Friday, September 3, 2021

Resourceful . . .

(from Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder)
". . .  When the solution came, it seemed obvious: Why not create a new gathering place before the old one went dark? To do this, Ghost Dancer couldn't just stroll into MacDonald's with a laptop. For starters, he didn't own a laptop, and WiFi hotspots wouldn't be ubiquitous for another a [sic] few years. So he jury-rigged an internet connection between the pay phone and the limited equipment he carried in the truck. "Freejack style," he called it. The setup relied on a Konexx acoustic coupler: a device that attached to a pay phone handset to receive and transmit analog data by holding a microphone to the earpiece and a loudspeaker to the mouthpiece. The other end of this coupler was plugged into a WebTV box, which had a built-in modem and offered basic browsing service; such boxes had started appearing in the mid-1990s, when computers were more expensive and less intuitive. To save space, Ghost Dancer had hung the WebTV from his CB radio. From there, it was connected to a thirteen-inch Philips television sitting on the passenger-side floor. After hours of fiddling with the setup, he fed thirty-five cents into the pay phone to get online, then logged into Yahoo . . . "



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