Its amazing that a 1960s old modem still works over today's phone line. And then an 1980s PC works with that modem. But after that, he just logged on to another Linux machine to run Lynx. That machine could just be a modern server.
Man, I haven't used a 300-baud modem since 1984 or '85 when I got a 1200-baud modem for my Commodore 64. LOL. And I don't think I ever used Windows 1.x. I bought my first windows-capable machine in April of 1989, and installed Windows 2.x on it. And a rotary phone? I want to say it was '87 or so since I've had one of those. 🙂 This whole video is one giant nostalgia trip.
@@jamespfitz The father of a friend of mine in High School had a Kaypro II. He was a lawyer for a large corporation, and I guess he needed to be able to edit documents on the fly? First time I ever saw one of those in real life was in their dining room -- he'd set it down on the table when he got home from work one day, and I happened to be over there visiting. Very cool machine for the early-to-mid '80s.
@@radoslawbiernacki It works fine in that it still does what it was designed to do. If you're interested, I use the same gear to surf Reddit, but using a local TCP/IP stack and browser here: th-cam.com/video/73w9vdNjYy4/w-d-xo.html Note that I do go through a proxy to offload TLS though.
@@neoqueto it was janky, but it worked to utilize pre-existing infrastructure. It would be the equivalent of using email to send video frames to one another so that the computer could composite them together into one video. Yes it worked in a pinch, but it was extremely slow and not particularly clever. Now if you want clever uses of sound, wait until you hear about how they used piano wire and a buzzer as RAM.
@@sheeplord4976 or mercury memory, similar to delay line memory as it also made use of propagating waves. I'm saying that the modem technology was clever back in the days of its inception. Janky, yes, but hella compatible.
Reminds me of the first laser printer that I owned. great quality. I think it got around 6 or 8 PPM, unless I printed something other than straight text - printing images usually topped out at around 4 PPH (pages per hour), on account of the printer using a 9600bps serial port for communication. Great quality, nigh silent compared to other printers, and it lasted for years (I bought it refurbished in the 90s, it was made in the 80s, and I kept it until the PPH print speeds became a problem (well, that and Microsoft deciding windows didn’t need to support it…)
Wait, there's printers Microsoft can't support? I thought there was that whole thing about not being allowed to make folders called stuff like CON so 1980s printers could work. shame you can't use it any more.
@@stm7810 it was the apple LaserWriter - no proper model number - it was the first model of LaserWriter. When Internet Explorer printed to it the driver just gave a single page with a postscript(?) error that stated the printer wasn’t supported. I had other options for printing with the printer - configure as a text printer: fast but only one font, use Netscape instead: that worked fine, if 4pph is “fine”, because web pages are all about pictures, or (horror) pictures of text. Alternately, configure it under Unix: x-windows WAS a thing back then, but configuring printers with it was a little beyond the scope of my interests. It was a good printer, just slow with data xfer because tech was slow when it was designed.
Its weird as a 90’s teen having dealt with his fair share of dial-up, until recently I didn’t even know dialing with a rotary dial was possible. After seeing the receiver has to be placed physically on the modem to transfer the sound of the connection it made sense.
It is! Though remembering things like going through 23 floppies to install Microsoft Office 95, I still live in fear of that sound repeating over and over, as it struggles with a sector on disk 17 or something. The floppy drives on this machine are great though, which is good since this machine only has the floppy drives - the unique mechanism on them means they'll be tricky to work on if they ever die.
@@Intelwinsbigly I wish I could, I'm just 14 rn, and I doubt my parents will allow me to buy one of those. Plus, space is a problem so the only way I'll probably see one of those is in a museum
Where they actually mechanical though? I know that model M keyboards with the buckling springs still had a membrane layer underneath it so it really wasnt. I cant really find any info on this type of keyboard.
shop i worked in had maybe a 100 old ibm keyboards bought as a job lot and then windows 95 arrived.... they had no windows key making them worthless to customers, i was told to put them in the skip... horrible heavy noisy keyboards for dos nerds.... how i wished i had kept them to sell on ebay now lol
Wait, so the modem was actually a microphone that listened to the beeps and boops coming from the landline and converting them into bits for the computer to be read?
Yes, exactly this! For Bell 103 specifically, the caller had two frequencies called 'mark' (1270Hz) and 'space' (1070Hz) and playing one or the other indicated a one or a zero, respectively. The answering modem does the same, using 2225Hz for mark, and 2025Hz for space. In the case of this 'pure' modem those are translated real-time to/from levels on the receive and transmit pins on the serial port. It's actually a very simple device operationally speaking. Check out the wikipedia article on Frequency Shift Keying: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-shift_keying
Those acoustic couplers were very prominent in Europe until the 1990ies, where the state telecom providers had all monopolies and did not allow you to connect modems or other equipment but the ones they provided for horrible monthly fees. So the acoustic coupler was the way "around" this as technically you do not connect electrically it to the phone network...
