I do remember having a 8250 based controller in my first PC, a 286-16 (a family computer really) which I replaced the chip with a 16550 chip as soon as I realised that null modem file copies took less time with the faster chip. It has been a long time since I have upgraded chips on my computer hardware 😜

That was well before my time but I would keep the old hoard who knows that stuff might be useful someday given how things are changing for the worse on the internet with all the spying as well new government regulations. I remember a few years back when the internet was shut down in a country during the "Arab Spring" and people had to revert to using dial up.

I used 2400, 14.4, 33.6 and 56K modems. The first computer I hooked a modem to was a Tandy 1000TX 286 so that was 8250. Then my first 486 had a 16450 port which isn't much better. Eventually I got a card with a 16550 onboard.

My 56K modem was useless because the phone system was still analog at the time or whatever and limited me to ~26.4 kbps. That modem was a USR Sportster with X2 and eventually V.90 firmware.

In college I found a free high-end USR Courier modem and played with it a little. But I was on ethernet at that point so the modem ship had sailed.

BBSs, ZModem, Ymodem, Bimodem, 8-n-1, V.42 bis vs. MNP, Winmodems, etc, etc.....

V.92 with V.44 is pretty neat. Too bad it didn't show up in like 1996.

First modem I got a handme down Netcomm 2400 bps. It was around 1995? so already slow but the modem was top quality and I messed around on the 2 or 3 BBS's in the area.
A random pic of it from a quick google search
http://www.cactii.net/~vk2bv/2001-website/fs-252.jpg

When we decided to get the internet we got a US robotics 33.6 clone that looked a lot like courier HST above only beige with blue surround. That served my parents house right up till 6 years ago! Once that died (may just be the fuse as that's gone before) they finally got a satellite connection as dial ups are dying out despite ADSL not available in their small pocket of a small country town.

last trip home I chucked out 2 internal modems I'd collected over the years but I cant bring myself to ditch the Netcomm casue its a part of Aussie history and the 33.6 it outlasted 4 PC's in the end. Really I cant see any use for them, even phone lines are starting to disappear from homes but you never know!

The venerable 16550A and its more modern substitutes (bigger buffers, multiple serial ports on one chip, etc.) are still in heavy use in the embedded and industrial worlds. I use a (literal) boatload of RS-232, RS-422 and RS-485 in my work on ships and on various pieces of submersible research equipment.

Also slowly building a neat little Stratum-0 NTP server out of an old 486 SBC and a RS232 multiport PC/104 card. Finagling with interrupts for 8 serial ports without shared interrupts is... interesting. 😵

Modems can still be used for long-distance point-to-point by using a line voltage injector. That allows making a length of twisted pair visible to the modem as a regular phone line. On some modems it's not even necessary either. 😁

I unfortunately grew up in an era of DSL only (which was admittedly very nice back in '04), but I've never bothered to throw away any of the various modems I've accumulated over the years, mostly out of the fact that they seemed pretty cool. I've always wanted to get a phone line simulator so that I can have my own godawful modem networking thing. That would certainly make network transfers to some of my Pentium-era laptops a whole lot easier.

I'm actually kind of surprised that this forum doesn't have a multiplayer hosting thread. It would be cool to see if there's anyone closeish with a modem and a copy of AOE II, for example.

Always had modems here from 1993 until 2007 (Was 2007, when we moved to 3G until DSL became available). Still use my original e-mail address which is the one I am registered to the forum with - it's an AOL address.

Still used Dial-Up as a fail-over when my DSL goes offline until the ISP broke contract and shut the service off rather than fixing the server that answered (which hadn't worked for a few months).

My first modem was an old Zoltrix (Or was it ELSA?) 14.4K that was outdated when I got it before I moved to a 28K modem for many years.

I still use a modem today though, as it is set to answer the line meaning I can always call home and connect to my PC even if the DSL goes out.

