[TriLUG] Piece of History

[Brian McCullough]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 05:15:52PM -0500, Justis Peters wrote:
> >   
> Greg and Tarus,
> 
> Good to see your names!  It's been too long since we've talked.  I hope 
> you're both doing well.
> 
> If the two of you are going to play jacks and queens when I have a king 
> in my hand, I've got to put my cards on the table.  My first modem was 
> 300 baud and it plugged into the joystick port on my Atari 800.  When I 
> later moved to 1200 baud, it was quite refreshing.
> 
> Does anybody have the ace?  Acoustic coupler with less than 300 baud 
> wins the round.  Unless there's a trump card or a joker I've never heard of.

Darn, I guess it's my turn.  How about an IBM Selectric-based "terminal"
with a 110 or 150 Baud modem built in, and attached to the Telephone
line, with a pair of cups ( acoustic coupler ) that you put the old
black telephone handset into.

I also had a Southwest Tech 6800 for which I had built a homebrew 
"telephone dialer" using a reed relay.  The 300 Baud ( I think ) modem
in this machine had all of the audio bits, but had no way of
manipulating the line on and off hook, so I took a reed relay and a
parallel port, and hey presto.  On and Off hook, and pulse dialling.


Brian