Dialling up in 1982 (was Re: old modems (was Telephony switches))

My first "Online" experience was in the late 80's at my Uncle's house. He worked for Dow chemical, and had one of those strange semi-PC compatible "laptop" computers. It had a customized terminal program in firmware, you would dial in to Dow's modem pool, authenticate using one of those time-based token calculator things, hang up, and the modem pool would *call you back* at your registered phone number, the terminal app would pick up, you'd authenticate again and you're all set. A couple of keystrokes later and I was on their VAX cluster. Nice system, I played around with BASIC and FORTRAN, and their disaster simulation software that was fun. A few years ago one of my acquaintances was working for Dow, porting their VAX based peoplesoft app to the PC, so they were still on big iron up until just a couple years ago. Around 1988 my other uncle gave me his old 1200-baud Hayes Smartmodem. I bought a copy of Red Ryder from EduCorp and dialed into my first BBS from my Mac 512KE. I mostly used BBSes until I found that you could telnet from the local Merit university dialins. I could telnet to Michigan State's FTP and Gopher proxy, then, in the early 90's, Lynx.