-with-Microphone-with-Suction-Cup-to-Record-Phone-Conversation-on-
Any-Tape-Recorder-with-35mm-Input-Amplify-Phone-Calls-P11741.aspx)

Instead of having a device sitting on the phone line, this just suctions on to
the handset, and uses a microphone to pick up the sound vibrations. Similar to
how a Jawbone headset works when clipped to your head!

~~~
Someone
_”this […] uses a microphone to pick up the sound vibration”_

It’s described as a _”Telephone Pick Up Coil with Microphone”_ , but I don’t
see how one would need both a coil and a microphone to pick up the signal, and
I would think a coil to be the more reliable method, so I suspect it only has
a coil, picking up the signal though electromagnetic induction
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_induction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_induction))

~~~
pwg
It likely has both.

Coil: to pickup via electromagnetic induction the voice sounds of the remote
speaker.

Microphone: to pickup the voice sounds of the local speaker (the person
holding the handset to which this device would be attached).

You likely would stick the device to the end of the handset with the speaker,
where the coil could pickup the relatively strong electromagnetic signals from
the speaker mechanism within the handset. But as that end would put it about
six inches away from the microphone portion of the handset, leaving little
electromagnetic induction possibility available, the 'microphone' part would
then be present to pickup the speaker directly.

~~~
kayfox
Its just an inductive pickup. In most phones some of your voice is fed back
into the earpiece, this is called sidetone and is used to make you self
regulate the volume of your voice.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidetone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidetone)

------
nineteen999
Some of these are a bit premature, surely they are on the decline but not dead
yet eg, LTO tape, Bluray for optical disc.

And I can assure you that pagers are very much alive and well, I personally
manage a technical team which uses paging technology to support 40000+
emergency services personnel. On our network they have coverage in many areas
where 4G or satellite alone can not/do not.

------
Animats
Icons have become a real problem. Today, the icon for everything should be a
smartphone. Which doesn't help. What would you use for "Save"?

Here's where it all started, with Susan Kare.[1] She designed the original Mac
icons. The original Windows icons. And is still at it.

Some icons have changed in meaning. The envelope icon on web pages used to
mean "Compose email to author of web page". Now it means "spam this page to
someone else."

[1] [http://kare.com/apple-icons/](http://kare.com/apple-icons/)

------
jcrawfordor
The fact that there's a unicode character for the entire word "Fax" is
intriguing. There is also a character "Tel," which makes me wonder if these
characters were intended to simplify the generation of e.g. fax cover pages by
using a single character to prefix the caller number information. That said I
can't find characters "From" or "Re" which would also be typical of that use.

~~~
gumby
This comes from legacy iconography of some old Japanese character sets. For
round trip compatibility and politics many seemingly pointless/redundant
characters survived into Unicode.

For example Greek capital alpha, Cyrillic letter A, and our Latin letter A all
look the same but each has its own code point. There’s a ton of that.

The origin of emoji is not Japanese computers but mobile phones (keitai),
which were quite advanced compared to what was available elsewhere until the
iPhone, hence a lot of weird and obsolete images that appear in them.

~~~
int_19h
As I understand, it's actually more or less the rule that same glyphs that are
semantically different - e.g. letters in different alphabets - are represented
by different codepoints. One exception was made for CJK, and that because they
were trying to fit everything into the 16-bit space that Unicode had at the
time. And that exception was itself extremely controversial.

~~~
gumby
Since I remember these debates as they unfolded: an existing code block for
various alphabets was typically used for, as I said, round trip compatibility
and what was seen at the time as reduced complexity for migrating old code.

“Han unification” was caught bitterly and the lack of alphabetic unification
was cited by opponents that the motivation was racist. I have a strong opinion
as to how Han unification should or should not have been conducted, if at all,
however I recognize the strength of the counter argument as well so to avoid
flame wars I don’t express my opinion.

Given that this comment is a deep reply to a reply and probably will never be
seen this shows how hot tempers flared at the time, and perhaps still do.

~~~
gumby
s/caught/faught/ but saw it mere moments too late to change

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masswerk
Some things missing: punch card, paper tape

(Having a range for punch patterns may be also nice, thus we could actually
list these kind of media.)

------
rbanffy
The other day I was looking for a computer terminal symbol. There is none.

~~~
smitty1e
How about the 3.5" floppy icon meaning "save" in so many applications?

The meaning of the symbol outlives the technology that begat the symbol.

~~~
evmar
Favorite obsolete tech story: a coworker's kid saw a 3.5" floppy on their desk
and said "Cool, you 3d printed the save icon?"

~~~
tokai
Its a meme to young people. They know what floppies are.

