I'm not sure if I still have it, but when Prodigy started becoming a formidable competitive service against AOL, they produced a retail kit with a "wall wart" modem that had the entire modem circuitry in the wall plug. It then had two cables coming out of it, one for the phone jack, and one that terminated in an Apple ADB plug. For the latter, they also provided DB9 and DB25 adapters that you put on the ADB plug to allow them to connect to standard serial ports. Something like that could fall under the "historical modem" category for the period of time when "the Internet™" was bought as a kit for your computer. On Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 1:08 PM Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 8:16 AM Adam Michlin via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Hi Everyone,
We're building a museum exhbit on historical modems. RIght now we have:
Acoustic
USR 300 bps
USR Dual Standard Courier 14.4kbps (Sysop badged)
Telebit T2500
Hayes 9600 bps
USR Sportster V.92
The idea is feature the beginnings (acoustic) and ends (USR V.92) and several important modems in both the hobbyist space (the Dual Standard being very popular with BBSs) and the business space (Telebit).
We'd like to replace the Hayes 9600 with a Hayes 300 SmartModem so people can see the modem that birthed the Hayes command set. Research indicates that the 300 is the first with the Hayes AT command set, but any corrections are welcome. Does anyone have a 300 they would be wiling to donate or lend?
You should have a commodore modem in the warehouse. The brown one that is 300 baud. It used to be next to the Commodore 64 years ago. It says Vicmodem.
Museum exhibits will be changed much more frequently, although not on any set schedule as of yet, so any loan will most certainly be for less than one year.
I'll add that, as it stands, this is a behind glass exhibit. There certainly is the possibility of connecting some of these (or other) modems to machines as we consider possible infrastructure capabilities on the museum.
Thanks!
-Adam
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========================================= Jeff Brace Vice President & Board Member, VCF East Showrunner Vintage Computer Federation http://www.vcfed.org/ jeffrey@vcfed.org