I see special ISA dial up cards that have a beep speaker on the card itself as well as 3.5mm audio ports on the back with the phone cable plugs. How did they work and was there actual wav audio coming from the cards speaker?
Dedicated Windows 95 Aficionado for good reasons:
http://toastytech.com/evil/setup.html
I set up a few PC answering machines using these a long time ago. The little speaker on the card was for listening to the modem dial and connect, not for voice functions. They had microphone and audio out jacks so you could use it as speakerphone or monitor messages as they came in. I would route the audio out to the soundcard's input.
The answering machine software saved messages in a low bit rate format (u-law and 11khz 8-bit PCM.) I think the format was dictated by the modem's chipset capability. Otherwise, the answering machine software worked like visual voicemail on today's smartphones.
