A smart phone from 1984
Have you ever done that thought experiment where you can travel back in time but you can’t take anything with you. All you have is yourself and your memories, there’s no Sports Almanac in this story. How would you go about using your knowledge of the future for financial gain?
One idea might be to ‘invent’ something before it was due to come out, of course if you did this you’d also be restricted to utilising whatever technology existed at that point in history. So for example you couldn't sell a word processor to Shakespeare.
But sticking with this idea, if you travelled back in time to the early 1980s and decided to make a Smartphone, what would it look like? Well it might look a lot like the STC Executel.
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UPDATE: This won’t make sense if you read it before the video, but yes the company who answered the phone at the end *were* the previous owners.
Comments (69)
Oh man, I hope you pulled out that battery before you put this phone back into storage wherever you put your historical artifacts.
My mother formerly worked as a VP for Heidrick and Struggles in their Chicago office. If it would be helpful, I would be happy to see if I can get some more information from her or her former colleagues on who this gentleman was and how these devices were used.
Neat item and video. Curious about one thing, did the US habit of interchanging hashtag and pound sign start due to sharing the "3" on the keyboard?
Someone from the US would have to chip in here - I don’t understand why a symbol with a defined name (# - Hash) would be called by the name of another symbol (£- Pound). It’s like calling the @ an asterisk.
I looked it up: Heidrick and Struggles is an executive search firm. Still a going concern by the looks of their website. I'm not expected a call from them, however.
this is one of my favorite vids from you. this and that beans bond beatles one
I wonder how many little text mode personal database systems, and probably corresponding file systems, were written in the 1980s? Seems like everything from Casio Databanks to toy laptops for kids(more in the early 90s) to this thing had one, and they all seem totally different. Also, as an electrical engineer myself, the printed circuit board assemblies in this thing look top notch and beyond most computers of this era. Note the current capacity enhanced traces which then have solder mask placed over them, in most be a very expensive processing step. Too bad they couldn't get a non-leaking battery. I doubt they came close to recovering the R&D costs for this.
The first thing I thought when seeing this video was "that looks a lot like the ICL OPD. I've never actually seen one of those. I just remember reading the review in the Dutch" Personal Computer Magazine "of the time. Guess I'm getting old...
I was too busy this last week to watch this video until now. What a fascinating device. I was hoping it was going to have some form of video teleconferencing as I know they had prototypes of that sort of thing back then. Still, neat machine. Pity about the yellowing and the leaking battery. If it weren't so expensive, I'd have you ship it to me and I'd restore it.
In all honesty it doesn’t really do very much nowadays other than function as an inconveniently large phone. I’ve got better phones, wireless, with caller ID and telesales interception. So the Executel is the kind of thing that’s just good for one video demonstration to document it for the future.
I had an ICL OPD and used it as my main house phone for years, long past when it should have been retired. It was ugly as hell but it worked *great*. I mainly used it as a very large address book, but it could also dial up bulletin board systems and so I used it for primitive forms of email long before the "internet" was really a thing. Thanks for bringing back memories!
Probably not worth it, but if you can set the calendar to 1929, the days of the week will line up with 2019.
I saved this one for Friday night, so I could have a zesty beverage in-hand. You didn't disappoint, Mat. And your face, when the odd-bod company name is given over the phone - you're a natural.
I was pleasantly wrong-footed by their extreme politeness. I can’t remember the last time a stranger was so nice to me.
Hope your luck will turn around with the horrible copywrite troubles with this new policy!
I don’t think it changes anything unfortunately - I’ll still have to keep demonstrations of things brief enough to fly under the radar - so a maximum of perhaps 5 seconds of audio.
A rebadged ICL One Per Desk was released in Australia in 1985. It was called the Telecom Computerphone. It was an even bigger flop than either the STC 3910 or OPD, and there was a rumour at one stage that Telstra (as Telecom Australia is now known) still had a warehouse full of unsold Telecom Computerphones as recently as the early oughts. They are so rare that I've only ever seen one once, and that was in 1986 when Telecom had a display promoting Viatel (Australia's version of Minitel) at my local mall.
In the UK, BT sold it as the Merlin Tonto.
Funny to see those mini cassettes. I only seen them used in a computer context on Philips P2000’s...
