1964 modem--woodworking content

[J. Clarke]

[salty]

Real Steampunk! Thanks.

[lektric dan]

That's not steampunk, it's just *old*. A 300 baud modem in the original wooded box (a very *nice* box). If you want to go steampunk, build your own, maybe a cable or DSL modem in a nice walnut veneered case with dovetailed corners. Or if you want to go old-style, I've still got a few TI TMS99532 modem chips you could build an acoustic coupled modem from.

[salty]

Do you find it difficult walking around with that broomstick up your ass?

I still have my original IBM PC, complete with monitor, all accessories, docs, and discs. I even have the sales receipt. I bought it with the upgrade to 2 - 160k floppies. $4500

I also have a few TRS80-100 and TRS80-102's also complete and including acoustic couplers that fit over the ear and mouthpiece of pay phones. Used by newspaper reporters to file stories remotely into an ATEX/PDP11 mainframe at 300 BAUD.

[Nonny]

Old memories, not necessarily good. I sent a branch office an Epson MX80 printer with serial board installed, a Hayes 300 baud modem with the microswitch set to autoanswer, and a serial cable. In the home office, an underwriter would use an IBM PC with Visicalc 1.0 to do a spreadsheet, then use DOS "mode" command to redirect LPT1 to the Console, after establishing a phone call to the branch office and the autoanswer modem. The result was a printer connected to the computer by 500 miles of telephone line.

What's best was the printing speed. The 80CPS printer was faster than the 30CPS (300 baud) modem, so it would screeeeeck across the paper, then wait until the next print line was received. Still, it was a heck of a lot cheaper than putting another PC in the branch office.

[Mark & Juanita]

Pretty cool. Wonder how much that cost when it was new?

[Morris Dovey]

It was downright spendy! I priced them (~1969, I think) and suffered severe sticker shock. It was a couple of years before I could pick up a reasonably priced accoustic coupler - which I still have.

[lektric dan]

What's reasonably priced? Somewhere in my piles of junk I've got a Novation NovaCat. I think it was the astonomical sum of $100. It should still work, along with the box of S-100 stuff and a Mits Altair

8080. This was maybe ten years newer than yours - several generations for computers, even back then.

[Morris Dovey]

I don't know what kind it is - it's buried in storage with a pile of other old computer junk I'll probably never use again. In S-100 days I went with the IMSAI-8080 (but replaced the IMSAI 8080 CPU card with a TDL Z80 CPU). My first computer was a DIY wire-wrapped monster with 16K words of writable control store and 64K bytes of normal RAM - interesting mostly because the instruction set could be modified on the fly.

I liked the MITS, but liked IMSAI's control panel even more. :)

[lektric dan]

Ah, the "good old days". Debugging wire wrap was so much fun! Kids today have it so easy!

Yeah, that was the one with the "real computer" front panel.

[Brian]

I have the Model B, serial # 1625. They dropped the dovetails in favour of box joints but added a brass lid stay to keep the top open once it is tilted back all the way, and 2 lights on the side for traffic indicators.

cheers ...

brian

Stillwater Lake, NS