This is the english version of a post I published five years ago

It’s now 40 years that two friends of mine and me had one of the greatest nights of our lifes. Today, in 2025, the Internet and “always on” has become an integral part of our lives and this story is just folklore when we meet. 😉 What used to be science fiction 1985 is now everyday life and standard practice that no one even thinks about anymore. The best example of this is my old physics teacher: “If you think that as adults you will always have a calculator with you wherever you go, you are barking up the wrong tree.” 😆

The story is set at a time that is much closer to the origins of the internet and the beginning of Unix¹ than it is to today. What’s even funnier is that the story wouldn’t be relevant today, because communication has become too fast and too cheap.

Going back into time…

In 1985, the East-West conflict was more important than Android or iOS, reports about computers (such as a famous edition of the German magazine “DER SPIEGEL” from late 1984) were ignored, and at Chornobyl, Ukraine they had a smoothly² running nuclear power plant complex. The greatest danger to Europe in the summer of ‘85 were the chart hits of “Neue Deutsche Welle”. Today is a different time, with bandwidths in the triple-digit Mbit range, smartphones having enough CPU power to control thousands of lunar modules simultaneously, and the stock market on high-frequency trading, where microseconds of latency are fought over.

1985

Back then, communication was slow and expensive. When making phone calls in Germany, there were local calls and long-distance calls. Since January 1984, calls within the local network were no longer unlimited for one “fee unit” (about 15 Euro-Cent today). You had 8 minutes, then you were charged the next unit. If you didn’t have a phone at home (or wanted to chat in peace), you had to go to the nearest phone booth (“Fernmeldehäuschen” was actually the official german name). It was usually not far to reach, because they were literally on every corner. In 1984, we had over 130,000 phone booths in Germany!

In the mid-80s, you had to insert 30 Deutsche Pfennig (around 15ct) for a local call. That was the German version of “forty³ cents more for the next three minutes.” Does anyone else remember “Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show”?⁴ 😎 For a longer long-distance call, it was better to have a handful of Deutschmark coins with you, and international calls in phone booths had a “heavy metal” feeling due to the coins required 😉 and required good motor skills. The money was gone faster than in a slot machine.

Mobile communication was archaic. At that time, the “B/B2” network (the C network didn’t come until 1985) was the most widespread. “Mobile phone” at that time meant a car mounted phone case weighing several kilograms⁵, a basic fee of 270 DM, and you had to have a rough idea of the location of the person you were calling.

Private data communication was officially “evil”. 😱 Anything unofficial was forbidden anyway, and the Deutsche Bundespost was merciless like the Imperial Stormtroopers, just wearing yellow instead of white. “High speed communication” meant 1200 bits/s (bits, not bytes!) and for the money you would have spent on a modem like that, you could easily have gone on vacation for a few weeks.

When we (two friends and myself) offered the first computer courses for a local community college at Dingolfing in 1985, there were no “computer labs”. The three of us and half a dozen brand-new Olivetti M24s in various configurations took up residence on the second floor of a plush café next to the town square in an unused room.

When there were no classes (there were only evening classes), the computers belonged to us and we were free to explore the world of personal computing just like owning a personal data center (6 personal computers for three people!). 😎

We learned, we tried things, played around, and improved our BASIC skills acquired on the school Commodore and dipped our toes into x86 Assembler. In addition to playing Donkey Kong, Lode Runner, and others, we also learned other languages and products such as dBASE, WordStar, and Turbo Pascal. We spent nights in front of the computers, astonishing the local Olivetti “office machine electronics technician” by printing graphics on a 9-pin printer that wasn’t officially capable of doing so and discovering mysterious tools such as debuggers and a sector editors for floppy disks.

The infamous “IBM PC-compatible” feature came to an end with floppy disk drives on the Italian Olivettis. IBM PC disks had a capacity of 360 KB (kilobytes!) on 40 data tracks, while Olivetti boasted 720 kilobytes on 80 tracks⁶ with the M24. Great, twice as much memory. It was just a shame that all the nice tools that could be used to (partially) recover deleted data, for example, didn’t work because of this difference⁷.

If 720 KB seem laughable to you now, just be told that the Turbo Pascal compiler (V3.0) was about 39 KB in size. Including an editor and debugger!⁸ 🤩

One afternoon, we had arranged to meet for a learning/programming/gaming session. On the way to the “computer room”, I noticed that a large crowd had gathered around the phone booth on the town square. At first, I thought there had been an accident, but that wasn’t the case. What’s more, almost all of the people there were what we would now call “people with a migration background” and who were known at the time as “Gastarbeiter” in German. Dingolfing had been a magnet for immigrants since well before BMW took over the Glas car manufacturing plant in 1967. Refugees had already settled in here after World War II (just as my parents). In this respect, I have something in common with the unforgettable Peter Ustinov, who once said: “My parents were very shy; it took a world war to bring them together”

Still, it was strange. But I went upstairs and started working on the computer. At some point, I realized that I was still sitting alone in front of the computer. Sighing, I got up and went downstairs to use a phone booth to ask when my friends would arrive. The crowd had disappeared, with only one man still waiting while a woman was on the phone inside. She came out of the phone booth grinning, pressed three coins into the man’s hand, and left. After what felt like an eternity, the man had also finished his call. I went into the phone booth and called my buddy. It’ll take a while, but he’ll be here soon, no worries.

