45-Year-Old Modem Used To Surf the Web 622
EdIII writes with this awesome snippet from Hack a Day: "'[phreakmonkey] got his hands on a great piece of old tech. It's a 1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A Acoustic Coupler Modem. He recieved it in 1989 and recently decided to see if it would actually work. It took some digging to find a proper D25 adapter and even then the original serial adapter wasn't working because the oscillator depends on the serial voltage. He dials in and connects at 300baud. Then logs into a remote system and fires up lynx to load Wikipedia. Lucky for [phreakmonkey] they managed to decide on a modulation standard in 1962. It's still amazing to see this machine working 45 years later.' Although impractical for surfing the Internet today, there is something truly cool about getting a 45-year old modem to work with modern technology. The question I have, is what is the oldest working piece of equipment fellow Slashdotters have out there? I'm afraid as far back as I can go is a Number Nine Imagine 128 Series 2 Graphics card on a server still in use at my house which only puts me at about 14 years."
Oldest Working? (Score:5, Interesting)
Model M Keyboard (Score:5, Interesting)
2 modems, 4 cans, 2 strings.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've often wanted to dig up 2 acoustic coupled modems, 4 tin cans, and 2 strings, and see if I could get the modems to work over that.
Atari Baby (Score:3, Interesting)
Does test equipment count? (Score:4, Interesting)
I keep a Hewlitt-Packard oscilloscope out in my car that was manufactured sometime in the mid-50s.
It still works, but I've only had to use it about three times in my professional life.
Commadore Amiga 500 (Score:5, Interesting)
PowerMac 5400 (Score:4, Interesting)
Where'd you get a compatible handset? (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the acoustic couplers back in the day were fairly picky about the telephone handset used.
I make it a point to get rid of old digital gear, but I do have a telephone from the 1920s. It's still hooked up, and is one of the few reasons I still have a landline. It has the rayon-covered cord and everything.
How Old Is My Crap: Mac ][ci (Score:3, Interesting)
If we're gonna get into a how-old-is-my-crap thread: my oldest working gear is a 1989 Mac ][ci running NetBSD that I periodically haul out of the closet to use as a testbed within my private network. Used to be my dad's photoshop box, then handed down to my wife, and finally into my grubby paws. Its small, easy to store, boxy shape has saved it from her annual pogroms against old gear.
Re:My hammer. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:2 modems, 4 cans, 2 strings.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Try PSK31 (31.25 bps binary phase shift keying mode used for ham radio) with a couple of sound cards. It'll work over open air with a speaker and microphone. If you used two different carrier tones, you could probably do full duplex.
For my own implementation of PSK31, I once ran it at a carrier of 62.5 hz. Sounded more like war drums than a digital mode over my subwoofer, but it still decoded OK.
Re:My hammer. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think a lot of things in those days were built without a really good understanding of engineering, so things were typically over-engineered. Things were built far stronger than they needed to be because people didn't have a good understanding of the strengths of the materials they were using or of the physics being employed in their designs. Likewise, without a lot of advanced chemical and metallurgical expertise, they weren't able to create materials specifically to meet the demands of the job like we can today.
The result is they had things that were much stronger, but took a lot longer and cost a lot more to make. Now, we have things that are designed specifically to try and hit the sweet spot between durability and cost, and that can be efficiently mass produced. As a result, our stuff doesn't last as long, but we can afford to buy a whole lot more stuff.
Re:Oldest Working? (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple //e with 4-digit serial number, purchased February 1983, still in my attic. I haven't fired it up in years, and I might, this weekend. Mac Plus from 1986.
Old equipment. (Score:3, Interesting)
One of my friends came up with a Western Union teletype that still had some paper with their name along one edge. The paper was yellowed with age. The teletype used a 5-bit baudot code, which wikipedia says Western Union stopped using in 1950. We hacked a printer port into an Atari 800, and started putting out the baudot. We had plans to write things like "JAPAN BOMBS PEARL HARBOR!" or "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN!" which would have looked wicked on the yellow Western Union paper, but we settled for writing things like "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." and "All good men come to the aid of their country."
-Loyal
DSL modem, circa 2000 (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not ludicrously old, but: my DSL modem died a few months ago (my own fault -- if it has air vents in it, they may actually be there for a reason, not just to look cool and futuristic). I went into a bit of a panic, because, really, where does one get a DSL modem, especially if one suddenly has no Internet access? I feared calling Verizon would result in long delays, pricey expenditures, and/or bafflement.
Fortunately, a friend of mine up the street who I knew to be a bit of a tech hoarder still had his, even though he had switched to line-of-site wireless years ago. The modem was nearly 10 years old, and twice as big as the one I'd been using, but sure enough I just plugged it into my phone line and worked great -- same speeds I was getting with the old modem (2.8M down, 600K up). I was sort of shocked that something that old could just plug in to my current set up with no changes, but I suppose there haven't exactly been great strides in DSL technologies over the past decade or so.
