Welcome to the #TelephoneExchange shed my new beepyboopy friend!
This is a “GPO Modem 2B” - a #dialup #modem… phone line in, RS232 out at a whopping 300bps!
It’s all discrete components (no ICs here!) and beautifully built with all the diodes/resistors mounted on little plastic carriers.
The modulator, demodulator etc are on separate, pull-out cards
It’s a gorgeous chunk of engineering, that I’ll be carefully powering up over the next few weeks!
Thanks for the swap @anachrocomputer
The recent "Watch Mojo" video on YouTube mentioned dial-up internet. That was all that was available in my semi-rural area when I bought my first computer in 1999. We didn't get DSL until around 2003.
Reminded me of a day pre-2003 I was off work, so I spent most of the day online. Mom was working, she was a postal worker delivering mail. Suddenly, I hear a knock at the door. It was mom, asking if I was okay, since she had car trouble on her mail route and tried to call me (before cellphones, she used the phone of a person on her route), and she said she kept getting a busy signal. She got another postal worker to help her finish her route after having her car towed, then brought her home. Had to explain I was on the internet and wasn't expecting any calls on my day off. Dial-up ties up the phone line.
After DSL became available, that problem was no longer an issue, even though it used the same phone line, just on a different frequency. Mom retired in 2008, and she lived here after that, and rented out her next door trailer. Today, even though mom has since passed, my internet is with the local cable company and I use a cellphone as my main phone. #2000s #cable #dialup #dsl #internet #mom
@vwestlife #Funfact: In #Europe, #Cband dishes weren't common so #SatelliteInternet used simiar #Tuner cards with #VSAT terminals, usually accepting downlinks from regular commercial #TV #satellites that were just data channels on #ASTRA and/or #Eutelsat #HotBird in the #KuBand...
I've got one of those:
Basically a #Router with some #Linux on Ethernet, Power & F-Screw-Connector on the rear, #56k& #ISDN #Modem|s and USB up-front.
As the snow keeps falling outside, I am reminded that snowdays are the best time to BBS. Always have been.
https://bytecellar.com/2022/01/11/bbsing-in-the-snow-is-the-best-way-to-log-in/
Spent most of New Year's Eve and this morning in bed with a 101º fever. In my moments of lucidity I watched some of the nerdiest videos I could find:
- 1.9 Petabytes - Expanding the Synology NAS
- Why is the invisible part of this radio tower so important?
- Rescuing the TOTAL CONTROL from an abandoned dialup ISP
- How a Steam Locomotive Works (Union Pacific "Big Boy")
- Hacking a Motorola Automatic License Plate Reader - Firmware Extraction and Password Cracking
Highly recommend as background watching for nerds. https://vees.net/blog/2024/12/31/
A discussion about modem sounds over on bsky reminded me that people seem to always reference diagrams or recordings of 33.6K or 56Kbps modems. I never had such a luxuriously fast modem. 1200bps and later 9600bps were the speeds of my dialup/BBS days.
Luckily there's a nice youtube video collecting a variety of connection speed handshakes for the better indulgence of one's nostlagia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xalTFH5ht-k
It has also occurred to me that I can string up a #VOIP #Gateway to the #PBX and run it to my router, and then use Google Voice to give myself essentially a free #landline #telephone number this way. And then I can even go further and built my own #dialup #ISP from this. And then I can connect my fucking #Sega #Dreamcast to the #internet over actual #dialup 56k.
And yes, I'm doing this.
@chrastecky S.u.S.E. 4.4. Wanted to setup a samba server and setup NAT so I could have multiple machines connected to the internet at once with my #dialup connection. This was 1997.
I have updated my BBSing resource page, for anyone with a hankerin' to "dial in" once again.
Counterpoint, when I first came on the 'net, we always had to pretend to be over eighteen and try and act mature or we'd get instantly bounced from the sites. Which made fandom interactions much more pleasant and less screamy/shouty.
So, I'm good with going back to teenagers having to try and be more grown up than the grown ups. Even now I'm one of the grown ups.
Also, we should bring back the #dialup noise to log on.
Once upon a time, someone referred to those stuck on #dialup Internet connectivity as “you analog kiddies”.
This annoyed me because that signal is not analog by any stretch of the imagination. It is quite obviously modulated to represent discrete symbols, making it by definition a digital signal.
Slow? Crappy? Yes, absolutely. Analog? No.
Was Prodigy an online service, a band, a rapper, a Pokémon series, a Star Trek series, or something else?
Since I have nothing (sorry, I mean *EVERYTHING*) to do on Thanksgiving, I'm premiering my "online in '89" talk from @demosplash on YouTube in ~2 hours (8pm EST):
I've just had the displeasure of using #HP #Aruba #Greenlake #HPGreenlake control panel via a 3mbps internet connection.
No lie.. It took _minutes_ for the landing page to load.
How do people build such bloated systems?
#Dialup
Do you still remember dial-up internet access?
In the museum, we've set up a simulation of it using two old PCs and two external U.S. Robotics modems.
#computermuseum #computerhistory #slovenia #vintagecomputer #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #dialup
"what's a 
