60's era Internet connection.

D

djscoo

Charter Member
Old technology like this interests me, I literally "lol'd" when he laid the phone handset in the modem. I think it's awesome the ingenuity of past technology designers. Blows my mind how far we've come.

[youtube]X9dpXHnJXaE[/youtube]
 
I remember using acoustic couplers like that one (well, no fancy wooden case), back in high school. If you whistled loud enough, at close to the right pitch, all the unconnected modems in the room would whistle back at you, and the printing terminals would all spaz out!

Jeff
 
In "recent" history....
I remember when folks building homes would have a T1 built in their homes....

With recent advances in cable, I wonder if they're having 2nd thoughts now.....(Although best thing about a T-1 is that it's not shared...)
 
I remember watching the movie WarGames in 1984-ish and seeing his modem that you sat the handset on and being SO jealous.

At the time, I had a Commodore 64 with a 300 baud modem that did not autodial. You had to dial the number, then unplug the handset from the phone when you heard the carrier and plug that cord into your modem. Some phones of the era would drop a call if the handset was unplugged, so you had to be fast, lucky, and have the phone to get it to work.

I remember waiting hours for a 15kb shareware game to get done downloading.

Later, I upgraded to a 1200 baud with autodial. I was astounded by it's performance and thought that the fact that it could dial the phone itself was the penacle to technology. How could it possibly get any better?
 
I'm a youngster, but I remember not being able to get a hold of people who used their only phone line for dial-up. We would get on the internet and do whatever we needed then get off as fast as we could so we could receive calls. Later we got a second phone line so it was less of a hassle. Now, I leave the net on all day! We recently got cable modem internet a year and a half ago. Boy was that a huge step up!
 
Hell my 80s era XT had a 300 baud internal modem ... LOL. Both the modem and the mouse wanted to use IRQ1 ... I had a job trying to find a modem or a mouse that would let me set it up for any other IRQ. I did manage finally to find a modem that would work on IRQ4

Oh and in the 80s .. the internet was BBS all text ... no pictures.
 
I actually saw something very similar to that when I was a teenager and I would visit my Dad's office that was around 1965-66.
 
wow, that's cool.

i used to run a BBS on a 1200bps modem out of my house in the early 90s. Had to convince my parents to get a second phone line to host it. Anyone remember the "underground" art ASCII group, ACiD? and our rival iCE? oh man, those were the days...

-feng
 
Never mind all the baud rate whooha, look at the quality craftsmanship in those dovetails. I wonder how much that items cost would be adjusted for today.
 
djscoo said:
I'm a youngster, but I remember not being able to get a hold of people who used their only phone line for dial-up. We would get on the internet and do whatever we needed then get off as fast as we could so we could receive calls. Later we got a second phone line so it was less of a hassle. Now, I leave the net on all day! We recently got cable modem internet a year and a half ago. Boy was that a huge step up!
Click to expand...

Remember lol, both my mom and my girlfriends mom still had that problem 4 months ago. I helped talk them into satellite internet though. It is still pretty common in the country.

When I see things like this and all of the 80's hacker movies it really saddens me that I didn't get to experience the hay day of it all.
 
My first email account was only accessible via an Amateur Radio link and was for text only messages.

Equipment consisted of a 386 PC running DOS as I only had 1 Mb of RAM (Windows 3.5 required 4 Mb to run and RAM was $100 per Mb in those days!) and a 14" VGA monitor with a whopping 16 colours. This was connected to a terminal node controller (TNC) which interfaced the computer to the radio equipment. The data was transmitted as a modulated audio signal which drove you insane with it's beeps and clicks if you monitored it.

The first computer I ever owned was back in the mid '80s and it was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48kb of RAM and programs were loaded from audio cassettes. It took up to 5 minutes to load a program which invariably crashed as soon as it finished loading which required another 5 minutes to try and load it again.
 
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