Amiga 2000 to surf the web (Score:4, Interesting)
I still have an Amiga 2000 standing around from 1989 with a 8 Mhz 68000 CPU and 7 MB RAM. Funny thing about it is that it can run the relatively modern AmigaOS 3.1, for which reasonably well working graphical web browsers exist. Occasionally I fire it for fun just to demonstrate that 80's hardware can show web pages in a semi decent way. Configure it to run on a 640x400 screen with 8 shades of grey and it still shows most of the modern web sites that have some sort of accessibility fall back. It can do tables and basic CSS, so in some cases the results are almost indistinguishable from what you see on a modern browser. Of course it is awfully slow and needs several seconds to render a medium sized PNG image.
It's particular cool to show it too kids that think you need GHz's and GB's to surf the web.
Re:Anyone still paying for a phone? (Score:3, Interesting)
For retro shits-n-giggles, I have two rotary phones (one wall mount, one desk) that ring with bells, etc.. I have an Asterisk system in the house, separate extensions in each room. But for my office, I like the funky old classic. It works fine with a Linksys ATA (pulse dialing, ringing). On some devices (iAXY), pulse dialing and sufficient ring current isn't provided, so they don't work; but on devices that still support pulse dialing, they do work nicely.
I also have a hand-crank phone (turn the crank to ring the operator, to connect you, kinda thing). Obviously the cranking wouldn't do much (but maybe fry some equipment), but answering and holding a conversation works just fine. The electrical standards for telephony haven't changed since pretty much their inception (or at least they've kept an amazing amount of backwards compatibility).
Given that it's hooked to a modern Asterisk system (which in turn is hooked to the internet), this is older than that 1962 modem (circa 1940, I believe). Having a 1940's phone connected to VOIP is quite a kick...
What do I win?
Re:Just Throw It on the Meme Heap (Score:5, Interesting)
ping -c 5 -p 2B2B2B41544829
As recently as a few months ago a friend was on the internet with his laptop (running linux) and it was still susceptible to this. After about an hour of fun I remotely patched his modem for him. Those were the days.
*2B2B2B41544829 = +++ATH0, when the computer replies with the command it is intercepted locally and causes the modem to hang up.
Oldest Working? (Score:3, Interesting)
Computer related? ASR33 teletype (1965). I occasionally fire it up to show off my AIM-65 (1976).
Audio equipment? 1958 Harmon Kardon Stereo Festival TA230. I play MP3's through it on a pair of Klipsch KG2s (1982). Still sounds great.
got an 1924 Philco radio I just restored (Score:3, Interesting)
still working sporadically on a 1920s Kellogg oak wall phone, which still needs a network. got some working 00A, 01A, and D5A tubes, too.
no really fusty computer hardware left, except a core board from an old posting/billing workstation by NCR from about 1964. 2K, no expansion possible.
PDP-11 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:oldest pieces? (Score:1, Interesting)
Well as far as modem technology goes I've still got a classic 1200 baud Hayes modem; must be from the early 80s I would guess (perhaps older?);
Did you know many credit card terminals in stores still use 300 baud modems?
The reason is the credit card industry wanted modems that would work through the crappiest, noisiest phone lines, and they don't have much information to transfer back & forth. So no need for faster modems.
Seymour Cray and the common telephone (Score:3, Interesting)
An old friend of mine, the late Bob Long (W6QBN) once spoke of an incident when he was a tech at CDC many years ago. "Seymour hated phones" he said. One day he came to visit the Arbor Vitae Cybernet site in Los Angeles and everyone carefully removed all the telephones that would be in his path.
Unfortunately, one phone was overlooked, a hand set in the corner of the room that was dedicated to the use of just such an acoustic coupler. Murphy being an employee of the installation, the phone rang just as he walked through while talking to a couple of colleagues. Seymour ripped it out of the wall, opened a window and threw it out. "He didn't change his stride or even comment on it."
Ahh, acoustic couplers -- remember whistling into the phone and getting one to send an ack?
Netronics Elf II (Score:3, Interesting)
I still have my Netronics Elf II computer - the first one I owned. RCA 1802 processor, Hex keypad, 2 7-digit LED display!
I no longer have the OSI C2P that was my second computer, or the thermal printer/terminal with APL keyboard and integral 300 baud acoustic modem I used throughout college. I even had a beautiful ADM3A terminal for while.
1970s Era working systems (Score:2, Interesting)
An 1976 IMSAI 8080 with 64K RAM, dual 8 inch floppies, and 5.25 and 3.5 drives, equipped with a Centronics printer and a ASR33 Teletype with paper tape reader.
A 1977 Genrad Futuredata firmware development system with dual 8 inch floppies and EPROM burner
A 1974-era duplicate of Jonathan Titus's Mark-8, a 16K 8008-based system as shown in July 1974 Radio Electronics
Recently sold my working 1975/76 Altair 8800 with dual fixed-format 8 inch floppies, 64K RAM, Centronics printer, ASR33 Teletype with paper tape reader. All original MITS boards. Would boot Bill Gates original BASIC, as well as Altair DOS and CP/M 2.2. Complete with original doc in MITS binders.
A 1977 TRS-80 Model I 16K
A good number of misc S-100 boards for IMSAI and Altair
80's stuff:
Original 128K Macintosh with dual 3.5 drives - boots and runs
Cromemco SBC with 3K Basic in ROM
Masscomp 68010 RT Unix - boots and runs
A bunch of old accoustic modems...