Demo: 300 Baud Acoustic Coupler Modem — Connects to Internet Surfs Wikipedia

Published on May 31st, 2009

Posted by McCullough in Whatever happened to.., tech

Circa 1964 Livermore Data Systems “Model A” Acoustic Coupler Modem, live demonstration.

27 users responded in " Demo: 300 Baud Acoustic Coupler Modem — Connects to Internet Surfs Wikipedia "

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# 1 amodedoma said, on May 31st, 2009 at 2:07 pm

My first access to a computer was using an old teletype terminal with a 300 baud accoustic coupler. At the time it seemed to me as fast as necessary – the teletype could hardly printout fast enough to keep up.

# 2 Jägermeister said, on May 31st, 2009 at 2:21 pm

Cool video! 300 baud modem… now, that brings back memories of the BBS era.

# 3 bill said, on May 31st, 2009 at 2:30 pm

I did ‘ARCHIE’ to the University of Minnesota and got a flan recipe for my wife… 300 was sooo fast!

# 4 bill said, on May 31st, 2009 at 2:33 pm

It might have been ‘gopher’ also…

# 5 pwuk said, on May 31st, 2009 at 3:06 pm

Cue Monty Python…

300 baud? Luxury, in my day we ‘ad to make do wit’ pigeons…

# 6 jim said, on May 31st, 2009 at 3:15 pm

Ya, but can he get any porn with it.

# 7 dbmacg said, on May 31st, 2009 at 3:17 pm

The modem shown here was designed to run with the lid closed. I once worked with an 1200 baud acoustic coupler required complete room silence to run. (Don’t speak or cough.)

Weren’t telex machines set to run at 75 baud?

# 8 Zybch said, on May 31st, 2009 at 3:24 pm

Thats just cool. My 1st modem was an 18″ long 8bit ISA card running at a blazingly fast 2400baud. Downloading anything was like watching a slug race in a salt factory, still faster than 300baud though.

# 9 Alfred1 said, on May 31st, 2009 at 3:32 pm

Where was John C Dvorak when this technology came online?

I blame him for the death of cpm…my poor kaypro…rip.

# 10 sargasso said, on May 31st, 2009 at 3:55 pm

This makes me feel old.

# 11 John Paradox said, on May 31st, 2009 at 4:22 pm

HELLO PROFESSOR FALKEN

WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME?

J/P=?

# 12 AdmFubar said, on May 31st, 2009 at 4:23 pm

i wonder how long it took for his box to be hacked as he showed everyone the number to call and his id and password…
oopps

# 13 Jägermeister said, on May 31st, 2009 at 4:24 pm

#6 – jim – Ya, but can he get any porn with it.

Yes.

# 14 Jägermeister said, on May 31st, 2009 at 4:28 pm

#11 – John Paradox – WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME?

…

# 15 Greg Allen said, on May 31st, 2009 at 5:30 pm

I’m impressed that they had 300 baud acoustic modems in 1964. I bought one twenty years later to use my Tandy 102 in hotel rooms. It was actually quite useful! I miss those BBS days.

# 16 deowll said, on May 31st, 2009 at 7:18 pm

I guess I was slow getting on line. The gopher net was going away just about the time I got on line.

Because gopher net sites loaded fast and the graphic using sites loaded slow on my machine I wasn’t all that happy about the change at the time.

I have sometimes wondered if some astute business or organization with limited resources or just an urge to save money might still be using the gopher net to shove data around at blazing speeds without running up a big ISP bill.

# 17 George said, on May 31st, 2009 at 8:31 pm

Cool. I haven’t thought about a Bell 103 compatible modem for years.

I recall in the early 1980’s I dabbled in the Apple ][ warez scene, and the modem to have then was the Novation Applecat. This internal modem had the wonderful ability to transition from Bell 103 300 baud full-duplex mode to Bell 202 1200 baud half-duplex. The best implementation of this was through a program called CatSend which would function as a terminal at 300 baud, but when in file transfer mode (uni-directional) would step up to 1200 baud. It took about 25 minutes to send a 140K floppy versus well over an hour at 300 baud, and it had the little bonus of being able to text message back and forth while the transfer was taking place.

Imagine that. People were piggybacking text on a datastream years before SMS messaging came along.

# 18 Somebody said, on May 31st, 2009 at 11:50 pm

What, no FIDO?

# 19 amodedoma said, on June 1st, 2009 at 1:01 am

#13 thanks for the cool link! ASCII porn, now that really takes me back.