@@tissuepaper9962 It was the monopolistic structure in most European countries pre-1995 (approximate year set by me). Germany was one of the first to remove the fixed line connections so you were allowed to connect your own equipment. But - it still needed to be approved by the federal telecommunications authority. So most modems from the US were not legal to connect. People did it anyway and there were raids (!) due to that and people got a criminal record by connecting a typical US USRobotics or a Taiwanese ZyXEL modem to the German telephone network... They did really bind huge amounts of law enforcement into this.
If I remember I started with an 11 baud rate dial up modem and then got the latest 22 baud rate modem and it blew me away how fast it was. Much, much slower than the one here but oh, those days were wonderful.
You probably had a 14.4 kbps and 28.8 kbps modem. Many times faster than this one at 300 baud/bps. Note that baud/bps are not interchangeable. It just so happens that the 300 baud modem will also be 300 bits per second. Your 28.8K modem would have been 2400, 3000 or 3200 baud, as it would have used clever signalling to achieve the higher bits per second throughput.
@@guytero8812 A slower modem might have been 110B, though that would have been limited by the terminal. Other popular speeds were 1200 & 2400. Then after smart modems appeared, 9600 and faster. BTW, I have been a technician for 50 years, mostly in telecom and I got started as a bench tech overhauling teletype machines. Some of those ran at a blazing 45.4B! I have never heard of 11 or 22 baud and I have spent most of my career involved in telecom and networks.
@@James_Knott HI James. Thanks for that. Now I remember that is was a 1200 baud rate I started with and then went to a 2400 baud rate modem. It was like a turbo compared to the previous one. And then the 56k one with v32 bis compression. Those were the days.
Was doing on-call late night programming support of a 24/7 billing system in the early 1980's at 300 bps. Brings back memories I'd rather forget. One big reason I moved on from that job.
Nice, I love seeing stuff like this, I bought a Phone Line Simulator just so I could hear the modem negotiation again between my Windows 95 PC using a 9600 baud and USB modem on my Linux rackmount using it as a PPP server for internet access (via WebOne proxy for HTTP/S)
I don't know what's more impressive, the fact that Reddit can be loaded on an ancient 300 baud modem, or that this all ran on a very old computer that SOMEHOW ran a somewhat graphical installation of RHEL (or clone) 8.5
The acoustic coupler killed me... I wish I was born earlier, but I started with a lame 14.4 Modem in a metal box so solid you could kill someone with it.
That's just the way it was, until phone companies decided that most users were either capable of safely making a wired connection to their lines, or so terrified by it they wouldn't even attempt it. I've never known a case of a user accidentally putting dangerous voltage onto a phone line, and if they are going to do it deliberately no rules will stop them. The only cases I came across of a line being connected to a high voltage supply were one which was due to a severe lightning strike, and one particular exchange where the last trolleybus back to town on a Friday night would take a bend too fast and launch one of its trolley poles into bunch of open copper wires. When a stand-in diesel bus took it to fast it went off the road, took out one of the poles, and we got it all tidied up with buried cable at the bus companies expense.
My first modem was 300B, which I bought in the '80s. However, it was connected to the phone line and so didn't need an acoustic coupler. With it, I'd dial the phone number and when I heard the carrier, I'd throw a switch to "Originate" to make the connection. I used it with my IMSAI 8080 computer and a serial I/O board I designed and built.
My first modem for my C64 was a 300 baud modem. It always looked like a super fast typist was typing the content on the screen when I dialed into a BBS. I was thrilled when I upgraded to a 12 baud modem - an entire screen worth of text would flash onto the screen instantly.
That Zenith is clean AF! I had one when I was a kid in the early 2000's before my mom randomly decided to throw away all my old computers. I've wanted to get another ever since, but they're all trashed, and if you can find a nice one, they're asking more than I can justify for a nostalgia toy.
I can’t imagine having to wait that long. And the phone you used sounds like a rotary phone. My grandmother used to have one of those. I remember when she showed it to me, I was like what the heck is this?
It is a rotary phone! They are slow, though remember that back when they were common you would've been dialing seven (or even fewer!) digits most of the time. Ten digit dialing on rotary for local calls definitely wasn't a common thing. There's actually a funny tidbit that you can figure out how population dense/important your area was around 1950 based on how long your area code takes to dial. Since lower numbers take less time to dial (zero takes the longest, it's more like '10') it made sense to give the lowest ones to the most dense population centers. So New York City got 212 (the lowest possible), and Alaska got 907 (one of the longest).
60 years from now someone will be using the crystalline matrices installed in the base of their skull to project a full 3D simulation right into their brain, showing someone using wifi to connect Windows XVIII to HoloTH-cam v5.0.
