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Are dial-up modems useful for anything?

i don't think us modem users are insulted Ol Juul. Just amused ;). But thanks for the concern. At one point Conical obviously thought the same dropping ppp and the likes from one Ubuntu release a while back. It's not as if the programs took up much space. Catch 22- you needed the internet to aquire the .debs ;). I found that very amusing considering the folk Ubuntu was targeted at.

Maybe we could form a group called "Modems Anonymous":
"Hi my name is Caluser2000 and I still use a modem." Actually that would make a good sig.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/ralf/pub/text/.modanon
 
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Thinking it through, I'm not 100% sure how it works (I think either a computer or the device has the proper configuration to use the modem, not just a random tethering) but I still see modems attached to network devices for remote configuration access or disaster recovery type of access if the network is down.

I've also seen and actually need to complete it for our work site at some point attaching a modem to monitoring servers to send out alerts/pages if the network is down. Obviously a major network outage or internet outage is pretty nice a quiet for the on-call staff if the email alert fails to get out :)
 
Caluser2000 said:
i don't think us modem users are insulted Ol Juul. Just amused ;). But thanks for the concern. At one point Conical obviously thought the same dropping ppp and the likes from one Ubuntu release a while back. It's not as if the programs took up much space. Catch 22- you needed the internet to aquire the .debs ;). I found that very amusing considering the folk Ubuntu was targeted at.
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I find that even the "small footprint" distros are not very small. They always talk about how little disk space they take (who cares), but conveniently ignore the fact that they take a huge amount of RAM - often 64K or more. After using linux since almost the beginning, it's clear to me that it's development is driven by people who either have lot's of money, or spend what they have on RAM - presumably because mom is paying the rent. I'm not very familiar with Windows, but I'm always impressed at the low resources of very functional machines.

Maybe we could form a group called "Modems Anonymous":
"Hi my name is Caluser2000 and I still use a modem." Actually that would make a good sig.
Click to expand...

We admitted we were powerless over modems—that our lives had become unmanageable.
Came to believe that a modem greater than our own could restore us to sanity.

You're right, it does have a certain ring to it. :)
 
EverythingIBM said:
So I have a whole stash of PCI dial-up modems, along with one 8-bit ISA one (forget what I pulled it out of).

Is there anything useful I can do with them without having an ISP for dial-up?

Otherwise I think I'm just going to recycle them. Probably a null-modem would be the best way to go if I need to network something older. And it's not like I'm going to be using dial-up to connect to the internet.
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People used modems to transfer mail and files with UUCP before the Internet was common place. And you can still use modems for the exact same purpose - no one knows when will it be necessary to fly under the radar, you know...
 
Pepinno said:
People used modems to transfer mail and files with UUCP before the Internet was common place. And you can still use modems for the exact same purpose - no one knows when will it be necessary to fly under the radar, you know...
Click to expand...

Indeed. My very first email address was a university account, but my second was delivered directly to my home PC via UUCP running on Coherent Unix. My email address at the time was, IIRC, "mwc!trixbox!trixter@uunet.uu.net". It's been two decades, I hope I didn't mangle that, some UUCP guru please correct me if I'm wrong. The email would go to uunet.uu.net, then be picked up by the machine "mwc", then picked up from mwc by "trixbox" where it was delivered to the user "trixter".
 
Pepinno said:
People used modems to transfer mail and files with UUCP before the Internet was common place. And you can still use modems for the exact same purpose - no one knows when will it be necessary to fly under the radar, you know...
Click to expand...
Darn tootin there! With things like SOPA and PIPA in the works we'll need a reliable backup system, even if people like us here will be using 10,000 modems to get a network up and running. I'm pretty sure that no big server owned by big brother would look too much at an old Apple/Commodore/Atari/Tandy/whatever as much of a threat, so they would be totally left alone.
 
It is a bit late, but I thought my questions would be more appropriate here than starting a new topic.