I think the best memory of using modems as the means of connecting to the net is one from when I was about 12 years old and properly discovering the female of the species. Every so often I'd stay up late and wait for everyone else to go to sleep before sneaking onto the computer and going on adult websites - nothing unusual there really. The problem was that sometimes I'd forget to mute the modem and the house would wake up to the sound of Dial-Up internet blasting out of my bedroom as I switched the monitor off and darted back into bed to pretend I had been up to nothing and must have forgotten to turn the computer off. Discovered recently that one of those websites I visited back then still exists!

meisterister wrote:

I'm actually kind of surprised that this forum doesn't have a multiplayer hosting thread. It would be cool to see if there's anyone closeish with a modem and a copy of AOE II, for example.

I haven't had a landline since about 2005. 😵

My first deathmatch experience was with Doom, using a null modem cable. I also remember playing Retalliator with the same method. It was Doom II when we first upgraded ourselves into 8-bit NE1000 NIcs (was free from local computer shops since nobody was using them) and IPX. We were also using our serial ports for data transfer (Norton Commander anyone?) and 16550 was the new guy in block with VLB multi IO/EIDE controllers. My first modem was an internal 14.400 ISA modem. It was 1995 I think (Turkey was a little bit late to late internet). Upgraded to a Creative 33.600, then a Hayes external 56K (still connected to my daily rig, without a real purpose). never used it since 2005 or something, when I first migrated to DSL.

Yes, I certainly do remember phoning my ISP and asking them why my internet was so slow with an external modem. The Asus 486SPV3 if I remember the model correctly only had UART 8250 ports. It wasn't exactly as one would think, where the internet would only be half as fast as a 16550 port, it was slow as molasses and completely unusable. This was back in the day when your average ISP tech support was very knowledgeable. I ended up getting an internal modem.

I started with a 1200 baud internal modem in my uncle's Packard Bell in 1991. Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, and several BBSs. It was slow but fun, and a very valuable experience.

In 1994 I had a 14.4K internal modem in my first PC build; was replaced in 1995 with this, a Best Data Smart One 2834F 28.8K internal modem:

Also had my own phone line and my first ever ISP subscription to explore a new frontier, the Internet. FTP, Usenet, IRC, and the Web - my horizons broadened even more 😁

In 1997 I got the first of 3 external modems:

The best one was the Compaq Microcom 415 56K V.90, very speedy and reliable. These were interesting times - the start of Google and Amazon, the Dot-com Bubble, endless 3D hardware accelerator flame wars, Napster, IRC and FTP servers full of pirated games and software, large Usenet binary newsgroups, Internet forums came of age.

In 2001 I switched to a DSL subscription with my phone provider, and the modems were placed in storage. I still have almost all of them, only the 14.4K internal was lost in an accident in 2005.

My favourite modem - a Lasat Safire 56K internal ISA that I picked up for a few quid from a computer fair rummage box ... recognized the Rockwell 56k chipset - upgrade firmware from K56flex to V90, and it was storming fast - on newsgroup headers, I was getting about 4x compression and maxing throughput

meisterister wrote:

I've always wanted to get a phone line simulator so that I can have my own godawful modem networking thing. That would certainly make network transfers to some of my Pentium-era laptops a whole lot easier.

A small PBX might do the trick.

Oh yeah I remember having 8250/16450 UARTS and receiving massive amounts of CRC errors on the higher speed modems 😀

I started with a 1200/75 modem that I bought and had no idea what exactly to do with it or how modems worked (or what BBS'es were for that matter). Ended up with a 2400bps internal modem which I got going and started racking up major phone bills to the annoyance of my parents. Interestingly that Compaq Microcom modem was sold in Aus under the Netcomm banner. I remember having one of those in my family at one point in time.

My two most favourite modems were the Maestro 144FM Elite which retailed for around $699 back in the days.

Being in high school, I could never afford that kind of money but I was loaned one for a few months from a local computer shop that I got friendly with. I remember nicknaming the modem the Darth Vader modem, it had a full metal casing and was solid. Coming from a 2400 to 14400 bps modem completely blew my mind! I ended up helping run their BBS for work experience. Modems after that started getting all plastic and cheap 🙁

Once I got my own BBS up and running I purchased a Dynalink 33600 which was a clone of the USR Sportster. After spending a fair bit of time on Fidonet Aus.Modems I realised there was the king of all modems at the time the USR V.Everything Courier which retailed for a cool $999 😀 Never ended up getting it and I still ponder about purchasing one if I ever find one but don't think there's any real use for it! I even learnt all the Hayes AT command sets, understood all the different initialisation options, read up all about the ITU-T (and formerly CCITT).