@@retrocet These old laptops - I don't know what the screens are made of offhand but I seen it before, the plastic in the screen gradually decays with age and it will slowly rot and as it rots the brightness will keep getting brighter and brighter until its an unrecognizeable haze. It might seem blotchy or unevenly colored in places before that happens. It affects how the screen can transfer the data image through it. It's not repairable unless you know someone that can remake the screen in a factory or find some way to bodge a screen (maybe a small in-car HDTV screen of similar dimensions soldered into the VGA socket and sandwiched into the old frame bezel, i dont know). It seems to be a problem with early Macintosh and Acer laptops. If I remember, Zenith was a shared brand with Compaq I believe (sold for a lower price point) so not surprisingly they share the same problems.
They were definitely cool at the time, and they're actually super robust. This thing has been an absolute tank of a machine. It's been in fairly regular use for over 30 years now.
In fairness, it doesn't really. What it does have is a terminal emulator, which I'm using to connect to an internet-capable machine. That said, there's another video on the channel (th-cam.com/video/73w9vdNjYy4/w-d-xo.html) that uses a real TCP/IP stack and a local browser to run all the client-side internet stuff locally (sans TLS anyway) but this doesn't leverage stuff built into Windows or DOS, but rather programs that run in DOS.
I really get off on all this stuff. Remember when you had to get those AOL discs and install them? I remember trying to do that on a very outdated iMac and trying to meet my brother on Habbo Hotel, who lived at my Dad's and had a new MacBook with a good internet connection whilst I was still trying to connect via dial-up. We really take our screens for granted these days and I love seeing the actual processes running behind something as simple as connecting to a website. I used to try and keep up to date with computers but after a few years of moving around for work and stuff I stopped paying attention, didn't get a smartphone for years after they became the norm and for a brief while when I got back into computers, I felt like an old man trying to figure out a machine that had changed so much in just a few years. Rambling a bit but I find it fascinating. Technology evolves a lot faster than our ability to catch-up and understand it. Once we think that we have it figured out, a whole new generation of technological developments which have been worked on secretly by the military and via secret government contracts becomes released for use by the public. Think about how much computer technology has evolved in the last few decades, especially with the internet becoming a means of communication more all-encompassing than anything before it, since the telephone and then the television perhaps, and then imagine how this technology will have evolved in 50 years and how it will function, assuming that humanity survives for that long anyway.
Prior to 1984ish (in the US anyway) Bell prohibited users from connecting any equipment not sold by Bell to their network, so you actually weren't allowed to electrically connect a third party modem at all. As a result, acoustic couplers like this one were the norm for most of the 300 and 1200 bps era.
Kudos to modern website operators for allowing their site to be useable in some way on ancient hardware. You never know what someone who needs access might be stuck with. Now I wonder what sort of hoops are needed gone through to load live video streams on it.
@@uncrunch398 These early PCs just had a speaker that beeped. Although there were later hacks that let you bitbang them for PCM audio playback, this tied up the CPU for other work. You could probably take periodic breaks to perform brief tasks if you used a very low sampling rate. It couldn’t have decompressed an MP3 fast enough in real time though. It would have had to be raw PCM. And the modem itself is so slow that a bit rate low enough would probably have been unrecognizable. Video? No chance. Very slowly changing ASCII art, perhaps. 😏
this is nearly the computer equivalent of a human getting subjected to eldritch horrors beyond comprehension and being incapable of processing it all and going nuts
@A Volpe .24k a second, 1000k per Meg, nope took a long as time and remember that's if you get the full 2400boad rate, and when you go off someone else's bulletin board you are subject to their modems speed too. And when I had a 2400modem you could get a 5600 so we didn't have the fastest stuff for the time.
Quick(ish) Answer: - The laptop has been 'in the family' since 1990 or so. I used to use it for science projects as a kid. - I've been a modem nerd for a while, and this modem is a bit of a holy grail for me. I had it set as a saved search on eBay that sat for seven years without a single hit. When it came up, I snapped it up immediately. It didn't work due to some cracked solder joints, but it was a relatively easy cleanup and restoration to get it into good condition again. - The phone was a random eBay purchase like ten years ago. I'm pretty sure I just wanted an old-school wall phone in my apartment at the time. Its number is actually the door buzzer for our apartment now, using a special VoIP bridge that converts pulse dial into DTMF, so we can 'dial' 9 to open the door. - The ISP I'm dialing into is an in-house affair. I'm working on a video about it, but I'm a very, very inexperienced video editor, so things like graphics and animations are pretty difficult right now. In the meantime, I have a text post up on Reddit about it: www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/tmyedk/comment/i1yy290/?context=3 Rambling Answer: I've been into retro computing for a while, and I really appreciate enthusiasts like Neil at RMC Retro that are focused on 'living exhibits', where machines actually function and can be used, as opposed to just being display pieces. I try to have all my machines in running condition, using original hardware as often as I can. Anyway, one of the most formative pieces of tech for me was dial-up; I was on BBSes and later dial-up internet in middle school and high school, so there's major nostalgia factor for me there. There are lots of WiFi modems that are great for getting old machines online, but I really wanted to create a 'living exhibit' where I could replicate the dial-up experience as much as possible. This channel is kind of the result of it all - I'm basically just screwing around with dial-up tech and making some videos of it.
