3 ms·

Also on HN today: Adding a USB Port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40833960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40833960 , http

• franga2000 2y ago
  Tinkering with payphones is a lot of fun! Some of the later designs were quite advanced - the ones I have can dial into the exchange with a modem to report detected faults, submit their earnings and even download the latest tariffs every night. This was all done on just the power from the phone line and with late 80s tech. The server software, that we're now trying to revive, has some kind of bespoke distributed database to sync between regional exchanges but also work independently of one another. [] And there are some many fun and stupid things you can do with them! We set up one at uni can tell you what's for lunch at the cafeteria, connect to a voice chat on Discord, print an LLM summary of your phone call on a receipt... [] For anyone for whom the above sounds familiar, no, it's not a Nortel Millenium, although we do also have two of those. They were made by Iskra Terminals from Slovenia (then Yugoslavia) and had this functionality at least 10 years before Nortel and the rest. If anyone is particularly interested in payphone shenanigans, shoot me an email (in bio)