My colleague found this during a recent lab cleanup.
Posted by legoman_86@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 49 comments
The craftsmanship of this is amazing! If I had the time, I'd try to get it working.
nixiebunny@reddit
Too bad AOL just announced that they’re shutting off dialup modem access.
oboshoe@reddit
this is going to be a 110 - 300 baud (bps) coupler.
Even in the 80s, 300 baud was a pretty miserable experience for file transfer. taking about an hour to transfer 90k.
so about 30 minutes to render an icon.
to render a typical web page, i bet it would take a full day.
MakoRed0@reddit
Surely being able to download a floppy in an hour in the 80's would have been great back then? Considering some C64 tapes could take up to half an hour to load..
oboshoe@reddit
I'm writing this message on an Apple M4, but the 3 biggest single upgrades in my 40+ years of computing
1) Moving from cassettes to floppy (about 20 times faster storage)
2) Moving from 300 baud to 1200 baud for BBS/File downloads (4 times faster)
3) Going from 56k dialup to 768k DSL
Things have really leveled out for awhile now. (except in the area of AI)
MakoRed0@reddit
I'm only 46 but guess in my lifetime the 3 biggest leaps that come to mind..
1 Floppy to CD 2 Discrete GPUs 3 Dial up to BroadBand
Steelejoe@reddit
I would add HD to SSD to this list. That one caught my by surprise
MakoRed0@reddit
Yeah definitely a big quality of life upgrade. The upgrade from HDD to SATA SSD was great but SATA SSD to m.2/NVME was really good to. Must have been insane for anyone moving from HDD to M.2
new2bay@reddit
Yeah, I’m pretty sure I can type faster than 300 baud.
oboshoe@reddit
yes. 300 baud is 30 characters a second exactly (8 bit ascii plus 1 stop bit and 1 parity bit)
so 2.8 seconds per 80 character line.
nixiebunny@reddit
Yes, I used these daily in high school in the 1970s. Ours wasn’t so snazzy.
guiverc@reddit
Worse, the acoustic couplers had a normal handset connected to them, with the design of the normal handset expecting hand movement during operation which was needed to prevent noise from appearing...
Every ~twenty minutes you had to softly shake an acoustic coupler (with phone attached) or else speed dropped to an increasingly bad error count due to noise as crystals in phone handset hadn't been moved... This prevented you from downloading decent files overnight as by ~forty minutes chances of getting a full 128-byte packet clean was near zero.
Of note, web pages in that era were pure text, as they didn't use HTML and were thus only text from a BBS or other server. Pages would appear in mere seconds as pictures (if present) were just ASCII text representations anyway.
StuE2@reddit
Lol
AdhesivenessSea1009@reddit
You can always host your own, all you need is a friend to run an older machine like xp to host the service, and dial into his number.
nixiebunny@reddit
I think I’d rather dial into a PDP-10 emulator.
Journ9er@reddit
Came here to suggest the OP try to connect to AOL with it before the pull the plug.
BobChica@reddit
There are still other dialup providers around. AOL has never been the only one. NetZero is still around and even offers ten hours per month for free.
Joe_Early_MD@reddit
Wow!
RetinaJunkie@reddit
Just when AOL wants to discontinue dial up internet 👆🏻
sonicjesus@reddit
Defiantly the most vintage piece of equipment I've ever seen on this sub.
Zardoz84@reddit
Expensive-Claim-7830@reddit
That’s so cool!!! What exactly can you use it for? Without sounding totally stupid what is it?
Stoney3K@reddit
It's an old modem with an acoustic coupler - back in those days, you didn't own the phone and you weren't allowed to plug anything else into the phone line, so you needed to (literally) put the phone handset onto a speaker and microphone built into the modem to dial into something.
These couplers became useless when phone companies allowed other people's devices to be plugged into their phone exchange, so modems could have their own hard-wired connection to the telephone jack.
Modems like this were used by people who worked remotely and dialed into the corporate HQ mainframe from their office. The other end would be connected to a terminal or maybe even a teletype.
NightmareJoker2@reddit
I kind of want one of these. They are priceless treasure. 🫠
Foreign-King7613@reddit
That's a good find.
felixthecat59@reddit
Cool. An acoustic modem. A whopping 300 baud.
iMadrid11@reddit
I now want a wooden box PC case with a leather handle.
hyperdream@reddit
I'm assuming it's a Livermore modem... Hackaday has a teardown of one.
grizzlor_@reddit
Based on dovetailed construction of the box, this is probably an early one too. They mention this in the Hackaday article.
rwblue4u@reddit
Good old acoustic coupler there :)
trash-juice@reddit
Reminds me of my first time … first time on Compuserve!
W0CBF@reddit
No more on AOL!
phoenixxl@reddit
Acoustic coupler .
bigbigdummie@reddit
Depends. Are you DCE or DTE?
jet_heller@reddit
If it doesn't work, it's most likely because of capacitors.
NorCalFrances@reddit
It's always capacitors. Someday archaeologists will dig up our relics and create "now hear me out" stories about how our civilization fell because our devices self-destructed.
JT_3K@reddit
Ooh a bank, that could be useful. I’ll make a note of that one.
wyohman@reddit
Very nice acoustic coupler
sidusnare@reddit
Very old school modem, acoustic coupler, I'd love to have one.
Computers_and_cats@reddit
I have one of those as well. Never figured I would see another one in the wild. I think I am missing the power cord though.
Practical-Hand203@reddit
Is it in a wooden box as well? Thought that was a custom jobbie at first, but Google does yield similar boxes with handles.
ResponsibilityNo7189@reddit
I have seen two of these, with wooden boxes, in the wild. So it's not "uncommon". Just a sign of a bygone era, when the electronics was so rare and expensive that you could afford to wrap it in a beautiful wooden case. You see the same for old scientific instruments, like voltmeters, amplifiers, etc.
NorCalFrances@reddit
Wood was a lot cheaper back then, too, and far more people had skill working with it. My college had a shop run by Facilities the would build boxes like that for the School of Sciences. They did metal ones also, but those were more expensive and required a less common skill and therefore also required more justification, like a dean's signature. The wooden ones could be had for the asking. Well, maybe that and a little bit of bluffing sometimes.
mjp31514@reddit
My dad has a really old voltmeter in a wooden box like this. Still works, too.
Computers_and_cats@reddit
I would have to dig it up out of my closet but I believe yours looks 90% similar to mine. One way or another it has a nice wood housing.
ObsessiveRecognition@reddit
That's awesome
chronos7000@reddit
Good thing you've got the power cord, those old "Pre-IEC" cords were available in two different wiring specifications and you better believe that reverse-polarity protection was almost unheard of in those days. Sometimes surplus houses carry them but then you must verify that they have the correct polarity.
Infinite-Land-232@reddit
Ditch your internet bill now! /s
oboshoe@reddit
wow.
i'm mostly in this forum for the memories since most of the stuff i see here is from my early career.
but rarely - i see something i'd love to have.
this is one of those times. that is really cool
tomxp411@reddit
Wow. That is just amazing.
That's definitely worth setting up somewhere as a demo unit...