@@retrocet sim, meu amigo, a internet discada é mesmo muito nostálgica! Eu adorava aquela época mesmo com todas as dificuldades. Muito obrigado por compartilhar! 🙏✨✨
That's still sort of true - the access here is just via a terminal (as opposed to running an actual browser) so Windows isn't really accessing the net directly. I have another video up where the same gear accesses the net from DOS though, using a real browser.
![SAFEPLANET - ดาวเคราะห์ [ THE PLANET ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4X1XL3I_k3c/mqdefault.jpg)
This is the most "back in my day" I have ever seen.
Very cool. It's nice seeing old technology function in the modern age!
Our forefathers did a great job defining HTTP for posterity. Really awesome stuff!
Unlike my iphone 6 which works perfectly but cant install many apps
Its amazing that a 1960s old modem still works over today's phone line. And then an 1980s PC works with that modem. But after that, he just logged on to another Linux machine to run Lynx. That machine could just be a modern server.
Modern age is from circa year 1500 to the present
@@onearthonelegionok 🤓
man used a rotary phone to browse the internet, absolute legend
😂😂😂😂😂
I want that
@@markoprskalo6127 what PC do you have and do you have a landline
I’m old enough to remember when you had to open windows from the DOS prompt, but young enough to have forgotten until this reminded me.
It's really quite amazing you got a modem from the 1960s to work with a computer that 'new' and today's internet.
1980's.
@@Connection-Lost the description says 1960s.
That modem was used for a long while.
That modem is interesting
Man, I haven't used a 300-baud modem since 1984 or '85 when I got a 1200-baud modem for my Commodore 64. LOL. And I don't think I ever used Windows 1.x. I bought my first windows-capable machine in April of 1989, and installed Windows 2.x on it. And a rotary phone? I want to say it was '87 or so since I've had one of those. 🙂 This whole video is one giant nostalgia trip.
CP/M, baby! Kaypro II!
@@jamespfitz The father of a friend of mine in High School had a Kaypro II. He was a lawyer for a large corporation, and I guess he needed to be able to edit documents on the fly? First time I ever saw one of those in real life was in their dining room -- he'd set it down on the table when he got home from work one day, and I happened to be over there visiting. Very cool machine for the early-to-mid '80s.
Kind of amazing that such old technology was so advanced and still works perfectly fine
In reality it wasn't advanced at all, looking back it was very simple, but extremely clever. It still works thanks to the simplicity.
@@radoslawbiernacki It works fine in that it still does what it was designed to do.
If you're interested, I use the same gear to surf Reddit, but using a local TCP/IP stack and browser here: th-cam.com/video/73w9vdNjYy4/w-d-xo.html
Note that I do go through a proxy to offload TLS though.
@@neoqueto it was janky, but it worked to utilize pre-existing infrastructure. It would be the equivalent of using email to send video frames to one another so that the computer could composite them together into one video. Yes it worked in a pinch, but it was extremely slow and not particularly clever.
Now if you want clever uses of sound, wait until you hear about how they used piano wire and a buzzer as RAM.
@@sheeplord4976 or mercury memory, similar to delay line memory as it also made use of propagating waves.
I'm saying that the modem technology was clever back in the days of its inception. Janky, yes, but hella compatible.
Reminds me of the first laser printer that I owned.
great quality. I think it got around 6 or 8 PPM, unless I printed something other than straight text - printing images usually topped out at around 4 PPH (pages per hour), on account of the printer using a 9600bps serial port for communication. Great quality, nigh silent compared to other printers, and it lasted for years (I bought it refurbished in the 90s, it was made in the 80s, and I kept it until the PPH print speeds became a problem (well, that and Microsoft deciding windows didn’t need to support it…)
Wait, there's printers Microsoft can't support? I thought there was that whole thing about not being allowed to make folders called stuff like CON so 1980s printers could work. shame you can't use it any more.
@@stm7810 it was the apple LaserWriter - no proper model number - it was the first model of LaserWriter. When Internet Explorer printed to it the driver just gave a single page with a postscript(?) error that stated the printer wasn’t supported. I had other options for printing with the printer - configure as a text printer: fast but only one font, use Netscape instead: that worked fine, if 4pph is “fine”, because web pages are all about pictures, or (horror) pictures of text. Alternately, configure it under Unix: x-windows WAS a thing back then, but configuring printers with it was a little beyond the scope of my interests. It was a good printer, just slow with data xfer because tech was slow when it was designed.