------
qubex
I smarted a little at the author’s invective against MiniDiscs, object of
meany a cherished teenage memory.

~~~
greggman3
Yea, the author is probably from the USA where MiniDiscs never took off.

In Japan they were huge! It's still frustrating that at end of their life some
of the final models would run for 230hrs on a single charge! I know of zero
mp3 players or phones that do that.

~~~
ficklepickle
I found my old minidisc player recently. It still powered on despite the
single ancient alkaline AA battery.

Good memories.

------
reaperducer
Nothing at all obsolete about fax machines.

A relative of mine tried to sign up for unemployment online yesterday. Her
state requires additional documentation. The only method offered by the state
was by fax.

I had to sign up for an e-fax account to help her send her paperwork in.
Hopefully it worked!

~~~
vidarh
What keeps annoying me is the number of times I come across situations where
people refuse scans but accept faxes. As if a fax they receive from me won't
be a scanned document passed to something like efax. Yet they cling to the
illusion that a fax is more authentic.

Another fun one I've come across is refusing to accept a photo of a document
but accepting a scan or faxed copy.

------
CaliforniaKarl
Just for fun, and for the record, on iOS 13.3.1 Safari, the following do not
display:

• The first in “Magnetic Tape”

• The last three in “floppy disks”

• The last in “CD and DVD”

• The last in “Pager and Fax Machines”

• The first two, fifth, seventh and eighth, tenth, and eleventh in
“Telephones”.

~~~
TwoBit
fwiw: Works fine on Windows 10 Firefox and original Edge.

~~~
gumby
Being a non-windows user I felt compelled to upvote your comment.

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indymike
My kids (ages 10-22) think the floppy disk icon means "save". They had no idea
that it was a floppy disk. Only the 22 year old was alive when floppies were
common. Perhaps the solution to no save icon is just to use the 3.5 in floppy
icon and call it save.

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Theodores
I like the nitpicking in the comments about what a MODEM is. Early MODEMs were
'acoustic couplers' and the terms should never be confused lest anyone not
understand the emoji.

Anyway there is nothing obsolete about any of these symbols. Context is
everything and sometimes you need diagrams of how things used to be done. The
symbols are handy for explaining the past.

~~~
gumby
The acoustical coupler was literally the coupler/adaptor to a headset; the
modem itself was an electronic package connected to the coupler (if needed).

I have used all manner of acoustical couplers including some built into
terminals, some attached to modems and some that could be connected to a modem
(like a Bell 103)

~~~
Theodores
The comments in the article did point this out, that the 'acoustic coupler'
and the MODEM were not the same thing.

I just found it funny that people should get so nit-picky about such things
when it is just a matter of emoji symbols and when there are so many other
conventions such as the save icon that we don't need to so triggered by.

Some people in the comments just could not let it go, they had to hammer on
about the difference between the MODEM and what an acoustic coupler was when
the world has utterly moved on and nobody cares.

------
droithomme
IMO it's a huge mistake to make Unicode a repository of random clip art. Of
course that ship has sailed and if there is a taco character then someone will
complain that there isn't a lasagna character and a broccoli chicken
character, and those will be added as well, until the entire character space
is full of clip art. And each person that got their favorite variety of
cupcake or flavor of ice cream included or the addition of a unique character
for gluten free vegan lasagna will proudly add to their resumé that they have
contributed to the Unicode standard.

~~~
samatman
Not counting the Private Use Area, there are 146,038 assigned code points.

This leaves us with 830,606 to work with. Is that really such a 'huge
mistake'?

~~~
pavlov
IMHO the main problem is that this ever-growing mass of random clip art needs
to ship on every embedded system that renders user-generated text.

Text rendering has become a lot more complicated and memory-intensive. Glyphs
used to be plain quadratic Bézier paths, but now there’s hundreds of full-
color images — and if your drawings don’t look as pretty as Apple’s
copyrighted emoji designs, someone will complain.

~~~
int_19h
The upside is that it significantly improved the adoption of Unicode in
general. On desktop and mobile devices, this mostly meant more glyphs -
"Unicode" fonts we had in common use in early 00s often wouldn't even have
many common alphabets, much less math and science characters. I remember how
some third party fonts specifically advertised full coverage of the BMP. But
these days, the default system font will usually have close to full coverage.

For embedded specifically, this forced Unicode into many systems that
previously didn't have it, and sucked at non-ASCII (or non-Western European)
text as a result. 10 years ago, I still had to use transliterated titles for
my music files to get the in-dash system in my car to show them properly; not
anymore.

BTW, I don't think emojis have to be full-color images. On some platforms,
sure. But e.g. on Win10, emojis are clearly vector images.

