It's Critter Time!

Does anyone have any modems to share?

This is a video I recorded a few years back on an iBook G4 connecting over dial-up, very retro!

https://photos.app.goo.gl/jbH1ZGBvzuDRDtmf8

Gosh, this was a sound I heard all too often just to get online. Times definitely have changed since.

When I got my first PC, we were still on dial-up, but the modems at that point were internal cards.

We did lose our first modem to a thunderstorm as kids. We unplugged the PC during it, but not the phone line and an electric surge melted our modem.

I think by the time I was old enough to use the computer myself, my mother had switched us over to DSL, which would have been in the early 2000s. I do have a fascination for the technology in a anemoia sense. I have played around with setting up a computer to computer link with some old modems which was an interesting experience.

Enbyeon wrote: Tue Jul 15, 2025 4:52 am We did lose our first modem to a thunderstorm as kids. We unplugged the PC during it, but not the phone line and an electric surge melted our modem.

Wow, that is really unfortunate.

linuxavali wrote: Tue Jul 15, 2025 1:54 pm I think by the time I was old enough to use the computer myself, my mother had switched us over to DSL, which would have been in the early 2000s. I do have a fascination for the technology in a anemoia sense. I have played around with setting up a computer to computer link with some old modems which was an interesting experience.

Oh? Which kind of setup did you have for playing around?

Dang i ALSO screech across long distances.

Modems are a LITTLE before my time and there's only a vague window of time from which I remember them. This however is still enough to kinda make me wanna mess around with a couple of the modern instances of them that are still kicking around somehow. Have NO idea how well UK infrastructure would even handle that though

Beancatte wrote: Tue Jul 15, 2025 3:07 pm Dang i ALSO screech across long distances.

Modems are a LITTLE before my time and there's only a vague window of time from which I remember them. This however is still enough to kinda make me wanna mess around with a couple of the modern instances of them that are still kicking around somehow. Have NO idea how well UK infrastructure would even handle that though

Do not know how the UK does it, but there are POTS Simulators you can buy and setup to connect to another system connectee to the same simulator. This would remove the need for an actual phone service and is how I do modem stuff these days, so everything is entirely local! Can even send faxes to a connectee fax machine!

XerShadowTail wrote: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:27 pm Oh? Which kind of setup did you have for playing around?

I don't even remember at this point. It was early high-school I think and they were in the tech lab in a box.

linuxavali wrote: Wed Jul 16, 2025 11:21 am

XerShadowTail wrote: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:27 pm Oh? Which kind of setup did you have for playing around?

I don't even remember at this point. It was early high-school I think and they were in the tech lab in a box.

Ahh, indeed.

When I was young in the late 90s, my dad once connected the family computer to the Internet via modem - I remember the loud squealing noises that it made as it connected and how the images took forever to load. It probably cost a small fortune as well, so we didn't bother to do it again and the Internet stayed this nebulous concept to me until about 2000, when we upgraded to broadband and I was blown away by how quickly every page loaded. Before long, I was surfing kid-friendly websites and playing Flash games during the Golden Age of the Web...

Ah, yes... modem noises! I recently restored a TI terminal with an acoustic coupler. 300 bps, 7bit ASCII. Back to the roots - I don't even want to know how long a modern website would take to load over that...

I remember using dial-up as late as 2010, until we finally got access to ADSL in the house we had moved to. These were dark times for Australia hahaha.

It didn't help that I was staffing two websites at that time, that did involve video or large images. That was an incredible pain in the arse. Skype wasn't happy, and IRC buffer queues were an actual problem.

This was still substantially better than having no internet at all. I'm bloody grateful for the NBN rollout programme regardless hahaha.

I'll have to rummage through the wardrobe a bit, but I think I got a Gandalf stashed somewhere.
If I find it, I'll take some photos!

It would be neat to try it on the air at some point, too.

There's a PCIe soft modem I remember getting for my custom-built PC from 2011 because I wanted to try out the Fax & Scan feature for Windows 7 to do some uncommon business-related transactions without lugging around a big machine. I then put together a DreamPi setup back in '16 to play some games online and found out that it does not work with it, so I got one of those Dell RD02-D400 modems and it worked like a charm.

Way before that, in my elementary/middle school days I would connect to the Internet through AOL on the ME/XP desktops. I could not figure out for the life of me why I couldn't connect the Dreamcast to the Internet back then until I learned more recently that AOL used a primary authentication protocol, much to my disappointment. X>

It was an interesting time though, especially when the Internet connection was shared on the same line as our landline phone, haha.

i used dial-up until 2010, but i don't recall the make of the last modem i used, even if i remember the general look of it and its source (radioshack, RIP). it was a dull cream color and... i think it must have plugged into a USB slot on my then-laptop, but i can't remember. shoutouts to bluelight internet for sucking so bad and teaching me how to be patient for 3 minutes while a webpage loads.

This is a board from a Gandalf data set manufactured in 1973. Terminal equipment connector on the lower left, power and phone line on the upper side, signal LEDs on the left. Probably a Bell 103 standard.