I just saw my first real-world drone in action, flying over 33rd Street toward 34th Street. I’ve seen drones in people’s possession but I don’t remember seeing one actually being flown around. It was moving fast, too.
Just sent an email to Marc Ostrofsky. He was a mover and shaker in the world of payphones in the 1980s and 90s before moving on to domain name reselling and dtop-ship reselling. He sold business.com for $7.5 million. He’s obviously moved on to bigger and better things since his payphoning days but I thought it was worth a shot to contact him to see if he had access to copies of the trade magazine he published for a number of years. Originally called “Private Payphone” the magazine was renamed “Public Communications Magazine” and somewhere in there it was also just called “Payphone Magazine”. I browsed through several copies today at the NYPL, issues from 1989 and 1990, and was laughing out loud at some of the copy and the illustrations especially. Such a vibrant and ambitious business in those days, everybody looking to make a buck and hey, why not?
Ostrofsky wrote a “Publisher’s Note” in 1989 with a set of goals to accomplish leading up to the 100th anniversary of the payphone. He wanted President Bush to declare a week in June as “National Payphone Week”, a proposal which is laughable now but even good for a chuckle in the context of the spirit in which it was proposed. He wanted all postal mail to be stamped with a logo commemorating the centennial anniversary of the payphone. He wanted to reignite the phone booth stuffing fad that had been popular 30 years earlier. All kinds of loony ideas, none of which seem to have come to fruition.
I wrote to him in the longshot chance that he would respond. It appears no library in the US has copies of those magazines from most of the 1980s. The NYPL has most of 1989 but nothing from prior, and the Library of Congress’ copies are not available through interlibrary loan. So i thought I’d go right to the source and see if Ostrofsky himself has copies in storage. I even offered to digitize them had that not been done already.
To the industry’s credit they saw the cell phone tidal wave coming in 1989. That should not surprise me but somehow it does.
The magazine has a lot of unique stuff in it, stuff no one else is thinking about and that is not readily findable on the Internet. Was a fun read, will go back for more.
