Get best of the week

Antiquities: Remote Work on 1998 Devices

A retro lover's blog is a strange place to react to current events. We need to wait twenty years, and then speak out. But the situation was not simple: for the second week now I have been sitting on (so far) voluntary quarantine, communicating exclusively on virtual work. Colleagues, especially sales managers, are having a hard time - they value personal contact, the ability to twist a button on someone else’s suit. And I'm fine: for the first time, my usual lifestyle has become the recommended norm. Fortunately, my work as a Ward worker, a typewriter on a cosmic scale, in principle, does not require a presence in the office. I am not a doctor or an expert on survival in a viral epidemic. All that is required of me in the current conditions is to keep my distance, not to panic, continue to work without discounts on the remote, and sometimes write articles about old pieces of iron.


Let's talk about old pieces of iron. In 2020, we have many remote work tools - from traditional e-mail, to very advanced instant messengers, high-quality web conferences, joint document editing with version control. Almost everyone has high-speed Internet access, allowing you to communicate in real time, at any time. We are not even confined to the workplace: all the same is accessible from a mobile device. 22 years ago, we didn’t have almost all of this and, frankly, if this spring had happened, we would have refused to cut off working communications, except for telephone conversations. But the technology already existed, albeit in its infancy-nursery! The late nineties - my favorite time from the point of view of a collector of retro devices.In those days, I would like to buy all the latest in the computer industry, but I could not afford them. Today I can, so let's turn on the “what if” machine (as inFuturama ) and try to pull modern ideas about remote work on 1998 digital technologies.

I keep a diary of a collector of old pieces of iron in a Telegram .

Computer and modem


I want to say right away that this post is not about trying to launch modern software and network services on the 1998 iron. This task is doomed to failure, and it is unlikely that you will have no other computer than a 22-year-old device. Rather, you will find a ten-year-old laptop in the bins, which, although slowly, is quite capable of working with modern software (for example, like my ThinkPad X301 and X200 laptops ). Imagine a situation where in the courtyard of 1998, you need to stay at home and work remotely, but you have (in some magical way) available a complete set of the most modern equipment with a common price tag for ten thousand dollars.


Let's start with the main tool - a personal computer. In 1998, with a high probability it is a desktop computer, but for the article I chose the ThinkPad 380Z laptop - simply because this exhibit of the collection had not yet been demonstrated before. The laptop is based on the Pentium II 233 MHz processor, in 1998 it was almost the top, incredibly productive system in conditions when the Pentium 90 was a good option. The laptop was bought by me two years ago for 350 rubles, its condition is not the best - there is no lid covering the hard drive compartment, the case is worn. In some ways, it is similar to the earlier ThinkPad 380E : thick body, heavy weight.


The best option would be a thin and relatively light ThinkPad 600, also released in 1998. But I already wrote about him , and in general, let's be (moderately) realistic. The ThinkPad 600 is a top picker, an extremely expensive model. If you are lucky, and you were given a laptop at work, then this will be a workhorse, moderately powerful, but without frills. Just such a ThinkPad 380Z is.


All the same, it was one of the most expensive laptops as of the fall of 1998. The price in the basic configuration is $ 2,500 (4,000 including inflation). A ThinkPad 600 with similar specifications cost $ 3,320 ($ 5,300), and for a reasonable price you could buy something based on a Pentium MMX with a frequency of 120 megahertz. The desktop on the “second stump” would then cost half the price of a laptop - $ 1,000 ($ 1,600) on the legendary Celeron 300 . We put the most modern operating system - Windows 98 was released in June 1998. And the office suite, of course, we have the same topic about work.


I did not change the configuration of the laptop: there are 48 megabytes of RAM (32 on the board, 16 more with an additional module) and a 4 GB IBM hard drive, which is very noisy, especially at home. A big advantage over 1997 was the introduction of a single USB 1.1 port. But it rather makes my life more convenient now, and not then, in the absence of peripherals and flash drives - instead of them are floppy disks and CDs (read only, without writing). For comfortable homework, add a mouse with a PS / 2 connector, and in general we are ready to work remotely!


No, not ready. Need a connection with the outside world. In 1998, the modem Internet rules the ball, usually at a speed of 33.6 kilobits per second. The V.90 and V.92 protocols, providing (in fine weather) up to 56 kb / s, have not yet been established: they must be supported by both the modem and the Internet provider. There is no built-in modem in the ThinkPad 380Z, you need to connect either an external one via the serial port or use a PCMCIA card. Portability is of little interest to us now - we work from home. But for convenience and minimizing the number of wires, we choose a compact solution: a 33.6 modem with an adapter for a telephone cable.