You've reminded me that there's a bit of information about them that I can pass on in the next update.
excellent detective work :D
Again a great video about an odd device. I loved the attempt to contact these people, what a pity you couldn't find out more.
That's a really interesting device. I know the dial-up features doesn't work now, but I figure hipsters will soon discover modems, so perhaps in 5-10 years we'll have ISP's come back and someone will relaunch that service.
I'm currently converting old VHS home videos to digital and I'm getting the same vibe watching this video. I love going through old devices and storage mediums seeing what is still there. At least here you don't have to stare at big hairstyles and ugly clothes for hours.
What a beaut! Totally right out of the Tyrell Corporation offices. And even though the phone calls at the end didn't yield an answer about the previous owners, it was absolutely this video's icing on the cake.
Wonder if it came from my old neck of the woods, given the entries for Crowborough, Uckfield (town signs so loved by graffiti artists) and Heathfield, all close together in Sussex?
I bought it from a trader in old tat in Edenbridge - I don’t know if that helps or hinders.
Thanks for showing this fascinating piece of tech :-) This is exactly that kind of telephone which could have made massive use of the ISDN network which launched in many european countries in the late 80s: Multiple digital lines, 64kbps real binary data transfer (without the need of a modem), parallel data transfer while using the phone, video calling and so on...
ISDN was much less common in the UK though. It became widely used for company phone systems and for video conferencing but has never been as common here as it has in Germany.
The profile for this fascinating device reminds me of the Atari 5200, another early 80s piece of vanguard gear. I appreciate the non-blocky, sleek but professional aesthetic.
I have a certain song bouncing around in my skull now. I won't get any sleep unless I dig out my old battered twelve inch and hit the right groove (or play the "special disco version"). I was half expecting to see The Moans bounce around the Executel to it till I remembered that you can't use the track, because rights and bollocks. I'd be happy to record a cover or pastiche for you, if you like. I miss them.
Mat, I actually think you got it right. Searching the Heidrick & Struggles list of offices produces several matches, including the one in Menlo Park: https://www.heidrick.com/Where-We-Work-List
Yes it’s been pinned on YouTube - perhaps I should add another comment to ensure everyone sees it.
Mat, as usual, fascinating and very enjoyable. I too enjoyed the reference to "Pop Muzik" by M. He had also had one other hit here in the US (although nowhere near as big) called "That's The Way The Money Goes". Which would be very apropos for a business that bought too many devices like this.
Brews on, earphone on , new video out , a great time of the week
It’s always a good time of the week for me too when a video is ready to show.
Have you ever done the Amstrad Emailer? (By the way, I'm stupidly pleased I immediately got the Pop Music reference.) :-)
No, but I’m thinking maybe I should - although I suspect that all the services are defunct now, so it would be more of a doorstop.
Great to see some unusual old tech. Great video even with the "M" joke. Had it been available it would not have looked out of place on the set of Gerry Anderson's UFO. Even if it was made in 1970 it was set in 1980.
I believe this could have been a massive success if they’d just added in the one feature that all executives would go on to use more than any other - Solitaire.
When you were needing to clean a phone from the 80's all I could think of was that the telephone sanitisers already left on the 'B' ark.
Worth it just for the M joke. Thanks.
Pop Muzik was the first thing that came to mind when you went through the list of international offices--then when you actually mentioned the song, I had an extreme lol attack. I thought that retrobright/brite only worked if you can leave the items out in the Texas sun all day--although it sounds like you've had some of that Texas weather there this summer.
The RetroManCave has come up with a way to achieve good results indoors - if you don't mind turning your house into something that looks like a meth factory https://youtu.be/05RSh3d-EuA
Do your think they got their design ideas from the 1980's Bang & Olufson Beomaster 2000 by any chance? https://beocentral.com/beomaster2000-1980s
I think designers always copy each other. There are some trends though that you would have to follow in order not to stick out like a sore thumb. Somebody decided that mid 1980s high tech should be black and louvred. That flat keyboard also has a bit of an Apricot Portable look to it.
I do vaguely recall the ICL OPD being the amazing concept of "A computer on every desk" how times have changed!
