Slashdot Mirror
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."
My name is Junis, I am posting this from a Commodore64 and my 1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A Acoustic Coupler Modem in Afghanistan after years of oppression underneath the Taliban ...</meme>
And I suppose the instant I show any signs of lag in World of Warcraft I'll have to listen to my guildmates crack jokes about me using a 1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A Acoustic Coupler Modem ruining the raid.
My work here is dung.
is just as old as I am... I just needed a long time to know how to work it.
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
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'
My hammer was made in 1876.
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..
Most electronic equipment was built to last, hence this guy got his modem to work.
I doubt anyone will be able to run a GTX 280 in 45 years.
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.
The question I have, is what is the oldest working piece of equipment fellow Slashdotters have out there?
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?); it was working fine when I stopped using it around 1993 or so (upgraded to 2400 baud FTW!!)* ... I'm sure it would still work if I plugged it in today but I'm not hunting down an RS-232 adapter to find out. If we want to talk audio gear I've got some much older items, including a pair of AR speakers from the 60s that still sound pretty damn good... Now get the hell off my lawn!
* (and back then FTW still meant Fuck the World!!)
Pick a small set of standards that will work "well enough" and let them become the Legacy Standard. I'm so sick of going to garage sales and seeing good equipment, such as printers and scanners, that won't connect to any computer that I own. I have a drawer full of PS/2 keyboards.
I hope that someday, someone posts a
The grandson of Hemos connected to the DukeNukemForeverNet* using a computer with USB, DVI, a drive that SPINS, and only 64GB of RAM, after all, 64GB should be enough RAM for anybody.
*DNFNEt is a networking protocol that uses baling wire and bubble gum... and I'm all out of bubble gum.
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 mean the phone instrument itself, perhaps with a dial? You know, the heavy duty ones that say property of Bell on the bottom?
Heh, you might check your parents or grandma... they have probably paid thousands of dollars for that phone over the years.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The CNC industry is still using NC machines built to work with paper tape. 30 years old and still going strong ...
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.
Luke, help me take this mask off
How about oldest piece of equipment in regular use?
I use a 1991 IBM Model M at my main workstation, which puts me at 18 years. They just don't make them like this anymore (well actually Unicomp does)
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of Wargames. Ferris Bueller never hacked into any goverment computers.
what is the oldest working piece of equipment fellow Slashdotters have out there?
There's this rock I use as a paperweight next to my computer. I figure it's anywhere between 100 million and 2 billion years old.
I have a 14" Radiation King that refuses to die. It's from about 1990, just before radiation levels became a marketing thing. Now I guess we just assume low radiation, as I haven't seen that touted as a selling point for quite some time.
Loose lips lose spit.
He recieved it in 1989 and recently decided to see if it would actually work.
Wow. And I thought I was bad about putting things off.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I got this abacus here that's at least a couple hundred years old. Amazingly, it still calculates just as well as it did when it was first made....
This guy's the limit!
So I have the following (it all works unless specified and I fire it up at least twice a year unless specified). And yes, my office looks like a train-wreck twice a year when I pull all this stuff out to keep it alive..
2 Commodore 64s (one works, the other is for parts), and a Commodore 64C
1 1541-II disk drive (works) and a bunch of software.
1 Commodore 128 (Has a couple of broken keys on the numeric pad), and a 1571 disk drive
1 Laser 128 (Apple II clone) with two drives. Works fine and I have a bunch of games and office type software to go with it.
1 Amiga 500, the internal and two external drives (one pulled from an A1000 so it's very big. Another is an off-brand, very small and cool 3 1/2)
1 Commodore Plus/4. Works great.
1 Commodore Vic-20. Works great
1 Commodore 16 which is unfortunately busted
I have a serial modem (14.4) I use to hook up the Amiga to a PC. I cheat because it's actually just doing telnet, but it's cool to get on the web with Lynx by using a kermit terminal program (my Amiga software is so old that it doesn't have a TCP stack). At some point I started getting some public domain amiga tcp stack off ftp but I needed a hard drive to hold it all so I stopped (even emulation is better than the real thing when you don't have enough hardware).
And of course I also keep a bunch of emulators on the modern machines so I can try things out and have interesting stuff to run (being able to run it on the actual hardware gives you a reason to want to pull it out). I love retrocomputing. In fact, that's how I plan on teaching programming to my kids. Yes, they'll use modern hardware too, but for programming I want them to see how there can be very little between you and the metal and you can still accomplish a bunch. All the layers of abstractions can actually make the basics (like why assembly is important and how you actually talk to hardware) a lot harder to understand. If all you have is a Commodore and you have to send commands to the drive to initialize the hardware, and you have to poke values in order to create a little assembly routine or change colors, it just makes it so much more *real*, and there's a lot less to explain of what's going on in the background. Since everything is an extrapolation of that pattern of thought anyway, I think it's better to start the understanding at that level.
- No Sig Today
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
I aim to misbehave.
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.
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.
...from a company that was spun off of AT&T back in 1984. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Phone_Services ...and yes, I still have one in my basement!
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.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
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.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
A couple of years ago I fired up my old Amiga 1000. What's that, circa '84, '85? Nifty machine. Still have my Apple II+, but that's been in storage forever. Also have an original Macintosh, but no peripherals (was someone's paperweight). I powered it up, sounded like it was working, but no screen. Haven't got around to cracking it open to play with the innards. Oh, forgot the old Okidata dot matrix printer for the II+. Wonder if I could get that to work? I'll have to find it. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever thrown out any computer equipment. Well, at least they eBay now!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
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.
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?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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.
-a.e.mossberg
I restore early systems as a hobby and have the following in bootable, working condition:
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...