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."

Comments

Oldest Working?

[mgbastard]

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.

Model M Keyboard

[Bai jie]

I still use my old 1984 IBM Model M Keyboard. I will weep when/if that keyboard ever dies.

2 modems, 4 cans, 2 strings....

[wowbagger]

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.

Re:2 modems, 4 cans, 2 strings....

[Rorschach1]

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.

Commadore Amiga 500

[Pvt_Ryan]

:D and I still love starting it up.. Nothing like the grinding of a floppy drive in the morning..

Re:My hammer.

[eln]

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:Just Throw It on the Meme Heap

[0100010001010011]

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.