300 baud home made.
300 baud C64
Hayes 1200. Anyone know why these things were built to be bombproof? Always kinda wondered about that…
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.
300baud from work. Fun times logging in with it. Eventually moved to 2400baud.
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*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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
I was late to the internet party, and got a pre-owned 33.6k. I don’t remember the brand, but I still have it stashed somewhere, just for the nostalgia. Had it in my desk drawer to muffle the sound a bit. I figured out later I could turn that off. But I needed the sound to hear if I got a successful connection. Since my mother was sceptical about the phone line being blocked, I was not allowed to use a modem at home initially. So I used it in the night, to avoid detection. I had planned to just use it for essential surfing and patch downloads for games. But the addiction was too severe. After one month had passed, I figured out the phone bill would not go unnoticed, so I had to confess. So we agreed that I could use it after ten in the evening, and I would pay the usage part of the phone bill. I think it was close to $100 a month usually. And that was even if I had free fast internet where I studied… I never have paid so much for internet after that.
It was probably rocket fuel for a really bad sleeping habit (or complete lack of sleep), but I would not trade those years of late night chatting, surfing, mud and usenet for anything.
Later before I moved out, I got a 56k internal modem. But it was so unstable at max speed, I just ran it at 33.6k.
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
14.4k that was more consistent as 9600. Packard Bell ISA modem.
Later I went 33.6 and went off to college with a 56k external modem that was supported by FreeBSD.
I think I used to be able to tell the different speeds by the handshake sound.
