7 Aug
2008
7 Aug
'08
9:20 p.m.
On 7 Aug 2008 at 21:01, Richard wrote:
My first home modem experience was using a Silent 700
TI terminal (thermal
print head) with a built-in acoustic coupler. It was manually dial the
number and then plug the phone into the cups. This was before we had
a modular phone jack in our house, so the terminal had to be physically
close to the phone in the kitchen.
When I had just gotten my Altair 8800, I picked up the modem unit
(with acoustic coupler) from one of the surplus places advertising in
PE. I remounted the thing in one of those gray hammertone aluminum
Bud boxes. The power supply was pretty easy--and I added a jack that
bypassed the acoustic coupler so I could plug my GE cassette recorder
into the modem.
Flip the front-panel switches for a bit to load a terminal program (I
had a TV Typewriter modified for 64 characters/line connected to a
hot-chassis Zenith tube-type portable TV (yeah, it was dumb, but it
worked). Woo-hoo! I could dial into work at 300 baud and even save
my work on cassette. I wrote an 8080 assembler that ran on the CDC
mainframe so I could edit, assemble and download and run code. When
I finally attached a speaker to "interrupt enable" LED on the front
panel, I couild even make music using EI and DI instructions to
toggle the line. It was really cool, crashes and all.
Cheers,
Chuck