What’s your favourite ridiculous piece of 90s technology?

vidibit:

Thank you so much for the excellent question!! I’ve been meaning to answer this one for a while, so here goes.

My favourite ridiculous piece of 90s technology is PocketMail! It wasn’t that ridiculous at the time, but it’s definitely something that could have only existed in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I actually have a PocketMail device, an Oregon Scientific PM-32 that I found on the side of the road in a box full of broken landline telephones!

PocketMail devices were essentially very basic Personal Digital Assistants that allowed you to access your emails without having to use a computer with an internet connection! Here you can see the basic screen and buttons for composing, sending and receiving emails.

The PocketMail device is open. It resembles a small, handheld laptop computer. The upper portion of the device includes a green and black monochromatic screen with buttons on either side to send and receive emails and navigate pages. The lower portion of the screen contains a simple keyboard for composing emails. The device itself is rounded slightly and has a dark grey colour.ALT

But remember, this thing doesn’t have Wi-Fi – so how exactly can it access your emails? If you flip the device over, you’ll see a strange little speaker thing that flips out…

The same PocketMail device is closed, with its underside facing upwards. The underside of the device resembles a flat landline telephone handset, with a speaker on the left side to send audio and a microphone on the right side to receive audio. The microphone attachment is able to fold against the device in a closed position, or fold out away from the device in an open position. The microphone is currently closed.ALT
The same view of the underside of the PocketMail device, however the microphone has been opened outwards to be able to listen for audio.ALT

That’s an acoustic coupler! You had to hold the device up to the handset of a landline telephone! So if you had a PocketMail account (with a special email address ending in @pocketmail.com) and were away from your computer/office, you could simply dial the phone number for the PocketMail service on the nearest landline telephone, then hold the device up to the handset so that it can send and receive email data with the email server in the form of audio – and presto! You have just sent an angry last-minute email to your intern for neglecting to look after your Tamagotchi while you were on a business trip to sell Y2K survival kits.

But… what did it sound like? The phone service has long since been shut down after the rise of more capable and portable internet-connected devices, but if you press the little ‘Mail’ button on the top of the device, you can still hear the sounds of this poor, obsolete little thing trying to reach out and communicate in the only way it knows how to:

AUDIO WARNING: LOUD

Kind of creepy, isn’t it?