Prop Identification: Cooper's Dial Master


Notes: Sharp EL-6250H Dial Master. There is a model without the 'H'. So, make sure it has the 'H' on the end. As per usual, the prop dept. whited out the brand and model number.


Thanks to Frank D.

7 comments:

C H A R L E S said...

awesome!

piero said...

Cool! Just cool!

Sam Howzit said...

Cooper only used this once, correct? I'm wondering if anyone out there in the Internets actually used this in 1989.

I found an article that described it a little more: "1989: Sharp Dial Master EL-6250H
Bragdon began buying gadgets for work in 1987. His first purchase: A Sharp Dial Master EL-6250H, which he used to store contacts for several years. According to Roseberry, the device was a telephone book, memo pad, calculator and auto phone dialer with an 8KB memory. While it was manufactured long before concerns about data privacy and breaches dominated headlines, it did have a security feature. A secret key was pressed to keep items password protected, according to Roseberry. A key icon indicated whether an item was password protected."

See - http://www.csoonline.com/article/498306/Mobile_Security_How_Gadgets_Evolved_

Frank D. said...

He used it in a later episode also. You can even see the back of the Dial Master with the built-in speaker in that scene.

Anonymous said...

I worked for a retailer that sold these in 1989, I actually discovered the cause and subsequent workaround for a glitch in these units and contacted Sharp about it, they had one of their product developers call me and I explained what I had discovered. A couple weeks later one of the muckity-mucks at Sharp sent my employer a letter on their letterhead thanking me for solving their problem, the store manager later gave me the letter to keep. I then felt I wanted to have one of the units to keep with the letter, so I bought one and still have it in nearly mint condition and have played with a few times to show people how they work. What is really kind of neat is you can use them to circumvent some PBX systems that bar long distance calls or calls to certain numbers, you just put the number in the auto-dialer, put it over the mouth-piece and press the dial button. You can even program in password entries and outside line access prefixes as well as whatever pauses you need to in between the various numbers, extensions, and passwords. It's a pretty slick device.

tmr said...

This is the internet at its best

Mani said...

I still have mine, loved using it but lost the manual and the charger. It last turned on about a year or two ago! I'm looking for the charger.