Before the days of mobile broadband, and before broadband itself even, there was a time where Internet access was provided by phone lines. To get onto a BBS or chat on ICQ required dialing a phone number and accoustically coupling a computer to the phone system. The digital data transmitted as audio didn’t have a lot of bandwidth by today’s standards but it was revolutionary for the time. [Nino] is taking us back to that era by using a serial modem at his house and a device that can communicate to it through any phone, including a public pay phone.
As someone in the present time can imagine, a huge challenge of this project wasn’t technical. Simply finding a working public phone in an era of smartphones was a major hurdle, and at one point involved accidentally upsetting local drug dealers. Eventually [Nino] finds a working pay phone that takes more than one type of coin and isn’t in a loud place where he can duct tape the receiver to his home brew modem and connect back to his computer in his house over the phone line like it’s 1994 again.
Of course with an analog connection like this on old, public hardware there were bound to be a few other issues as well. There were some quirks with the modems including them not hanging up properly and not processing commands quickly enough. [Nino] surmises that something like this hasn’t been done in 20 years, and while this might be true for pay phones we have seen other projects that use VoIP systems at desk phones to accomplish a similar task.
Ah, the old days of putting Blu-Tak around the ends of the headset, wrapping the acoustic coupler in a towel to isolate vibration, and playing Status Quo on the headphones too loud.
Hi! I wouldn’t call it “good”, though – but I’d imagine it was interesting, exciting era for sure. 😎
IMHO, in terms of signal quality/reliability using such a coupler roughly was the equivalent to using AFSK (audio FSK) and a radio transceiver’s microphone/ear phone jack
In amateur radio (for Packet-Radio/RTTY) instead of using proper, direct FSK.
Traditional acoustic couplers had a switch for 300/1200 Baud and answer/originate mode.
That’s important for making out a connection.
Hayes modems normally (unless forced) must talk to each others to find out which tone pairs and modulation schemes are used? I don’t know.
Anyway, the higher end acoustic couplers had been built into wooden boxes,
so the handset could be locked inside the box and would be acoustically insulated against environmental noise.
Example: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8411189/acoustic-data-coupler
Of course, in the hacker scene the cheaper plastic Dataphon (?) couplers had been used instead.
So it’s understandable that there’s not same kind of mental bond for the “professional” acoustic couplers. They had been used by business dudes, rather.
But that’s just my opinion. I didn’t mean to criticise the article or video in any way.
It was well done, I think. Also love the use of the different laptops! Kudos!
At home, I would have use an DOS-based BBS software, though.
Some had ANSI graphics and featured online games, such Trade Wars. Maybe next time? :)