@@Relkond cool.
Lmao i actually "used" 10 kilobits per second speeds on weak 2g throttled internet out in rural america in 2018
@@neonsamus
Was it digital or acoustic communication?
Its weird as a 90’s teen having dealt with his fair share of dial-up, until recently I didn’t even know dialing with a rotary dial was possible. After seeing the receiver has to be placed physically on the modem to transfer the sound of the connection it made sense.
it's satisfying to hear the disk r/w (?) sounds 🤩
It is! Though remembering things like going through 23 floppies to install Microsoft Office 95, I still live in fear of that sound repeating over and over, as it struggles with a sector on disk 17 or something.
The floppy drives on this machine are great though, which is good since this machine only has the floppy drives - the unique mechanism on them means they'll be tricky to work on if they ever die.
@@retrocet ahh now I wish I was born in the '80s
@@yeppiidev buy the machine now if you like it so much.
@@Intelwinsbigly I wish I could, I'm just 14 rn, and I doubt my parents will allow me to buy one of those. Plus, space is a problem so the only way I'll probably see one of those is in a museum
@@yeppiidev Stay in school and you'll be able to collect as much as you want, the hard part will finding a woman of any quality in your generation.
Crazy how people pay more for mechanical keyboards now when they were the standard years ago
they are just as expensive. its just we have more cheaper options and premium options
for a computer that used to cost 2400 dollars, it better have a decent keyboard.
Where they actually mechanical though? I know that model M keyboards with the buckling springs still had a membrane layer underneath it so it really wasnt. I cant really find any info on this type of keyboard.
I don't think it is a mechanical keyboard.
I believe it uses Alps integrated dome switches.
shop i worked in had maybe a 100 old ibm keyboards bought as a job lot and then windows 95 arrived.... they had no windows key making them worthless to customers, i was told to put them in the skip... horrible heavy noisy keyboards for dos nerds.... how i wished i had kept them to sell on ebay now lol
Man used a sphinx. Man woke up under a stone. Man drove home from work and man was madly in love with goat.
Very cool I've never seen a modem this old. Quite the hack around
Wait, so the modem was actually a microphone that listened to the beeps and boops coming from the landline and converting them into bits for the computer to be read?
Yes, exactly this! For Bell 103 specifically, the caller had two frequencies called 'mark' (1270Hz) and 'space' (1070Hz) and playing one or the other indicated a one or a zero, respectively. The answering modem does the same, using 2225Hz for mark, and 2025Hz for space.
In the case of this 'pure' modem those are translated real-time to/from levels on the receive and transmit pins on the serial port. It's actually a very simple device operationally speaking.
Check out the wikipedia article on Frequency Shift Keying: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-shift_keying
Yeah but it speaks KKKKKAHHHHH
Yeah it stands for Modulate-Demodulate.
Always has been, they just skipped the acoustic coupling bit in future models.
Kind of like how commodore 64 cassettes worked.
I love watching this work exactly it should and perform its function even today
Just disconnected my iPhone from acting up wifi to load a video of another device connecting to the internet using dial up. What a time to be alive.
I once owned that model of computer. Thanks for the memories.
Those acoustic couplers were very prominent in Europe until the 1990ies, where the state telecom providers had all monopolies and did not allow you to connect modems or other equipment but the ones they provided for horrible monthly fees. So the acoustic coupler was the way "around" this as technically you do not connect electrically it to the phone network...
Europeans were based?
@@tissuepaper9962 It was the monopolistic structure in most European countries pre-1995 (approximate year set by me). Germany was one of the first to remove the fixed line connections so you were allowed to connect your own equipment. But - it still needed to be approved by the federal telecommunications authority. So most modems from the US were not legal to connect. People did it anyway and there were raids (!) due to that and people got a criminal record by connecting a typical US USRobotics or a Taiwanese ZyXEL modem to the German telephone network... They did really bind huge amounts of law enforcement into this.
If I remember I started with an 11 baud rate dial up modem and then got the latest 22 baud rate modem and it blew me away how fast it was. Much, much slower than the one here but oh, those days were wonderful.
You probably had a 14.4 kbps and 28.8 kbps modem. Many times faster than this one at 300 baud/bps. Note that baud/bps are not interchangeable. It just so happens that the 300 baud modem will also be 300 bits per second. Your 28.8K modem would have been 2400, 3000 or 3200 baud, as it would have used clever signalling to achieve the higher bits per second throughput.
@@hairyclassics1789 If I remember correctly it was pre 14400 baud rate. Super slow.
@@guytero8812 A slower modem might have been 110B, though that would have been limited by the terminal. Other popular speeds were 1200 & 2400. Then after smart modems appeared, 9600 and faster.
