Modems

What uses have you put modems to in the past? I seem to have unwitting gathered a few older external ones over the years and it's seems a waste them just sitting dorment.

I had an external voicemodem running an answering machine in the late 1990's, it could take calls, had multiple mailboxes, send and recieve faxes etc.

Other then that I keep a few external units around incase I ever need them, I was thinking of setting up an internal BBS and figuring out a way to gang up a few models into a switcheboard kind of thing (if possible) for the oldest machines with no ethernet.

My father is using a modem for dial-up internet to this day.. there's some strange noise problems on the phone line that the telecom never, over the decades, could figure out, and it would affect ADSL quality so that is out. And the fiber guys never come around to his neighborhood, and the cable company has way too little competition and you need to buy a full TV cable setup before you're allowed to buy the internet-over-cable setup.. and my father has perfectly working digital TV over the air already.

So for now it'll be the dial-up modem. Fortunately the telecom still maintains their free dialup internet service. But as the netbank keeps adding more and more rubbish to their pages the login takes longer and longer..

But I really can't think of any other use for modems, I'm not aware of modem usage among a single individual out of my extended network, my father is the only one.

An obvious and easy project would be to use a modem as an interface to control activities at, say, your cabin or summerhouse, but these days it's just so easy to do that with dedicated GSM interface boards. And a modem would require a landline these days (I think the analog modem support on GSM phones went away when GPRS was implemented).

But yeah, modems should be able to talk to another so the internal BBS thing sounds like an idea.

-Tor

The only problem with the internal BBS thing is that you would be going serial port -> modem -> phone line -> modem -> serial port when a null modem cable would do the same thing. That's a lot of hardware and wire just to hear modem tones again.

Good question. I've got a stack of USR modems, from the Courier HST to the V.Everything as well some Hayes boxes. These were very expensive units in their time. The USRs all seem to have 80188 CPUs with some SRAM and EPROM, so it may be worthwhile harvesting those. I'll probably keep an internal PCI modem around in case the "broadband" service fails.

It's the same situation with DDS tape drives. Nothing wrong with have one or two "just in case", but more than that is just silly--and nobody wants them.

Modems work great for FAX use. Fax your corrupt government official and get results! BTW Even the newest Windows has fax software included; some need the software installed from the installation disk.

GottaLottaStuff said:

The only problem with the internal BBS thing is that you would be going serial port -> modem -> phone line -> modem -> serial port when a null modem cable would do the same thing. That's a lot of hardware and wire just to hear modem tones again.

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That works great from one machine to another, but not for multiple machines at the same time. Come to think of it I have some multi line serial port MCA cards for the PS/2 machines I might be able to rig up with a few modems (if I can hack the dongle).

Isn't there some kind of old very expensive gear for offices that had a dozens or more phones tied to one external line that is super cheap now (or was that all digital)?

Well that's kinda what a PBX was, lots of different types but yes it split the main connection into internal extensions with the ability to host mail boxes and internal phone routing. A free one that was or is popular now is Asterisk.

Don't forget call display; I've had a modem feeding a computer that logs and voice-announces Caller-ID info since Caller-ID was introduced.