Browsing the net with 1960's modem

Chaos

Chaos

Chaos

Soldato
Joined
20 Oct 2002
Posts
5,589
This is an old vid but I just came across it and thought it was pretty cool.

This guy shows browsing Wikipedia at 300 baud using lynx (a text only browser)


 
That is pretty cool, Like how it works on pure analogue and the voltage has to be just right, thats how plug and play should be. How we have gone backwards. :(
 
That is quite cool, look at the quality and workmanship which used to go into these sorts of things, you just don't get that these days.

As for the voltages thing, well USB serial adaptors often don't conform to the RS232 specification properly, so that's hardly surprising, i've run across this issue myself with even new telemetry/IA equipment which wants proper RS232.
 
How else would it talk to the phone network? These things were very expensive to start off with, and people had phones anyway so why not save money by missing out the phone part? Also, it wasn't that long ago when people had to rent phones from the telcos, and weren't allowed to connect their own devices. This also gets around that.
 
Last edited:
MeatLoaf said:
Why did he have to put the phone handset into the modem?
Click to expand...

As said above, it's an acoustic modem, so it generates the tones through a speaker and listens through a microphone, which is played through the phones handset.

You would do well to watch War Games and Hackers (although they're not entirely technically accurate, they do use this acoustic modem principle in various places)
 
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