Video: 45 year old modem used to dial into web, view Wikipedia, correct the entry on Klaus Nomi
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted May 28th 2009 5:37AM
posted May 28th 2009 5:37AM
We've just been hepped to a video by someone named Phreakmonkey, wherein he gets his hands on a Model A Acoustic Coupler Modem and puts it through its ever lovin' paces. Manufactured by Livermore Data Systems ca. 1964, the 300 baud device uses an analog signal powered by the computer's serial port. Of course, getting this thing up and running required scrounging up cables, adapters, and a twenty year old telephone -- but the result? Pure geek goodness. What're you waiting for? Squeeze past the break to watch this dude dial into a server, fire up Lynx, and visit Wikipedia, old school.
[Via Hack-A-Day]
[Via Hack-A-Day]
Should have been a rotary dial phone, for greater period accuracy. ;)
300 baud!!! I remember getting my first 300 baud modem... it was twice as fast as the 150baud I had before. Then I bought a 1200 baud..... wow..... the speed.... on my VT100 the characters popped up like lighting. ASCII porn was now possible to view in a timely manner.
Need some window trim work?
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Internet
My very first modem was a 300 baud acoustic couple Radio Shack model. It was a lot sleaker than the model in this article, and it was slow as sin. I remember the very first time I connected to Compuserve. Good times.
Not to downplay the coolness of that, because it is amazing. But he wasn't actually downloading the wikipedia web page over 300 baud, he was connecting to a Linux terminal over 300 baud and lynx was running on a terminal at his work which was downloading the page over a faster connection. So the HTML was being downloaded at his work, and just what was shown on the terminal (the text and screen layout) was being transmitted over 300 baud. Pulling up wikipedia over 300 baud since it would have to download all of the HTML of the entire document would be much slower.
Without HTML, how would Lynx be laying out the screen or providing links?
Those hilarious BBS's. you gonna drink the rest of that beer?
Hey, there was nothing like playing Risk everyday and having your computer set on redial to get the line!! Man I miss my 8086!!!!
Hahhaha memories.
My first modem was also an acoustic coupler beast - and I didn't even have a touch-tone phone - I had to dial with ROTARY. Ugh!
Had that thing slung off a TRS-80 Model 1 with the expansion box. Woo a whole 48k (yes K) of RAM!
He's had it since the 80's and he's just now trying to get it to work?
I would have been trying to BBS with it the first day I got it.
I'll burn some books to clean up the shelve space!
Kudos to the super nerds out there!
I never want to watch this again.
This is epic. I actually got goosebumps.
I'm confused about something... You are connecting to a system at work, which then appears to telnet into another machine at work. From that machine (running Linux) you are then running lynx and loading a Wikipedia page. Since lynx is running on that Linux system, not your local system, it is connecting to Wikipedia via its own connection, not your neat modem. The slowless you are seeing is not the time it takes for the HTTP request to complete, but the time it takes for lynx to render itself over your slow connection to your screen. No?
To you, and the others above who are making similar points:
Are you thereby asserting that all the people who dialed into terminal servers, UNIX boxen, &etc prior to ~1995 were "not on the Internet" because the IP protocol didn't terminate at the CPU that happened to be physically closest to them?
Wikipedia is sending the data that was appearing on the screen. Sure, the IP packets and HTML was being decoded upstream and only the final results were being sent down the modem because.. well, when all you had was 30 characters per second you *had* to do it that way.
I thought of this too, and a few days ago managed to get a seriously-relaxed-PPP config to work across this thing. DNS killed it. By the second or third recursive DNS query the line became so saturated that the LCP PPP headers would timeout despite my extremely relaxed PPP settings and the thing would drop the connection.
So, I disabled DNS and used just the /etc/hosts file. Result? Standard 56-byte payload PING packets took ~5000ms. (That's five seconds each.) Establishing an actual TCP connection worked if you did them _one at a time_. Trying to establish more than one concurrently caused the second and all subsequent ones to timeout.
Loading a web page via Firefox almost worked, once I also disabled all it's "Check for Updates", "Check for Phishing", and any other things that caused unnecessary net traffic.
But even then, it would time out before rendering an entire page. Maybe get a logo image down and part of the main HTML, but that's about it. It was hilariously slow. I was going to make a video of that, but the process of trying to load just google.com took more than the 10-minute YouTube video limit, and it would bore everyone to tears.
So there's the short answer to the assertions that since I'm dialed into another machine that is on a faster connection, I'm "not really on the net" with the modem. :-)
Cheers!
- K.C.
@K.C. Get the FireFox Add on called User Agent Switcher and put in the user agent from a mobile phone that doesnt have a decent browser. Some sites, like Google, will pick up on the new Agent and give you a VERY slimmed down version of the page.
SO AWESOME.
Bet it is used to upload firmware into old alarm systems.