I hung up and the three ten-cent coins clattered out of the coin compartment. However, the sound that everyone who grew up with phone booths knows ended with a metallic “clink.” That’s the sound it makes when an unaccepted coin falls into the coin counter’s dispenser compartment. I opened the flap and there it was: 30 Pfennigs! What the heck?

Wait a minute, I think I know why the woman was grinning earlier! I put the three ten-cent coins back in, call my friend again, “Hey, I just need to test something quickly, I’ll call you back in a minute!” — “You surely know what you’re doing”, comes the reply through the receiver. I hang up, “clink”. 30 pfennigs in the coin tray. Wow! 🤩

Suddenly, I realize what happened this afternoon: the international call record for a phone booth in Bavaria had been broken! The coin counter is defective and today it’s “call the world for free!”. Ok, not free, but the whole world for 30 pfennigs! Which you then get back.

Another call to the other friend, who is suddenly in a hurry to call someone. Long-distance and international calls for free, who knows how long this paradise will last…

“We can just call someone and ask them something”. OK, but whom should we call? Finally, we come up with the idea of calling a software company that produces a then very popular word processing program⁹ and simply asking for “Jeff”. Mainly because the phone number of the corporate office is displayed prominently on the software packaging.

“MicroPro International, good morning, how can I help you?” a female voice comes out of the receiver. “Oh, hi, good morning, I would like to talk to Jeff, please”. First of all, at least I was quick enough to say good morning to account for the time difference. Second, do we seriously believe that they only have one Jeff, or anyone at all, who is known by their first name at headquarters?

“You mean Jeff from the development team?” she replies.

He really exists! With a brief apology, we hang up. Phew, we almost spoke to Jeff! 😆 “But it actually was funny”, I say. “Let’s ask for ‘Bob from sales’ next time”, says my friend with a grin. So we hop into a phone booth, call international directory assistance, and ask for the area codes for Palo Alto, Santa Monica, San Francisco, and half the West Coast.

The man on the other end of the line sounds a bit surprised, but he tells us all the area code numbers.

We spend the next hour driving the receptionists of the Californian software industry crazy. It’s interesting how far you can get on the phone when you open the call with “We’re calling from Bavaria, Germany, and we have a technical issue with your product”. Even more interesting is the image of Bavaria that California apparently had in 1985. “Oh, Bavaria! Where you have the large Beer Festival?” was the response in more than half of the calls.

At some point, we stop and think about what else we could do that would be more useful. We decide to go back to the “computer lab” and have a coffee. There, our eyes fall on a printed hex dump.

“We want to run Peter Norton’s disk sector editor on the Olivettis, right?”
“Yes, and? We can’t do that because we don’t know where the number of sectors and tracks is stored or whether that’s enough if we patch it"
“Well then, let’s call Peter Norton and ask him!”

Peter Norton and his “Norton Utilities”¹⁰ were the tools for the PC in the mid-80s. Rescuing files, editing sectors of floppy disks directly, etc. In addition, Peter Norton’s book “Programming Guide to the IBM PC”¹¹, which was simply referred to as the “pink shirt book,” was the reference for all PC programmers.

“You can’t just call him and ask him to tell us what we need to do!”
“What is he going to do? At worst, he’ll swear at us and hang up.”

What seems impossible today was actually easy back then. We called Santa Monica, introduced ourselves as three young enthusiatic computer-trainers, and asked if the Master could spare a few minutes for us.
“I bet that will NEVER work”, I said.

After an “I’ll check if he’s available, hold on a second”, we suddenly heard a male voice. “Peter Norton speaking, I hear you guys are calling from Bavaria because you have a question? I’ve got five minutes for you”.

In shaky English (they hand you your high school diploma, but back then no one taught you how to make a proper phone call in English), we asked if he could perhaps give us a hint on how to get his tool to work with 80-track drives. He tells us that Toshiba also has a PC with 80 tracks and 720 KB floppy disk capacity and that the new version of his utilities can do that. But he also gladly tells us what we need to patch¹² if we think we can manage it. He thinks it’s good that we’re learning assembler.

The call ended up taking 10 to 15 minutes. I have no idea whether our admiration for him came across or whether we spoke proper “Denglish,” but we get all the information we need and say our goodbyes with many words. We should continue learning, software will become big, he says. Three people in a FeH 78 Fernmeldehäuschen phone booth painted in RAL 1005¹³, talking on the phone and frantically taking notes at the same time. We must have looked very nerdy at least. But since our small town in Lower Bavaria had long since shut down at this hour (only the occasional car passed by; after all, as a BMW town, we have to maintain our reputation), we didn’t attract any attention.

Half an hour later, we’re sitting in front of the computer with coffee, tinkering away.
Well, what can I tell you, it worked! 👍🏽 We were probably the first in Germany who could edit 80-track drives with the sector editor!

That night I also learned something important: if you ask nicely, you usually get an answer.

That’s how our only conversation with Peter Norton went.
It was the best “hotline call” we ever made.

😉

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