K.C. (aka Phreakmonkey) has a Livermore Data Systems Model A acoustic coupler modem, a 300 baud modem from 1964. It was given to him by the widow of a retired IBM engineer.
Instead of seeing it in a museum, he decided to hook the trusty Model A up and make it talk to something. The video shows the way we used to connect to the Internet in those ‘good old days.’
To be accurate, you couldn’t connect to the internet that way because there was no internet then. What you (we) connected to was a timesharing system. My computer experience dates back to about 1970 and it was amusing to recall having to stick the handset of the analog phone into an acoustic coupler. When we upgraded to 1200 baud, boy, then we were going real fast. We could only dream of speeds equal to what is now called dial-up.
Same with me Greg. In 72, I connected via acoustic coupler to a mainframe in Speed Scientific School at Univ of Louisville to submit and run homework in Basic. We had to load the program via a paper tape reader (a continuous strip of paper about 1/2″ wide with holes punched in binary (I think) in it). Used that instead of punched cards.
revrick – Thanks for reminding me about the tape reader. What a change to today.
Wait a minute, you are saying there is a faster way now?
lmao does anybody still use dialup
Yeah, infidel, where I work we have around 4K dialup accounts for folks out in the field needing to pull information from back in Nashville and for email. But for play, most folks have upgraded to something else.