BTW, I have been a technician for 50 years, mostly in telecom and I got started as a bench tech overhauling teletype machines. Some of those ran at a blazing 45.4B! I have never heard of 11 or 22 baud and I have spent most of my career involved in telecom and networks.
@@James_Knott HI James. Thanks for that. Now I remember that is was a 1200 baud rate I started with and then went to a 2400 baud rate modem. It was like a turbo compared to the previous one. And then the 56k one with v32 bis compression. Those were the days.
@@guytero8812 Those were only 56K in one direction, with 33.6K going the other, IIRC.
Was doing on-call late night programming support of a 24/7 billing system in the early 1980's at 300 bps. Brings back memories I'd rather forget. One big reason I moved on from that job.
Nice, I love seeing stuff like this, I bought a Phone Line Simulator just so I could hear the modem negotiation again between my Windows 95 PC using a 9600 baud and USB modem on my Linux rackmount using it as a PPP server for internet access (via WebOne proxy for HTTP/S)
Very impressive that this machine still works!
That disk mechanism is very satisfying.
I don't know what's more impressive, the fact that Reddit can be loaded on an ancient 300 baud modem, or that this all ran on a very old computer that SOMEHOW ran a somewhat graphical installation of RHEL (or clone) 8.5
Darn... Cool to see those old technologies in action.
I was born after those, thus quite interesting to see them!
Thanks!
This is so retro, my trousers flared into bell-bottoms before the video was finished.
This is beautiful! Please keep doing what you're doing.
Thank you! Will do!
The acoustic coupler killed me... I wish I was born earlier, but I started with a lame 14.4 Modem in a metal box so solid you could kill someone with it.
That's just the way it was, until phone companies decided that most users were either capable of safely making a wired connection to their lines, or so terrified by it they wouldn't even attempt it. I've never known a case of a user accidentally putting dangerous voltage onto a phone line, and if they are going to do it deliberately no rules will stop them. The only cases I came across of a line being connected to a high voltage supply were one which was due to a severe lightning strike, and one particular exchange where the last trolleybus back to town on a Friday night would take a bend too fast and launch one of its trolley poles into bunch of open copper wires. When a stand-in diesel bus took it to fast it went off the road, took out one of the poles, and we got it all tidied up with buried cable at the bus companies expense.
The slow speed of updating somehow gives it a more futuristic appeal
Great old school adventure!!!
My first modem was 300B, which I bought in the '80s. However, it was connected to the phone line and so didn't need an acoustic coupler. With it, I'd dial the phone number and when I heard the carrier, I'd throw a switch to "Originate" to make the connection. I used it with my IMSAI 8080 computer and a serial I/O board I designed and built.
Holy mary mother of patience and perseverance.
I'm in love with everything that's in this video
My first modem for my C64 was a 300 baud modem. It always looked like a super fast typist was typing the content on the screen when I dialed into a BBS. I was thrilled when I upgraded to a 12 baud modem - an entire screen worth of text would flash onto the screen instantly.
@Michael Jay lol, I meant 1200 baud
That Zenith is clean AF! I had one when I was a kid in the early 2000's before my mom randomly decided to throw away all my old computers. I've wanted to get another ever since, but they're all trashed, and if you can find a nice one, they're asking more than I can justify for a nostalgia toy.
I can’t imagine having to wait that long. And the phone you used sounds like a rotary phone. My grandmother used to have one of those. I remember when she showed it to me, I was like what the heck is this?
It is a rotary phone! They are slow, though remember that back when they were common you would've been dialing seven (or even fewer!) digits most of the time. Ten digit dialing on rotary for local calls definitely wasn't a common thing.
There's actually a funny tidbit that you can figure out how population dense/important your area was around 1950 based on how long your area code takes to dial. Since lower numbers take less time to dial (zero takes the longest, it's more like '10') it made sense to give the lowest ones to the most dense population centers. So New York City got 212 (the lowest possible), and Alaska got 907 (one of the longest).
makes you apprechiate how far weve come, look at this boot up time!
Thanks, it's nice to see how far technology has come to put the power of modern machines into perspective
very cool , seen something like this in the 90` and was know this must be the future
2:01 This is the moment when you connected to the matrix.
Absolutely mind blowing. Love the video bro.
Thanks!
60 years from now someone will be using the crystalline matrices installed in the base of their skull to project a full 3D simulation right into their brain, showing someone using wifi to connect Windows XVIII to HoloTH-cam v5.0.
I didn't even realise you could do this before windows 95, let alone windows 1!!! super cool video!!
Sounds magical. ❤ Old computers are so cool.
That keyboard sound is great!
I forget that Bytes even exist, I’m so used to seeing Kilobytes as the lowest speed.
But it's in the name
the more impressive thing is he has a ZDS PC that the screen hasn't rotted away
Is that a common problem? Honestly this is like to _only_ LCD in my entire laptop collection that's not dying in some way.
