300 baud home made.
Hayes 1200. Anyone know why these things were built to be bombproof? Always kinda wondered about that…
300 baud C64
First one that I had myself was a 300 baud acoustic modem. It came in a wooden box that was about the size of a shoe box but more square.
My brother had an acoustic coupled 300 baud modem for his C64, but that stuff was off limits to me. My first was a 2400 baud on ISA card, I bought for the family IBM XT Clone when I was maybe 13, I came up with the money with a hustle. I bought an old lionel train set at a garage sale with $20, sold it to a train shop for $100 (they probably screwed me over). It was my first pc component install, I remember setting the dip switches for the IRQ channel.
300baud from work. Fun times logging in with it. Eventually moved to 2400baud.
C64 VICModem. 300 baud, manual dial. :)
That was my first one as well.
My first PC modem was the US Robotics Sportster 14400 FAX Modem. A cool feature was that you could flip a couple of bits and it would do 19200. USR reportedly grumbled about that breaking the warranty and using it against its design limits, but it worked great.
First was a Novation CAT 110/300 baud with acoustic coupler. Later I got a Practical Peripherals 1200, then a Zoom Telephonics 2400/9600. Then I bought a US Robotics Courier HST, it cost a ridiculous amount at the time. A few years later was working and I mailed it and an actual check to USR and they swapped it for a Courier vEverything (with the 20Mhz DSP). I still have that modem and a newer vEverything I salvaged.
+++ATH0 OK *NO CARRIER*300 baud, I wish I could remember what brand it was. I think I had it hooked up to my Apple ][+ and dialed in to College.
My first modem was a Dataphone s21 (German Akustikkoppler) for the Commodore C64. It gave me breath-taking 300 baud on the data highway (aka boards).
I don’t know the model, but my first modem was 2400 baud
Downloading anything took forever but it was still a magical experience to me!
I couldn’t figure out how to silence the modem sounds either (if it was even possible) so every time I wanted to use the computer when someone in the house was sleeping I had to pray the connection sounds wouldn’t wake anyone up!
ATL0orATM0should have silenced it. Unfortunately I had to use the Internet to look that up. :)saving this for when time travel is invented so I can go back and tell my younger self, my mother would appreciate it!
Supra 2400, to LineLink 144E, to Practical Peripherals 28.8 (all of these external). Being a kid I was limited to upgrading when birthday and holiday money was saved up.
To one way broadband with this weird box containing a 56kbps modem you plugged a phone cord into for the uplink and a 1.5mbps downlink over cable coax. Bi directional broadband wasnt available yet.
Nothing very exotic: USRobotics 14.4
A thoroughly obsolete 1200bps Racal-Vadic thing that didn’t do the Hayes command set. Its command set was sufficiently different to AT that I couldn’t configure my terminal program to control it, so I’d pick up the phone, dial whichever BBS I wanted to call, wait for the beep, push the connect button on the modem’s front panel, and put down the phone.
I think it was sufficiently obsolete that the BBSes I called would have had 9600bps or 14.4kbps modems by then.
Found the manual! https://usermanual.wiki/m/e841e449995c65b1eb3d261c6cec7d97d5b42039de6114e9fed37628782b868a.pdf
deleted by creator
