[vcf-midatlantic] Your First Modem?

[Jeff Galinat]

Hi,
 If anyone is interested, I put a link to the ACGNJ article I
referenced earlier up my OneDrive.  I realized later I made some errors in
reading ACIA status bits but it worked as written.

Here is the link=>

<https://1drv.ms/b/s!AoxC-mzikoIggvgGo8JNquvnpV1Yiw?e=dMs1R4>

Regards,
Jeff

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My first modem was a surplus 300 bps acoustic coupled model I bought at the
Trenton Computer Fest around 1978 or 1979. I used it for a few years with
my Apple ][+ before I retired it. I was an IBM customer engineer at the
time and one of my customers gave me a Bell 212 unit (don’t remember the
actual model #) so I upgraded to 1200bps at that time. I used that with a
dual serial card for the Apple I built on a proto board to get online and
to connect to a serial terminal. I wrote a very small machine language
program to redirect the Cin (character in) & Cout (character out) routines
to the serial port. The terminal allowed me to view the BBSes at 80x24
rather than the Apple’s 40 column display. Also, the only printer I had at
the time was a screen printer attached to the aux port of the terminal so
at least I could get a hard copy. The write up was published in the ACGNJ
newsletter and Steve Ciarcia even referenced it in a future issue of his
“Ask Byte” column in Byte magazine. I was thrilled to have a hardware guru
like Steve reference something I built.
Jeff