@@retrocet These old laptops - I don't know what the screens are made of offhand but I seen it before, the plastic in the screen gradually decays with age and it will slowly rot and as it rots the brightness will keep getting brighter and brighter until its an unrecognizeable haze. It might seem blotchy or unevenly colored in places before that happens. It affects how the screen can transfer the data image through it. It's not repairable unless you know someone that can remake the screen in a factory or find some way to bodge a screen (maybe a small in-car HDTV screen of similar dimensions soldered into the VGA socket and sandwiched into the old frame bezel, i dont know).
It seems to be a problem with early Macintosh and Acer laptops. If I remember, Zenith was a shared brand with Compaq I believe (sold for a lower price point) so not surprisingly they share the same problems.
When I was little I had a Zenith TV. Used to have to hit the crap out of it to get it to work lol. Was from the early 80s and this was late 90s.
People still use dialup in very remote areas around the world, including in the US and especially Canada.
Today's generation: "Check out my new smartphone! I can totally connect with others!"
1964 Modem: "AM I A JOKE TO YOU?"
Don't forget rotary phone
There's something about people accessing modern websites through ancient tech that's absolutely fascinating.
still faster than using 56k trying to load reddit on chrome.
0:52 the disk swap looked so clean, nice
The varnished wood box looks cool. You just don't get that craftsmanship anymore when you buy any sort of computer equipment.
Oh man…Zenith. That brings back some wood grain memories.
That's such a cute computer! I woulda lost my mind back then if the drives popped up like some futuristic mainframe
They were definitely cool at the time, and they're actually super robust. This thing has been an absolute tank of a machine. It's been in fairly regular use for over 30 years now.
Didn't know Windows 1.04 had internet capabilities, always thought it was added in Win3.x (3.11 in particular).
In fairness, it doesn't really. What it does have is a terminal emulator, which I'm using to connect to an internet-capable machine. That said, there's another video on the channel (th-cam.com/video/73w9vdNjYy4/w-d-xo.html) that uses a real TCP/IP stack and a local browser to run all the client-side internet stuff locally (sans TLS anyway) but this doesn't leverage stuff built into Windows or DOS, but rather programs that run in DOS.
A red rotary phone, so retro!
i'm glad i know how to dial with rotary phones, because a lot of kids now don't know how :)
Somewhere out there there is a sweaty man that has never left his mom's basement in his life. This is how he talks to everyone.
I did not give you permission to tell my life story.
That pop-up floppy drive was cool. Never seen that before.
And this was still higher tech than what they used to put man on the moon.
I can't keep up with all this new fangled technology 🤯
I really get off on all this stuff. Remember when you had to get those AOL discs and install them? I remember trying to do that on a very outdated iMac and trying to meet my brother on Habbo Hotel, who lived at my Dad's and had a new MacBook with a good internet connection whilst I was still trying to connect via dial-up. We really take our screens for granted these days and I love seeing the actual processes running behind something as simple as connecting to a website. I used to try and keep up to date with computers but after a few years of moving around for work and stuff I stopped paying attention, didn't get a smartphone for years after they became the norm and for a brief while when I got back into computers, I felt like an old man trying to figure out a machine that had changed so much in just a few years.
Rambling a bit but I find it fascinating. Technology evolves a lot faster than our ability to catch-up and understand it. Once we think that we have it figured out, a whole new generation of technological developments which have been worked on secretly by the military and via secret government contracts becomes released for use by the public. Think about how much computer technology has evolved in the last few decades, especially with the internet becoming a means of communication more all-encompassing than anything before it, since the telephone and then the television perhaps, and then imagine how this technology will have evolved in 50 years and how it will function, assuming that humanity survives for that long anyway.
The screen actually looks like a healthy sleek blue tbh, it looks satisfying
Fascinating modem design. That it communicates literally through the audio handset and not directly by electrically signaling on the phone line.
Acoustic Couplers were available even into the 80s.
Prior to 1984ish (in the US anyway) Bell prohibited users from connecting any equipment not sold by Bell to their network, so you actually weren't allowed to electrically connect a third party modem at all.
As a result, acoustic couplers like this one were the norm for most of the 300 and 1200 bps era.
@@retrocet Thank you for that information!
Of course! Thanks for checking out the video!
Kudos to modern website operators for allowing their site to be useable in some way on ancient hardware. You never know what someone who needs access might be stuck with. Now I wonder what sort of hoops are needed gone through to load live video streams on it.
The laptop isn't actually rendering the site, he called a modern Linux computer and used lynx as the browser.
@@Vaionko That makes sense. I was thinking probably something similar would enable a lq a/v stream.