# 20 Stu Mulne said, on June 1st, 2009 at 2:34 am

Brings back memories….

I drooled over a 1200 baud glass teletype back in that era, and actually used some Model 33 Teletypes with Bell 103 (110 baud “Omni”) couplers. Worked….

The first one I ever owned personally (as distinct from the former day job) was a cheap Radio Shack direct-wired modem. 300 baud…. It worked well enough that five or six years later, when they about gave ‘em away, I got one for one of our divisions as a total disaster backup. (Running 1200 baud MNP by then.)

My favorite story was a 14,400 Microcom or Hayes with an idiot light that indicated MNP was working.

El Presidente demanded that I rent a Toshiba laptop for somebody or other in the company, and get it in NOW! I spec’d MNP or LAPM because I knew what his situation would be in FL, and when the laptop came in, I loaded it with the necessary software as EL Presidente was beating on me to get it back out to FedEx. Then I tested the thing by calling a host in a back room. Very strange – lots of line noise…. Our phone system was hilariously flaky, but the MNP error detection easily handled that.

Took a walk into the back room and the MNP idiot light was out….

A few minutes of muttering and init string hammering resulted in a definite error message when I tried to tell the modem to switch on MNP. So now I gotta tell the boss that this box wasn’t going to work unless we spring for a Worldport (remember those?) and that’d take a couple days, AND the guy in FL would never be able to install it. (That guy had ONE item on his menu – DOS in those days – and used to call me for help on what to do to start his program…. He actually used the dumb thing or I would have kept him out of that loop entirely.

Naturally, the boss didn’t understand…. When I bought my first 1200 baud MNP modem (maybe $850), he dropped a note from the Wall Street Journal selling modems for $90-ish. For a Commodore…. “Why can’t we use those?” Never did quite explain it….

I was about to go tell El Presidente the bad news when the UPS truck arrived with the FL guy’s old laptop, back from repair. A quick check-out, and it went back to Shipping for a FedEx ride. Then Toshiba Tech Support (tied into the rental deal) calls me to tell me that the rental agency had goofed – the modem in that box didn’t support MNP….

I told the rental folks I wanted full credit, and would be sending the thing back as soon as I got an RMA documenting that. Then somebody in another division found out that we had a loose laptop and had enough “pull” to demand it. My explanations that it was rented were ignored. (RENTED, not leased!) For a while…. She did buy the Worldport, btw….

Eventually the other cost-cutters (she was supposed to be one) got wind of this and bought it for her… I couldn’t get printers for “production”, but…. They eventually fired me. My replacement needed an assistant within a couple weeks…. Never work for family – I would have had a great “age discrimination” suit….

Regards,

# 21 Patrick said, on June 1st, 2009 at 8:52 am

300 baud, that was the same speed as the modem I used to do online shopping with in ‘84.

# 22 pedro said, on June 1st, 2009 at 11:16 am

#21 Not as old, but I remember doing online shoping thru compuserve, as well as buying plane tickets thru a direct connection that compuserve had with SABRE. It was so amazing to be able to have all that “power” at the time. 2400 was the connection speed back then.

When that SABRE link died, all those accounts were transfered to Travelocity.

Now compuserve is finally dying (at least the “Calssic” access) this month.

Man, we getting old or what!

# 23 pedro said, on June 1st, 2009 at 11:18 am

Which reminds me. John, are you gonna give a nod to Compuserve now that is being (unceremoniously)shut down?

# 24 Cranky said, on June 1st, 2009 at 11:43 am

300 baud? Why we WISHED we had 300 baud. We had 150 and we LIKED it. Not so sensitive to line noise by gadfry. And the paper tape punch couldn’t keep up with that anyway.

# 25 Tomas said, on June 1st, 2009 at 7:20 pm

#24. 150 baud?…Why we WISHED we had 150 baud, Hell, we were lucky to average 3 smoke signals, per minute!!!! And we LIKED it!!!

WHY YOU YOUNG PUNKS AND YOUR FANCY SCHMANTZY MIGABYTES AND SUCH!!!!

Nice post Cranky.

# 26 888 said, on June 1st, 2009 at 9:07 pm

#6 – yes:

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b’ger/VK \______________`. \___\ .
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‘-`

# 27 HARRYMCAULIFFE said, on June 12th, 2009 at 7:27 am

Hi my name is Harry McAuliffe I own a 300 baud working acustic coupler VEN-TEL Santa Clara, Ca Model A/C 103 Serial number 6430. Is it worth anything ??

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