First was a Novation CAT 110/300 baud with acoustic coupler. Later I got a Practical Peripherals 1200, then a Zoom Telephonics 2400/9600. Then I bought a US Robotics Courier HST, it cost a ridiculous amount at the time. A few years later was working and I mailed it and an actual check to USR and they swapped it for a Courier vEverything (with the 20Mhz DSP). I still have that modem and a newer vEverything I salvaged.
+++ATH0 OK *NO CARRIER*Hayes 1200. Anyone know why these things were built to be bombproof? Always kinda wondered about that…
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14.4k. Then 28.8k. Then 56k. Then T1 from my local computer group, and finally cable… fiber is coming this year.
I’m going to serve 2600.network over fiber. Somehow I wound up at the beginning.
Acoustic-coupling modem for a TI 99/4a. 300 baud?
Commodore 300 baud
300 baud home made.
First one that I had myself was a 300 baud acoustic modem. It came in a wooden box that was about the size of a shoe box but more square.
Apple Personal Modem 300/1200 on my Apple IIgs.
300 baud, I wish I could remember what brand it was. I think I had it hooked up to my Apple ][+ and dialed in to College.
A thoroughly obsolete 1200bps Racal-Vadic thing that didn’t do the Hayes command set. Its command set was sufficiently different to AT that I couldn’t configure my terminal program to control it, so I’d pick up the phone, dial whichever BBS I wanted to call, wait for the beep, push the connect button on the modem’s front panel, and put down the phone.
I think it was sufficiently obsolete that the BBSes I called would have had 9600bps or 14.4kbps modems by then.
Found the manual! https://usermanual.wiki/m/e841e449995c65b1eb3d261c6cec7d97d5b42039de6114e9fed37628782b868a.pdf
It was a Radio Shack 300 baud modem. A little googling seems to indicate is would likely have been a Tandy DCM-3 “Direct Connect” (as opposed to acoustic coupler) modem.
It was in-line between the wall and a phone so you would pick up the phone, dial the number, head the modem tone, press a red button on the top of the modem and hang up the phone.
Nothing very exotic: USRobotics 14.4
2400 baud modem in an Altima 286 luggable (CGA LCD monochrome screen) in 1990. Hello CompuServe! And dialing into the Sun SPARCservers at work (oh yeah, remote working, 1993). Then used a USR 56k modem with a Sun SPARCstation 20 to connect to my ISP. The SS20 served as the firewall/router/DHCP server for my home LAN, which quickly grew to include NeXT, Sun and SGI workstations as companies cast them off to save money with the advent of the Intel/MS hegemony. That setup is still down in the computing cave, should the fiber-optic-cable-eating viruses grown in some corporate arcology ever be unleashed and we are back to copper POTS again…
Commodore 1670 at 1200 baud. Good times were had.