@@uncrunch398 These early PCs just had a speaker that beeped. Although there were later hacks that let you bitbang them for PCM audio playback, this tied up the CPU for other work. You could probably take periodic breaks to perform brief tasks if you used a very low sampling rate. It couldn’t have decompressed an MP3 fast enough in real time though. It would have had to be raw PCM. And the modem itself is so slow that a bit rate low enough would probably have been unrecognizable. Video? No chance. Very slowly changing ASCII art, perhaps. 😏
@Michael Jay Nope. The laptop was used as a remote terminal over dialup.
Oh geez… I don’t miss those days at all.
Such a powerful machine there mate
Very neat, but seems like it'd be hard to do this while taking a dump
That keyboard sounds really satisfying.
this is nearly the computer equivalent of a human getting subjected to eldritch horrors beyond comprehension and being incapable of processing it all and going nuts
The amount of patience one needs
Ah yes, the date is January first, 1985
Awesome nostalgia at its finest!
I remember dad getting our first modem, befor the internet. 2400 baud, took over night to download small under 1 MG files.
@A Volpe .24k a second, 1000k per Meg, nope took a long as time and remember that's if you get the full 2400boad rate, and when you go off someone else's bulletin board you are subject to their modems speed too. And when I had a 2400modem you could get a 5600 so we didn't have the fastest stuff for the time.
Fascinating! Where did you obtain this ancient equipment? And what site did you dial that actually could connect to your modem? :) Thanks for posting.
Quick(ish) Answer:
- The laptop has been 'in the family' since 1990 or so. I used to use it for science projects as a kid.
- I've been a modem nerd for a while, and this modem is a bit of a holy grail for me. I had it set as a saved search on eBay that sat for seven years without a single hit. When it came up, I snapped it up immediately. It didn't work due to some cracked solder joints, but it was a relatively easy cleanup and restoration to get it into good condition again.
- The phone was a random eBay purchase like ten years ago. I'm pretty sure I just wanted an old-school wall phone in my apartment at the time. Its number is actually the door buzzer for our apartment now, using a special VoIP bridge that converts pulse dial into DTMF, so we can 'dial' 9 to open the door.
- The ISP I'm dialing into is an in-house affair. I'm working on a video about it, but I'm a very, very inexperienced video editor, so things like graphics and animations are pretty difficult right now. In the meantime, I have a text post up on Reddit about it: www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/tmyedk/comment/i1yy290/?context=3
Rambling Answer:
I've been into retro computing for a while, and I really appreciate enthusiasts like Neil at RMC Retro that are focused on 'living exhibits', where machines actually function and can be used, as opposed to just being display pieces. I try to have all my machines in running condition, using original hardware as often as I can.
Anyway, one of the most formative pieces of tech for me was dial-up; I was on BBSes and later dial-up internet in middle school and high school, so there's major nostalgia factor for me there. There are lots of WiFi modems that are great for getting old machines online, but I really wanted to create a 'living exhibit' where I could replicate the dial-up experience as much as possible. This channel is kind of the result of it all - I'm basically just screwing around with dial-up tech and making some videos of it.
@@retrocet sim, meu amigo, a internet discada é mesmo muito nostálgica! Eu adorava aquela época mesmo com todas as dificuldades. Muito obrigado por compartilhar! 🙏✨✨
@@retrocet 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👾
Thats neat... I like the floppy drive on that laptop
For kids out there, this is the definition of a real dial.
This is the computer this guy gets all his Child Adult movies from. Or some Russian hacker stuff idk.
The popup drives are a great idea!!
A Lynx, I spent so many hours exploring the web with that tool
I remember having a 300 baud modem. Then I upgraded to a 1200 baud and thought it was fantastic!
That bright red rotary phone tho! Looks like it could connect you directly to the batman lol
Your laptop looks so riveting!
Yes,… Windows at it more or less how it looked, when I first used Windows, for the first time. I think I had a color CGA monitor though.
I love those pop up disk drives
I thought until now that Windows 3.1 was the earliest version of Windows that could use internet
That's still sort of true - the access here is just via a terminal (as opposed to running an actual browser) so Windows isn't really accessing the net directly. I have another video up where the same gear accesses the net from DOS though, using a real browser.
These were essentially the computers in the computer lab at my middle school
I *like* this. Well done!
That keyboard sounds amazing to type on
As an Apple fan, this is how I still consider Windows PC
Youngins these days don't know how good they have it.
So, the noise you hear when you call someone on a landline while they're using a dial up connection is an actual code.😮
"Bro why didn't you heal me?"
"Getting some lag sorry."
Bro used Windows 1.0 to use Linux, this guy is a champ.
Ah even before my time. I started with Windows 3.1 a little and mostly on Windows 95 with a 14,4 modem. The old days now lol
Geez.... and I thought seeing my ebay posts on a Sega Dreamcast™ was cool.
Ooh I liked the pop-up floppy disk drive.