The low speed of the modem Internet is the main limitation in our hypothetical situation of remote work in 1998. At "33.6", the real speed of transmitting compressed data will be 3-4 kilobytes per second: enough for the web, mail with light attachments, and communication in ICQ. In 1998, no one sits on the Internet "constantly", in the user scenario, the connection is widespread at night, when the tariff is cheap.


We need to work in the daytime. At the end of December 98th, the Zenon Internet service provider took $ 1.8 per day of modem Internet access (2.86 taking into account inflation, about 220 modern rubles). A full-time job - 8 hours - with a constant network connection (meaning real-time interaction within the team) would cost $ 14.4 ($ 23). Multiply by the number of quarantined days and the number of employees: 5720 modern dollars per week of work for a team of 50 people.


There is reason to save, even if you are a large company and are raising your multi-line access to the network. The ability of many people to work through the Internet in 1998 is limited by the infrastructure: providers simply would not have enough lines for a large number of people who want to connect. But in the realities of those times, constant access to the network, as we are used to, is not really needed. A modem connection allowed voice communication over a network, but ate all the bandwidth and was not very reliable. In October 1998, PC Magazine made a lot of material about VoIP technology, but there it is more about gateways between a regular telephone network and a corporate LAN, for example, to reduce the cost of long-distance calls. The hardware gateways presented in the article support up to 12 digital lines. If you are a large corporation with a bottomless budget,in 1998 you can also organize fully digital interaction with remote employees: your own dialup, VPN, voice communications, data exchange via mail or a file server, instant messages. But that would be a very expensive pleasure.


Moreover, do not dream about real-time video calling. In 1998, a webcam can be bought at the nearest electronics store. But a typical method of broadcasting images on the network is a static picture, updated once a minute. In my experience, videoconferencing was relatively unreliable until the early 2010s: back in 2014, the typical method of communication was not even a fully digital service, but a conference call over telephone wires to avoid lags. And only a voice. Conclusion: communicating with colleagues using video and voice over the Internet is too smart for 1998. Therefore, we will talk on the phone. But wait, the phone is busy, there is a modem! We need a mobile phone.

mobile connection



Another big expense item. The GSM communication standard was still a novelty at that time, analogue radiotelephone networks of AMPS standards (in the USA) and NMT were widespread. Beeline operator’s tariffs at the end of 1998 are refreshing: $ 19 per month subscription fee (nothing is included in it), 59 cents per minute of outgoing call. Including inflation, this is 94 cents, or about 73 modern rubles per minute. A standard half-hour conference call will cost ~ $ 30 to everyone connected over the cellular network, taking into account inflation.


This is the Sony CMD-Z1, the 1997 model, the oldest phone in my collection. At that time it was a “thin” and “light” phone, 220 grams, up to 10 hours of talk time. Functional Spartan: calls, SMS, phone book. But there is a fashionable folding microphone and a jog dial for a contact list. You won’t be able to connect it to Beeline: at that time it was developing a GSM network in the 1800 MHz band, the same phone was single-band, only GSM900. Theoretically, it can be connected to a computer. There is no GPRS standard yet, but there is a “modem” mode with a maximum speed of 9600 bits per second.


In the summer of 1998, this phone in France costs 2,800 francs, or about 420 euros. We are not discussing the work “in the fields” today, but since we are talking about a portable, we will add the best keyboard PDA at that time - Psion 5.


In case you want to work in another room or in the park, and do not want to drag a laptop with you, this is ideal. Through the infrared port it can go online, but the Z1 does not have such a port. We will need another mobile phone. For example, Siemens SL10.


Remote office life


With the exception of 3D modeling, complex video processing, computing, Pentium II in 1998 is able to perform any task. For my tasks, such a powerful computer is even a bit much, something more economical would have come up. The main tools - mail, tables, text, presentations - are closed by Microsoft Office. I installed the latest version of Office 97 at that time - the first clip assistant appeared in it.


Exploring the office suite 23 years ago is an interesting task in itself. I really liked the compact interface of Word 97, everything is strictly on the case:


In general, on a screen with a 4: 3 aspect ratio, working with text is much more convenient. In Outlook, too, everything seems to be in place. The only thing missing is the automatic substitution of the last edited document, as done in Office 2019, but a direct comparison is possible to reveal other similar trifles, and a lot.


Feature “Word”, awarded a separate item in the menu: creating a “beautiful text” according to the programmed templates. Of Word, of course, all this is easy to transfer to e-mail.



The culmination of the retro office experience was the bombing design of templates in Microsoft PowerPoint. Presentations only grew from concise lines of text printed on film and inserted into the projector. There is a noticeable desire to show "and now we can." All this eventually returned to a very strict flat design.


In general, everything, I am ready for remote work. Conferencing by phone or mobile, communicating by mail, preparing documents in Microsoft Office. To save the Internet, you can agree in advance with colleagues and, for example, go online for an hour a day for text communication in ICQ . Now I work in the same way, it just became more convenient. But there is one more aspect of retro-remote trading that I would like to discuss: the stubborn unwillingness to “digitize” a significant part of the work. I will show by the example of creative activity.