The only modem I have is a Tandy 1200 baud PC Modem Cat. 25-1013, an 8-bit ISA device that supports the AT command set. It can only go into my Tandy 1000SX, which even with its 286 Accelerator Board cannot quite get to 8MHz AT speeds. I would think that at 150 bytes per second transfer rate, it has very, very little use. My ISP is Comcast and it does not offer dial up access numbers, so the Internet is out of the question. I suppose I could get BBS software or a terminal emulator, but BBSes are few and far between these days. If I can find an opponent, maybe I can play Modem Wars, Battle Chess or 3-D Helicopter Simulator.
 
The first online boards, even games, were all text based. It wouldn't be too painful if you found someone with some old system online with Adventure, etc. Even if you had to pipe it through telnet and an in-between system.
 
I hold onto a couple Courier models and acoustic coupler model. I have a box that simulates the phone network. I had plans to some day have two computers talk to each other with one running a BBS. Unfortunately, I haven't found the space to configure this yet
 
atod said:
I hold onto a couple Courier models and acoustic coupler model. I have a box that simulates the phone network. I had plans to some day have two computers talk to each other with one running a BBS. Unfortunately, I haven't found the space to configure this yet
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A box that simulated a phone network? Nice box. I want to run across one of those. Your idea for an in-house BBS is very interesting, sounds liek a neat thing to have running.
 
Hi
It shouldn't be to hard to make something that would act like
a phone line.
First, don't waste time on Touch Tone and just use the
dial option. That would be easy to make a simple dial detector.
It doesn't even have to understand what number is dialed,
just any dial.
A dial tone could come from a simple 555 oscillator or if
you must us a micro processor some simple code in a '51.
A couple of relays to handle the various line isolations.
The last thing is the ring tone. This is usually a 30 Hz
90 volt. I suspect most modems are not sensitive to the
frequency and the AC line through an isolation transformer
would be enough, just leaving it at 60Hz.
Dwight
 
Probably an old (1980s) small KSU would do most of the job, including +48VDC and ringing. There have to have been a jillion of these kicking around with the old 5-button business phones.
 
One I went to the flea market and a guy was selling some old, used and mostly broken telephone test equipment, the types of things used up on the lines and would be carried on a belt. I bought a dial tone producer; it clips onto a pair of wires, sends the needed dial tone out and that's all it does. One of these days I plan on using that in a bigger project, to have it working, and if a circuit I design is in place, will turn it off when anything is dialed.

Brings me up to a question: is there a way to give a certain computer a number, like have the modem listening out of say, 5 machines, and respond when "it's number" is dialed?

I'm still not giving up on my internal telephone network, regardless of the nay-saying I have heard about it. Ethernet is not practical on an 8-bit computer, at least most of them, and ethernet on something that was not ever intended to have it is expensive and difficult to implement.
 
NathanAllan said:
I bought a dial tone producer; it clips onto a pair of wires, sends the needed dial tone out and that's all it does.
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Are you sure it's a dial tone? Some of those units emitted a tone to identify the corresponding pair in a multi-pair cable.
Ethernet is not practical on an 8-bit computer, at least most of them, and ethernet on something that was not ever intended to have it is expensive and difficult to implement.
Click to expand...
So use an RS-232 network (LANtastic, Also-LAN, etc.).
 
NathanAllan said:
Ethernet is not practical on an 8-bit computer, at least most of them, and ethernet on something that was not ever intended to have it is expensive and difficult to implement.
Click to expand...

If you are talking about the IBM PC and other compatibles with 8-bit slots, I would disagree. If you are talking about Apples/Tandy/Atari/Commodore, that is another story. RS-232 is an option for all, but Ethernet is an order of magnitude faster.
 
NathanAllan said:
One I went to the flea market and a guy was selling some old, used and mostly broken telephone test equipment, the types of things used up on the lines and would be carried on a belt. I bought a dial tone producer; it clips onto a pair of wires, sends the needed dial tone out and that's all it does.
Click to expand...

Like Mike hints, that's probably just a tone generator. I've got a little box like that. I'm not sure that a linesman would have any interest in making a dial tone.
 
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