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Comment by optionalparens | Hacker News Reader

14.4? Slow down there, friend, we lucky people were using Hayes 300 baud modems. I still remember my glorious upgrade path:

300->2400 (now we're cooking)->4800->9600->14.4->19.2->28.8->56k

USR, Courrier, and Hayes were usually the best ones for me. I skipped 33.6 among other upgrades. The Courrier also had that extra punch if you were lucky enough to get one on the other end.

The Unix stuff was pretty pedestrian as far as programs, but on Dos, Windows, Amiga, Atari ST, C64, and some others, some cool programs for connecting. I think on Dos I remember using Terminix and Telix quite a bit, but the names mostly escape me by now.

Anyway, I guess now it's better I don't have to dial with options like *70 or use the various AT codes to get online, handshake, and stay there.

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Heh I remember one friend boasting about getting a super fast 28.8k modem (the one with the better protocol - IIRC there were two competing compression schemes for 28.8k) Paid only a few hundred for it instead of the about $700 new. That would have been around 1994ish, he was an Amiga user.

And 1200/75 (download/upload) for a while- very popular in the UK.

acoustic coupled modems anyone?

We had a bunch of these bastards at work and at various universities local to me. I seem to recall them all hating each other and many not conforming properly to the standards. Dial and pray.

Still sometimes find these, but more often the 9600-56k more modern ranges in random server rooms and offices, still running all kinds of things that no one understands or wants to touch. If I didn't hate consulting so much now, I thought about going into this at some point to charge breakneck prices to do archaeology for these companies. I'd feel bad though replacing or touching such beauty, not to mention they often are the backbone of many businesses so that's why they are so paranoid to go near.

Yes. My first connection from high school to the town's university computer system.

The high school teacher was later (the following September) in my freshman comp sci class learning assembler. Very strange to have your math teacher (doubled as computer teacher) in class with you.

I'd love to show my kids how mine worked - there's a few dial up BBSes out there still - but I don't have a landline and I've only heard bad things about attempting to use a modem over a VOIP service... and there's the little problem of plugging an old telephone into a PC to access that VOIP service in the first place.

there you go http://www.whence.com/minimodem/

Looks good, but I want to physically connect the landline phone as an audio device too... that solution seems elusive. I could probably assemble a circuit to do it, though I'm not sure I could design one.

I have this Linksys VOIP router that I used to use on my old landline to interface with an Asterisk server, but I don't think the firmware supports this use case.

two laptops next to each other will work fine for a presentation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpaD0BX9yZM&t=16m53s

It's a bit grimy, but: http://m.imgur.com/JTwCqyy

That's an A4 piece of paper for scale.

Awesome!

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