I guess you could go off topic and start talking about Procomm Plus, Telix, Telemate, Terminate terminal programs. Got my hands dirty with all the major BBS Software in Australia at the time (Opus, Maximus, EzyCom, ProBoard, RemoteAccess of course). I never got into the BBS software that seemed more prevelant overseas such as Spitfire, TBBS, MajorBBS, Wildcat just to name a few. Spent hours learning about Fidonet, Frontdoor how it all fit together and eventually got my BBS a point FidoNet address and then eventually applied and received my own FidoNet address.

I think the thing that amazes me is how we managed to learn so much pre-internet. There was no Google or even Altavista back then, and I don't even recall purchasing any books on modems and definitely not on BBS'es or BBS Software. I guess I owe a big thanks Bluewave and QWK , FidoNet and a very close knit friendly Sysop community!

Just thought of a use for modems (well a few years out of date)
Think the last new modem I setup was 2006/7 for banking software at a UK company. They had about 5 of them attached to the back of Finance Dept PC's
I removed the last of them in 2012 as the bank was killing off the dial up service.

Our first modem was a 14.4K Zoom modem. It was an internal ISA card, so the motherboard's serial ports weren't involved.
There was something weird and cheap about how it worked, I think it didn't have hardware based error correction or something like that. A friend complained that whenever I connected to his BBS, sometimes it would cause *his* computer to crash.
I don't think I'd have any problem going back to the slow networking of those days - the online content was geared to work with it so it was fine.
But the thing I really couldn't tolerate is that back in those days, the ISP would bill by the hour. We'd get maybe 10 or 15 hours per *month* free, after that the hourly rate was extreme. I remember downloading a file catalog from AOL - it was a spreadsheet file containing a list of all their downloadable files. This allowed browsing/searching the list without wasting your valuable online time.

Our next modem was one of those awful PCI 56K Winmodems sold by USRobotics. It was an X2 type, not V.90. After that I was given an external V.90 serial port USR/3Com modem, which I still have. By that time the UARTs were a non-issue.

Today I have a bunch of old modems wasting space in a drawer which I never use. If I ever get rid of them, I'll still keep that external USR modem.
I occasionally use an old Pentium laptop's serial port for a diagnostic connection with an old car, but that thing runs a very low baud rate. On my modern desktop, I did make the effort to track down a compatible serial port bracket, but I still haven't made use of it. I should be using it with my UPS, but I still haven't set that up.
I make regular use of parallel for my printer and occasionally for an EPROM programmer. It makes me sad that modern motherboards have replaced all the legacy ports with a needless sea of USB ports.

dacow wrote:

Interestingly that Compaq Microcom modem was sold in Aus under the Netcomm banner. I remember having one of those in my family at one point in time.

You're right, it has the same look; only difference is the color and lettering. Probably a reference design used by different manufacturers and branded accordingly.

I remember those days fondly. Went from 2400 to 14400 then Got the PPI 28.8LCD. It's one of my favorite peripherils of all time. There was a program called lcdset32 that you could use to make a custom message on the screen, my neighbor and I called it "HAL" sent it in to be upgraded to 56k got it back and took it apart and brought the EEPROM to work and flashed my neighbors : ) That was a great time to be into computers. One thing hasn't changed if the internet is down the PC doesn't get used much.

Yes, I remember those days!
My first modem was a 2400 baud one, which I used on my Amiga and my PC (I think I had a 386SX-16 at the time). Got my first touch of being 'online', with local BBSes and such, downloading shareware games, apps and demoscene-related stuff.
Later upgraded to a 28k8 Tornado modem. I still have it, but I probably can't use it anymore, because my 'phoneline' is VOIP.
This is the modem that first got me on the internet. With a 486DX2-66, which has a VLB multi-IO card, with the venerable 16550 UARTs. I still have that 486 as well.