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45-Year-Old Modem Used To Surf the Web
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."
I don't really use it anymore, but I have a TRS-80 Model IV and it works. I haven't used the modem in a long time. That's only about 26 years old though. The PowerBook 165c also works, and that's from 1993, making it 16 years old. Bonus for the SCSI ethernet adapter.
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
I still use my old 1984 IBM Model M Keyboard. I will weep when/if that keyboard ever dies.
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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I have an Atari 400 I still drag out from time to time when I get an itch to play the "definitive" (to me at least!) versions of Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Defender. Bought as a Xmas present when I was 9 which puts it at 28 years old. :)
I also still have my old Apple ][ bought 4 years later with the "CP/M card" and a 300 baud modem. Hmm... I think I'm going to have to some surfing tonight! ;)
astroturtle
--- http://www.astroturtle.com
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.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
:D and I still love starting it up.. Nothing like the grinding of a floppy drive in the morning..
My stepson currently has a PowerMac 5400 in his room, with a video in card. That came out in 1996, so it's about 13 years old. Until recently, he'd use it for watching VHS movies & playing his XBox.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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.
I got iron padlock with key that was made in the 1860s.
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.
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.
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.
I programmed a PDP-11 in graduate school to pull data from my vapor deposition rig. Circa 1975 or so. Gotta love those 8" floppy disks. I don't know about today, but four or five years ago I went back to my graduate lab for a visit, and there it was still chugging my code along. Why replace it if it ain't broke?
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.