Apple II connecting via acoustic coupler modem and rotary phone (2015) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Apple II connecting via acoustic coupler modem and rotary phone (2015) [video]

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68 pointstomhoward25 comments

A coincidence to see something posted on the Apple II. I had serial number 71, and I wrote the shitty little free Chess program that for a while Apple distributed on their Apple II demo tape.

I was thinking last night how far Apple specifically, and technology in general have progressed since the late 1970s because I was reading docs and articles about my Apple Watch and experimenting with everything that I could do just on my Apple Watch: it runs a surprising large number of cool iOS apps (Night Sky being one of my favorites), can directly access the App Store, can locally store and play audio books, podcasts, music, etc.

The Apple II was amazing and I really loved it, even though I stretched my use too wide for the hardware (I developed a commercial Go playing program in UCSD Pascal, and had FORTRAN on it also).

It makes me happy to see people still hacking with old Apple IIs.

I was about to get myself an Apple II but I couldn't decide which model and in the end I got myself a C128D which I am restoring at the moment. The Apple II is still on my wishlist.

Have you ever used 128 mode? What software other than GEOS if any at all?

Btw C128D BOM cost Commodore as much as Amiga 500, and they barely made any money on them.

The Apple II was, I think, the last computer that one person could completely understand.

In many ways a modern Arduino UNO is just as comprehensible.

Fun trivia about rotary phones: it takes longer to dial higher digits (0 taking the longest), so major cities (more people, more calls) got lower area codes like 212 (Manhattan) vs 307 (Cheyenne, Wyoming).

The general idea is like Huffman coding.

Personal trivia... I once lived in area code 909, which was the worst of the rotary-dial era.

909 was not established though until well after the rotary-dial era was over, I had a rotary phone in the 90's and was calling 909 numbers, but I was a distinct minority.

I grew up with area code 809, which is for the caribbean, almost as bad a yours by 1 pulse.

And the middle digit was the biggest factor in dialing length, because before 1995 is was required to be 0 or 1. But the fastest "0" area code (202, Washington DC) was still two pulses faster than the slowest "1" area code (916, northern California.)

Guess they didn't get the memo when they gave Houston 713 (though that used to cover a large area of Texas, so perhaps Houston had a much smaller rank then)

It did. That's why Pittsburgh is 412, we were one of the largest in the country when these were dolled out.

I guess since the move to touch tone phones being common was around the time cities like Houston grew it wasn't an issue anyone felt needed to be fixed.

Indeed - as of the 1940 census (area codes went live in 1947), Houston was #21 whereas Pittsburgh was #10

https://www.biggestuscities.com/1940

I miss modems. I miss the noise, I miss the magic, and I miss the community.

Acoustics is such a high dimensional medium yet one humans can readily manipulate... This reminds me of [1] (2016), where they optimize a 3D series of conduits so that they produce the desired output signal (given object shape and output audio frequency).

I wonder if one can arrange such conduits (6-way connected pipes and chambers) to replicate a feed forward neural network. If it can be done with light...

These pipes could be interesting to work with, maybe in order to build DAGs. Plenty of software take DAGs as an executable input! Can someone put me in contact with the people at [dynamicland]?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JbN9vXxGYE

[dynamicland] https://www.dynamic-land.com/

> Can someone put me in contact with the people at [dynamicland]?

contact@dynamic-land.com

> I wonder if one can arrange such conduits (6-way connected pipes and chambers) to replicate a feed forward neural network. If it can be done with light...

It actually can't be done with light, not without active switching components or very high intensities. (The "optical neural network" papers published so far are fully linear networks, lacking the nonlinear activation functions between layers that are critical for deep neural networks to have any more power than a single matrix multiply).

However, I think nonlinear acoustic properties are actually more accessible than nonlinear optical properties, and so an acoustic neural network may be more plausible.

I had four Apple IIs (IIgs, rest IIes) and I had a network going and everything. Sold them all in 2003 because of no job for over a year. Sold them all for $250. I could get $3000 today if I still had them, but I wouldn't sell them.

The whole plot of Hackers (1995) would not be possible without pay phones and acoustic coupler modems!

Heck, a whole chunk of my career wouldn't have been possible without pay phones and acoustic coupler modems!

I worked at an organization that was still using acoustic couplers for order transmission as late as 2009.

I purchased an AppleIIe recently with a serial card and connected it up to my linux box as a dumb terminal. I was able to do load the Google home page and do a search and navigate to results via the keyboard.

I remember quite clearly in my childhood having an Apple IIe with a 2400 baud modem; I couldn't use BBSes that ran faster than 300 bau, because the built-in terminal was "too slow". I ended up getting Proterm and later talking to the author, who said he used interrupts and a buffer (I had no idea what that meant, and managed to fry my Apple later trying to invoke an NMI). ALl valuable lessons!

This is awesome. When he put the phone on the modem it was a revelation.

(2015)

I remember seeing and acoustic coupler used for the first time in, I believe, Mission Impossible. Ethan Hunt takes out an adhesive pad and sticks it to a payphone and "dials in" to a mainframe or something.

Seemed incredible at the time!

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