Still better then AOL’s dial up service

WOW. This made my day!

A-w-e-s-o-m-e

EPIC!!

WAY FREAKEN COOL!

I dug out my old grid laptop to see if it would still but up. I thought it was busted because it took forever to get to the command prompt, booting off a 720K floppy. I just may put the old girl to work a node to revive the slow amateur radio PBBS system in this area.

I wonder what it would take to use our computers today, to return to the old POTS BBS’ if the Internet become unavailable for some reason?
Fun to watch the video. getting the new to work with the old is the oldest type of hacking, so this post was worthy of hackaday.

s/recieved/received/

i before e, except after c

Vintage FTW! Excellent video, thank you.

I’ve got a couple of old 110 baud acoustic coupled modems in my basement. I’ve kept them on hand in case I ever had to “go underground”. Fortunately I haven’t but now you’re making me wanna go dig them up.

wow that is pretty sweet! I was surprised when he put the phone inside the modem box thing then I was like “o shi- it works from the sound!”

Coolest thing I have seen in a while.

It’s really cool!

I was wondering if it could be done from a simple uController and some simple tone detector IC (567) & variable frequency oscillator (555).

If that’s possible then its a really interesting project!

I made my little brothers watch this video. I think sometimes they take for granted the broadband connection they use to play games and such. Everyone should have a healthy appreciation for this piece of epic history. I loved this post, thanks alot hack-a-day. Viva La DefCon!

@caleb: hold on, i need to change my grades real quick.

Yes – the accounts / passwords &etc used in the video were temporary for the vid. That’s why I didn’t make any effort to obscure them.

(Proof: Look closely at the UNIX login. It’s “oldskool”.)

Also – a few days ago I did get PPP working over it, but it’s unusably slow. DNS alone saturates it. It won’t load a webpage without timing out.

Thanks for all the cool comments!
– K.C.

amazing!

that box that it is inside is beautiful too.

this looks like it would be a fun electronics project/kit. Make your own modem :D

Where is the text version?

the elegance of the box design “dovetails” really well with that of the technology

all that is missing is a 14″ monochrome orange display with a hercules graphic card and making sure that the modem had its way with irq settings and dma channels before installing an 8 bit mono soundblaster card, not to mention the com port conflict between com 1 and com 3 ( 1 was mouse,(9 pin serial))….those were fun times indeed!!

Would go great with this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/cell-phone/8928/

this is great.

id *love* too see a schematic of that

Oh how all we “experts” fell about laughing when a customer came in and asked about 2400 baud dial up.
“Technically impossible etc.”

:O Amazing.
It actually looks more reliable then my current router.

I miss the old modem sound.

That’s freakin’ cool. This should be required viewing in all computer science schools to remind the whippersnappers just how far we’ve come.

Imagine trying to load a graphics page, eh? Hit enter, go away for two days.

The first acoustic modem I used was at a finance company to pull credit reports from a printing terminal. There was no monitors yet back then. I eventually had an atari acoustic modem I used with the old eight bit computers. brings back memories.

i saw something very similar in an antiques shop down the road from me about a week ago. gonna go and buy it at the weekend now. i had no idea what it was, but i saw the port on the side and thought it was some kinda of vintage computer stuff.
i didnt open it, but the port side looked identical. dunno if its got knobs or not. damn if only this video had come out a few weeks ago. im just hoping its not gonna cost me a lot to buy!

Very nice of him to take a relic of an old friend and make it live. Could write a book on this kinda stuff. Terrifyingly epic that it works.

I have the same modem although I’ve never tried using it. It’s a beautiful piece!

Ahh.. this brings back memories of using dial-up internet through Arachne and Lynx on my Digital laptop, with a 2400bps modem.

I’m from Livermore.

To make this authentic, you should use an old dial telephone, not the new push button kind. Better yet, call the operator and have her dial the number for you. It has to be an American operator too, not a foreign call center type so keep trying until the accent sounds correct. Now that you got me going, how about an antique dial-less phone! Dial Zero by rapidly engaging the hook 10 times, and the operator will come on and make the connection.

I still boot up my PCjr every once in a while and it has a 300 baud modem too, but it’s not like this one. This one is much cooler.

great work dude!!! it was awesome to see you get all that working. there’s just something about spending free time in getting old things to work. it feels like such a huge accomplishment. the wives might not think it’s that neat, but I sure do! thanks for posting this.

