Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

45-Year-Old Modem Used To Surf the Web

Posted by timothy on from the cool-wooden-case dept.

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."

2 of 622 comments (clear)

  1. Token Ring out in the field... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I had a one-night tech job a few years ago where a major financial institution was switching the network from Token Ring to Ethernet, even though all the workstations came equipped with built-in Ethernet and the building was wired for Ethernet. I made extra money that night because the younger, non-certified techs couldn't read the directions on the worksheet. They plugged the Ethernet cable into the Token Ring NIC card (which supported two cable types) and didn't run the network utility to see if the connection worked. The hardest part of that job was finding a taxi cab to take home at 3:00AM.

  2. Re:oldest piece of "equipment" by sexconker · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Let's just bring this allllllllllll the way around.

    There needs to be a pregnancy test that shows abort retry fail on a positive result. (And nothing on a negative result).

    Abort is obvious
    Retry is the panic stricken OMG NO GOTTA DO ANOTHER TEST
    Fail is accepting your fate and living with the "error"

    Obvious, yet fun.
    Almost as fun as the obvious idea I have for Left 4 Dead. Once the SDK is finally out, someone needs to swap the models.
    Louis = Obama
    Francis = Biden
    Bill = McCain
    Zoey = Palin

    Swapping in audio clips from the campaigns last year would be icing on the cake.