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

That's an A4 piece of paper for scale.

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.

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.

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.