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The day I was able to upgrade my 'shoebox' 110 baud modem to a 300 baud modem was the day I thought "I'll never need this kind of speed, but it's nice to have."

Thanks for posting about this documentary. I ran a BBS from 1983-1986 on a Commodore 64, a 1200 baud modem and 5 1541 floppy drives. An amazing time for this technology.

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Which BBS? I was on a lot of C64 BBSs.

I actually built my own 300 baud modem for my C64 from electronic components I got at Radio Shack. I was kind of a nerdy kid.

Cool. Did you ever do a write up on how to do it, or know of one. I'm just curiuos, I assumed it was pretty involved.

A 300 baud modem was pretty simple actually, it was just a tone generator/decoder with digital controls. I think I used a simple PLL chip to decode the tones and probably 555 timers to generate tones. Anything faster than 300 baud was far more complex. I built it as a final project for an electronics class I was taking in like 1989 or something.

Modems used to cost about a dollar per baud.

Rich folks with their 56k.

And 501k!

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