RS-232 acoustic coupler

Talk about a blast from the past.
Well, I'm looking for one of the classic looking acoustic coupler modems that you put your phone handset onto and as you typed away you heard all the spiffy noises.
saw one From Texas Instruments a while back (and am kicking myself for not getting it) at a second hand store and I really want to try it out with the BBS terminal program I have (which is DOS).
Would anyone have one that they care to sell?

EDIT: If you think you have one but don't know what it is (and I have no idea why you would not), they look similar to this.

EDIT: One has been located and a deal had been made for one from a TRS-80.

I should have a R-S unit somewhere; I'll look around & let you know if no one else has one.

The old RS-232 acoustic coupler. That takes me back.

I remember using one of these. I was a grad student and I could "borrow" it from our computer centre if we wanted to do work on our home micros to load up over the phone to our PRIME.

After that I got a 300 baud RS232 kitset modem that I could plug directly into the phone line! Luxury!!

Tez

I've never used one, as of I grew up with the 14400 Modems (still RS-232). I really can't forget the sound it made when you tried to dial up to the internett.

Wow.

I used to have a TI 300 baud one back in college in the late 80s. About once a week it would start throwing garbage up on the screen so I'd have to turn it upside down and give the microphone side a solid WHACK on the top of the desk toi unpack the carbon.

Fun times! The Angel BBS in Longview, TX, had ASCII pr0n for downloading and printing that you had to stand about 6' or more from to see.

Well I see that quite a few people have come to love (or hate) their coupler.

When I got my Altair, I needed some offline storage. Floppies were still way too expensive and I didn't want to use paper tape. I found a surplus modem from a TI Silent 700 and rigged it up with a power supply in a Bud aluminum box.

To handle tape, I rigged up a DPST toggle switch to adjut the receive/transmit carriers wo that they werr the same. So, connected to the same serial port on the Altair, I could dial into work (and do my assemblies on the CDC 6600) or write to audio tape cassette. It was only 300 bps, but it worked well enough.

But I don't miss the old acoustic couplers. Hooking up a modem directly to the phone line was verboten without a telco-supplied DAA (monthly rental only).

You might look at building your own from the March 1976 issue of Popular Electronics--the "Pennywhistle" modem by Lee Felsenstein.

I used to have a whole box full of various makes of AC modems, but, I sold them off on feE-bay as fast as I could list them.

I'll take a look around as well and see if I've got any in since then.

I'm thinkin' that old phones are gonna be valuable too, since those modems ain't gonna fit any modern handset...

I got a couple old phones that work well with the couplers. I got two touch type ones and a rotary (which still works) and I also got a wall mount rotary.

NeXT said:

I got a couple old phones that work well with the couplers. I got two touch type ones and a rotary (which still works) and I also got a wall mount rotary.

Click to expand...

Yeah, it was all downhill after the Trimline. I still have a wall-mount rotary Trimline as the phone in my shop. I'll probably die before it does.

There should still be plenty of 500/2500 desk sets kicking around for cheap.

Chuck(G) said:

Yeah, it was all downhill after the Trimline. I still have a wall-mount rotary Trimline as the phone in my shop. I'll probably die before it does.

Click to expand...

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Consider it a challenge to outlive the G@$$%mned thing!

BuMPage.
I'm still looking for one.