I worked at ICL in 90's and they were still using the DRS systems internally then. The OPD is a fascinating device, too, but they're like hens teeth now. There's a great video here: https://youtu.be/hZDVHi3UywM
It almost certainly was a phone owned by Heidrick & Struggles. Looking them up, they opened their NYC branch in 1957. In 1968 the firm established an office in London and has 50 offices over 6 continents.
Egon Zehnder employed Philip Vivian and now employ Andrew Vivian (assuming his son) . Bruce Beringer is a company also. Did I also see Korn Ferry in the video? They are all Global executive search firms. Whatever the hell they do.
Great video, Mat. Is there anyway of printing out the calendar? For the busy executive who is out and about, knowing what meetings to attend and where would be vital. (Dot matrix and daisy-wheel printers certainly existed back in 1984.) If you had to manually write out your meetings for the day if you left your office that would seem to obviate many of the benefits of this device. I well recall the first Personal Organizers -sometimes called PDAs - I had a Psion Organiser and later a Cassiopeia both of which could be made to synchronize calendars with MS Outlook - albeit a decade or so after the device you are demonstrating here. They did away with the need to keep a hard copy diary - provided you remembered to take them with you!
No there's no facility to add a printer - the only connector on the unit is for the umbilical to the secretarial unit. The brochure doesn't make any mention of printing either. I suppose this is where a Fliofax would come in - you'd have to copy the information across manually - but that's all you could ever do with a Filofax anyway.
Fascinating Mat. Makes me think it was the sort of thing https://www.alexcartoon.com/ would have had.
I've never seen that cartoon before. I'll have to look back at a few to get the idea behind it.
I bet the production cost of that thing couldn't been that high, remember that the C64 came out two years earlier and was significantly cheaper that than device. Heck, i bet the Speccy could give the STC a run for its money. A 8085 with a videotext chip and 32 kByte of memory is nothing to phone home for in 1984, heck, the first 128k Mac came out that year. What where they thinking?
My guess is Low Volume, High Margin. A supercar of phones aimed at the rich. No it didn’t work out, but that’s what makes it interesting. I doubt anyone would be as interested in seeing my Speccy 128.
I did laugh out loud.
Something very distinctive about that 80s industrial design, definitely on the watch list while I’m on coffee break later
I agree that 1984 seemed to be a peak year for techno wiz-bangary. It seems that this year was the peak point of technical ambition that perhaps wasn’t matched by practicality until technology finally caught up fairly recently. It’s interesting compare cars of this period that had fully digital dashboards, speech synthesis and fancy trip computers with cars in the 1990s that just had basic analog dashboards. It’s only really the last five years that all the 1984 promise has become mainstream and useful.
Great video! Interestingly the only company I could find nowadays that semi-correlates with that list of locations is the lawyers 'Shearman and Sterling' - https://www.shearman.com/contact-us - which would match with the diverse contacts such as Asda and so-forth.
Looks like Heidrick & Struggles might be it - supposedly an 'international executive search firm', which means either corporate headhunters or some kind of highly secretive intelligence agency. Offices all over the world, apparently. Hopefully packed full of similarly glorious, obsolete 1980s technology? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidrick_%26_Struggles
When editing the video together I realised that most of the companies I recognised would fall under the category of food & drink. Perhaps it was someone like Schweppes, Pepsi or Coke - that kind of area. Then again that would be a great front for a James Bond type of operation, just like Universal Exports.
"New York, London, Paris, Munich... everybody's talking 'bout Pop Music" - nice one! :D
Talk about?
Looks like they pretty much got it right, just too early. I have on my desk ( and sell to clients ) a Siemens DX800A which is a VoIP based handset with calendaring, contacts, basic info such a weather, and doesn't look too dissimilar. Its also a cordless DECT base station, and connects to a standard landline or ISDN ( I own and run an IT and comms company in the UK). Many of the handsets we offer have similar functionality, some with touch screens and full access to your email accounts. Maybe these STC people were time travellers :o) Looks better than the Amstrad E-Mailer too
The Amstrad Emailer came to mind too. I never owned one (obviously) but I do recall it cost money to do everything - send and receive(?) emails.
I really like the look of that keyboard but I can’t help but think that I would be constantly knocking the receiver off given its placement directly to the left.
The keyboard is surprisingly pleasing to type on - not that I got to type much on it though.
Thanks Mat. I really enjoyed this video. Best wishes.