As far as I'm concerned, the downfall of little blinking lights on the hardware that showed you the status of what's inside, was the beginning of the making-shitty of the entire internet and computing world.
Damn right. We sold our souls to a little black mirror in your pocket
An official Hayes one? No.
I started with an 1200 baud Commodore 1680, then upgraded to a SupraModem through a BBS sponsor program. USRobotics pioneered these, but other manufacturers followed suit on. Basically, if you ran a BBS and displayed a banner ad for the modem, you could buy it (the modem) at a pretty reasonable discount.
It worked really well for years, especially after the initial ROM upgrade (which came supplied not as a flashable update you could download, but as ROM chips that you had to physically swap out).
Supra, like USR, supplied upgrades as well, in the form of a motherboard swap.
I did always want a USR Courier; there was something to the big, black, red LED-lit badassery that was appealing to my teenage self, but the Supra had a little green matrix that told you the status of the session, which was really nice.
Hayes was the gold fucking standard...
I have three of them at work that I still use daily.
What do you use them for? Still maintaining a BBS?
Dialing into security alarm systems that are still connected via POTS lines. They’re certainly on their way out but there’s still plenty out there.
I think it’s still in the attic. Now, all I need is a landline.
And a server to call
Hah, no one alive back then is going to miss spotting that. I knew it would say Hayes before I clicked. 😁
My first modem: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1644
And my second: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1647
I was so excited when I got the 1200 because I could no longer easily read faster than the BBS output. I always wished I had a Hayes though, because back then the red LEDs were so damn cool. 🙂 😎
I remember getting my 9600 baud modem. Compuserve was smoking with one of those!
I always envied the Compuserve folks - the most "online" I got during my C64 days was QuantumLink (which would go on to become AOL) - Compuserve was real internet to me for a long time, but I was never a customer. More or less the same as I felt about Prodigy.
They look like parallel ports!
It was a versatile port. You could connect standard parallel devices with physical adapters, but it had other uses as well.
https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/User_Port
I have everything but the monitor in my basement. One of these days I need to get mine running. :)
Ha Ha nice try but you're not tricking ME into admitting that I played Tradewars 2000 using that thing!
I kind of regret getting rid of mine years ago. You really don't know in the moment what will be nostalgic and what is trash.
Where do you put the hand set?
RJ11 clips into the back. There was a time when you had to plug in a handset but it was gone by the mid 80s, as a direct connection to the wall allowed for higher speeds than a hand fitted coupler could.
Aww. I was just pulling your leg. My earliest modem was a 9600 baud with those rj11 plugs.
I couldn't find a picture, but my 2400 baud modern was a Prometheus, it was tan and had a slightly upward facing face. Designed for your phone to sit on top of it.
Still regret selling mine.. Ah those were the days
Dreamt of a Hayes! Can’t remember the ones I had. V42bis .
Then I wanted the US robotics courier that got 9600 with compression!
I had a 300 baud modem that connected to my Atari 800's second joystick port.
Word.
Used one, hell I still have one on a shelf at work.
Nostalgia
nostalgia noun nos·tal·gia nä-ˈstal-jə nə-, also nȯ-, nō-; nə-ˈstäl- 1: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition also : something that evokes nostalgia
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