Offline Creative


Suppose you need to make a commercial. Or record an appeal to employees, which will then be broadcast over the telephone. Or to participate in some other creative project, where it is difficult to share thoughts through text. You need to send a note by hand, an audio message, record a video on the camera. If you have a Pentium II-based computer at home, you can do all this digitally. Connect a microphone to the computer (or use the built-in), write sound in a regular Windows recorder, edit in CoolEdit. Similarly, you can record video, and even edit it in Adobe Premier. It is possible, but in 1998 it was not yet (a) familiar and (b) convenient. Even if you try, it’s not a fact that it will turn out qualitatively. The computer has not yet collected absolutely all the functions that previously required separate devices. High-quality sound and image have become available massively relatively recently - when almost all smartphones began to be equipped with very good cameras and microphones.


Therefore, I will assume that in 1998, under the conditions of remote work, the “creative” would take place on a non-computer, or even on an analogue technique, followed by sending the recording by courier. First we’ll deal with a digital and computer device: if you need to take a photo of notes on paper or on a blackboard (now this is a traditional ritual at work meetings), you can use the camera on floppy disks. The Sony Mavica FD-71 is another exhibit in my collection from 1998. She copes with this task well, although it is desirable to take a photo in bright sunlight.


Let's move on to recording sound. Here I have a choice between a more modern digital device - a Sony MZ-R50 mini-disk recorder (1997) or a traditional analog cassette recorder. Sony WM-D6C is a semi-professional device, manufactured from 1984 to 2002. Both the minidisk and the cassette are portable, both require an external microphone, which is generally recommended. The built-in microphone will inevitably spoil the recording with the sounds of the tape drive or motor to rotate the optical medium. Even in the case of digital technology, there is no direct way to transfer recording from a minidisk to a PC (and will not appear until 2006). The minidisk allows you to edit the record (cut out unnecessary, change the sequence of fragments) directly on the device. The cassette player is easier to understand: press a button and record.


Finally, a camcorder. Consumer digital video cameras will appear only in the next 1999. In 1998, you have the choice between VHS and Video8 formats. The Panasonic MC10 camcorder writes to VHS-C cassettes, allows for easy video editing - transitions with dimming and even (using a separate character generator module) adding captions.


Another interesting artifact from the past is also associated with the reluctance of people and companies to switch to new (and not always clear) computer technologies. This is a fax. It is possible that instead of photographing in JPG from a digital camera, 22 years ago you would be asked to send notes or a sketch of the picture in this way, without using a computer, although using digital data transfer. I don’t plan to buy a fax in a collection of retro devices, but you can use a software version, for example, Ventafax, which is still being released. Apparently for those who are strong in their conservatism.


Bright Future and Half-Life



Here is such a set of an advanced remote worker of the 1998 model. If 22 years ago I really would have had it all, I would have quietly survived any quarantine ... Since at least two weeks I would have figured out how it all works. The main conclusion from my brief (and not very consistent) historical excursion: technologies for remote work, communication with colleagues, were already then. There was no habit and skills to use them. And of course, the infrastructure was not ready for mass digitalization of workflow, network connection and interaction there. Even 10 years ago, the forced dissolution of employees at home would have been much more complicated than now. It is still not perfect: someone has fallen off home Internet, employees with young children get in touch not on the calendar of meetings, but when it works out. Even an introvert like me understandsthat face-to-face communication is more efficient than conference calling.



And what about Half-Life? I was incredibly impressed with the gameplay of the latest release of Half-Life: Alyx. So far, these are the impressions from the video on YouTube: the set for virtual reality is a little expensive, and all the money went to tape recorders . The game is striking in its elaboration of details: you can interact with almost any element of the virtual world, and not with a mouse click, but with natural hand movements. It is very close to dreams of a virtual world in science fiction books. And I think this is the next stage in the development of remote technologies. Both really useful (telemedicine and education, see the video above), and conditionally increasing effectiveness. After all, you can get together in a virtual meeting room, draw on the board, almost completely recreate teamwork in the office. And you can also throw markers at each other. In this approach, genuine progress is being felt, but at the same time, both this future and the current coronavirus pandemic are perceived a little nervously, with an unpleasant taste of uncertainty and unexpected changes. Today I use technology that originated twenty years ago every day. What will happen in another twenty years? I don’t know, but I hope that it will be better, or at least not worse. Any technology can be used both for the benefit of man and society, and to the detriment. We are not always able to control this evolution, but when we make our small contribution, we want it to be positive: for prosperity, not crisis, for confidence in the future, but not in favor of fear and doubt. In the spring of 2020, this idea seems to me especially relevant.

More articles:


All Articles