A friend found one discarded in a phone booth, and gave it to me, the only VIC-20 owner he knew.
It changed my life. It gave me places to go when I really needed them. It gave me an escape. I am forever grateful.
Shoutout to the rest of the PhoneLine Phantoms, Army BBS, Datanet, and especially Paladin's Palace, for which I can still dial the number on a rotary phone in the dark.
I had one of these! You had to load the terminal software from the included cassette tape, pick up the telephone, dial the digits (literally, we didn't have TouchTone), wait for the Bell 103 handshake tones, then quickly unplug the handset and plug the cable into the modem. Set the handset aside so you don't accidentally hang up.
Then enjoy BBSing on the 22x23 display! Good times.
How do you write an article about an old modem without the word “baud”?
Nevertheless, I don’t remember this one, the Vic 20 wasn’t super popular in my circle, but dang $99!!! I think my first hays clone was $399 in real 1980s dollars.
I came to say the same thing. “How many baud was it?” is the immediate question anyone familiar with modems would have, but it is nowhere in the text. Only in the image of the advertisement does it say that it is 300 baud. Because people who would want to buy one would want to know.
My first modem, also around that time was... 10 Dutch guilders (around $4.50 at that time). That's 'cause I bought a suspiciously modem-looking (markings, phone line transformer, line relay, etc.) full-size rack-mount board at a swap meet, no documentation on the thing, bunch of switches and leds on the front, S100-like connector on the back, 'sold for parts'. I traced the circuitry, managed to work out its intricacies, figured out what voltage it needed to work, powered it up and started experimenting. After a few days I had it worked out, created an interface to my C-64 to run the thing through the user port - with pulse auto-dial! - and built ye olde wooden enclosure with built-in power supply and a single-slot rack mount for the thing. It worked for years and was my first way to get online with that machine. It was the classiest modem I ever had, bar none.
I wonder what that board was originally used for, it was quite an elaborate thing, a half-size board sandwiched on top of a full-sized one, a bunch of expensive-looking white ceramic gold-capped circuits on the top board, the bottom one full of discrete components. It must have been something serious and expensive. Still, I suspect the C-64 I ended up connecting it to may have had more computing power than the original host.
It changed my life. It gave me places to go when I really needed them. It gave me an escape. I am forever grateful.
Shoutout to the rest of the PhoneLine Phantoms, Army BBS, Datanet, and especially Paladin's Palace, for which I can still dial the number on a rotary phone in the dark.
Then enjoy BBSing on the 22x23 display! Good times.
Nevertheless, I don’t remember this one, the Vic 20 wasn’t super popular in my circle, but dang $99!!! I think my first hays clone was $399 in real 1980s dollars.
I wonder what that board was originally used for, it was quite an elaborate thing, a half-size board sandwiched on top of a full-sized one, a bunch of expensive-looking white ceramic gold-capped circuits on the top board, the bottom one full of discrete components. It must have been something serious and expensive. Still, I suspect the C-64 I ended up connecting it to may have had more computing power than the original host.