I first used one of the modern acoustic couplers in 1969 with an ASR33 TTY, running at 10cps I think. We then used then with the IBM 2741 that ran at 13.4CPS then upgraded to a 30 cps thermal printer. If I remember correctly the frequency was 1300 and you could whistle into the coupler and get the device to type. Never could spell my name.

Years later I found a box very simliar to this one and still have it along with my first Cobol program deck, my decimal/octal/hex calculator (TI545 I think), flow charting template and my “THINK” sign. They are packed next to my K&E slide rule. Thanks for the memories.

That’s awesome. Makes me want to make my own analog modem now.

Great video. I often wondered why Hollywood was so obsessed with the slowly-displaying-line-of-text gimmick – it’s been forty years since the studio executives saw a computer?

Everyone’s an expert, so here’s my $0.02. Get in touch with some steampunk tragics for your next shoot, and they’ll lend you a suit and some flying goggles. And some nice drapes (^^,)

Do multiple takes and then edit it down, then you won’t have to turn the camera. If your screen pov was dead on we’d the userid jokes ;)

I think it would be appropriate to get a small brass plate engraved or stamped with the device’s history, including terms of custodial ownership – or caretakers? ‘sum quod eris’.

And close the lid, isn’t it what that little notch is for? There should be a telephone history museum near you that might even beable to help set up a patch board as per doug’s comments ^^^.

Lastly, how about some historically significant places to telnet to … some of your .mil or .edu sites?

I enjoyed this immensely. Thanks for taking the time to put it together.

So, you connected a modem. What’s the hack? You connected to the web through another computer, what’s the hack?

I can’t decide what’s more embarassing, thinking this is cool or that everyone else seems to think it is…

Try it again, direct, with a tube kit from 1954 running somewhere between 45 and 70 Baud and a 1969 Zenith industrial processor. That would be a minor hack. Then again, it’s just data.

Excellent fun! What surprises me is the DB25 connector on a 1964 device. RS-232C wasn’t defined until 1969. Before it was called RS-232C, I seem to remember it being called just EIA (mostly compatible with the later RS-232C). Exactly how old that is, I don’t know. Guess you were pretty lucky to find a device that implemented an electrical interface that was compatible with a standard that didn’t exist yet.
But I loved it!
This is something all people should watch, if they are interested in computers and computer communication.

This was definitely very cool.

Hackaday turned to shit a while back and most of the blog posts are crap.

Good posts like this are the rare exception.

He isn’t surfing the net, there are only ASCII characters and escape sequences racing through the modem, not IP packets!

this is really cool!

you should spell RECEIVE instead of RECIEVE, though :p

Does it download porn?

@ trilliumslide

So you’re the one who bought the other one :)

I had one too — thought it was the coolest thing ever!

It’s so old it’s got the Isaac Hayes command set.

That’s right, baby.

Make that the Gabby Hayes command set!

YEE-haa!

I’ll be here all weekend folks, working for my co-sysop status…

COME ON NOW, he is certainly surfing the web. The fact that ASCII to binary conversion, and viceversa takes place, along with an intermediary computer is employed doesn’t mean he is not. That’s like saying one isn’t listening to music or other audio, if a microprocessor is used to convert digital bits to audio wave forms that animal can hear. In the event thing truly go to crap, It will be the old farts, and the genuine young nerds who will be hacking away, sharing the fun via computer networks. Damn where did I put my cane, I need to get up and go use the crapper. :)

Nice vintage demo, thanks. When I was in high school (vintage 1973) in Palo Alto, I was a geek in Computer Lab. We had a 300 baud enabled timeshare to the computers at Stanford U. Input devices were keyboard & punch tape; output was a Western Union teletype machine of Korean war vintage. Our team wrote a checkers program using COBOL. I scored an A for the year. Who woulda thunk back then that we’d be checking our stock funds on wifi laptops in a coffee shop somewhere today, eh?

Anyone ever tried the trick of getting a DreamCast to connect to broadband by putting a 56k modem into your PC and wiring them together, making sure to disable wait for tone before dialing? I could never be bothered. Might have to rip it out and have a go :D Can’t remember the site it was on though!

Too bad there’s no rotary phone in the demo. Loved it!

waste of fuckin time.

402? nebraska
447 6573

please, please change the passwords you used. I do have the passwords as well but won’t post them.

Just had to watch this again after downloading it.
Makes me want to go buy an acoustic coupler off ebay.