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Today I've found a PCI 56k modem, and amazingly, it still works, I've put it in an old computer, booted up Windows 98 and then... the magic, that lovely dialing sound, opening IE 5.5 again after so many years to find that bing.com is the only search engine that still works (without updating the browser)

And the best part is I'm currently downloading the missing audio driver on that thing, still 4 hours remaining, 2.4 kb/s I love it.
 


I have a low profile one sitting around that works(in theory, we NEVER used it).
 
i'm pretty much out of all my old parts like that. i have a couple i keep on hand for testing but i've sold or given away all the older stuff i did have. i had a ton of agp video cards for a while and a large box of ddr1/2 ram and other assorted things like modems and network cards. but over time i slowly installed them into clients old pc's and never had a reason to rebuild the supply. now the used stuff i get is newer and includes a lot of ddr3 ram and newer cpu's

i still fix up and give away a good 10 systems a week to needy in the community. this time of year we get a lot of stuff donated since a lot of upgrading happens with the holidays. i'll be working for 2 months after the holidays to check out and restore all that's been donated. life is good 😀
 
I have given away thousands of dollars worth of old PC equipment back in the day (or tossed it in the trash), because old stuff usually ended up so slow in comparison (or useless) that it wasn't even worth the effort to ebay at the time. Nobody gave a crap about "retro computing" either.
 
100% true

my pieces went one by one into old pc's for clients that had a part die. so as mobo ethernet went out, my networking cards went. as gpu's dies or the onboard video was just too slow to do anything anymore. my slightly better agp gpu's went one by one and so on.

the ones i'm giving away now are usually about 5 yrs old. enough for a homework/internet system which is what they are intended for. poor students who need something to do homework on. see a lot of first gen i5 systems and even some older fx systems popping up. plenty good enough for web use and homework. of course i do still get a lot of core 2 duo stuff but even they can handle the light loads overall.
 


USR 0766, still works like a charm, I remember having an older one, ISA socket, I remember it because of its huge speaker and 2 audio jacks, from the 80's I think



I have a landline phone only because my apartment came with it lol and that's great, I don't really rely on mobiles, I know, weird, I really feel like I was born too late, I'm only 22 years old but I had my first computer at the age of 14 and it didn't came with a modem, so... it's a nice experience, I'm still playing with it
 
Waitaminnit, some of you have been talking about modems, some specifically 56k and say that they still work. How? Even if you have a landline, does the phone company provide dial-up internet service to all subscribers?

I live in a remote corner of the world and the internet came here less than 20 years ago. It was 56k for a few years until it was superseded by ADSL which is still the main means of internet access. A few small companies offer direct satellite internet and mobile phone companies provide internet service via USB dongles. No cable yet, and 56k has not existed for more than 10 years.
 
First computer I used was a CP/M-86 based device to convert data punch cards to magnetic reels

First computer I build myself was an Apple2+ clone kit... forget the name but it was a nice system, cheap to make and ran like a champ

First Home computer, 1983 TRS-80 Model 3 with 64Kb Ram, and 2 5.25" 187Kb drives. and to astonish a few, 110 baud coupling modem. (that's would be 110 characters per second...), after a few "upgrades" namely a 10 Megabyte External Hard drive and 4 720K disk drives (yes take out large drives out , wire in 4 small drives in holes... was awesome! not to mention the massive 128Kb ram upgrade lol I ran a Bulletin Board System during 1987-1990 off that thing, had many networked forums on there an of course as soon as 56K modem where available I had one running on it.

in 1997 before I left for the USA, I gently placed 3 TRS80 Model 3, boxes of manuals, Diskettes, and 1 16" line printer on the corner of the garage... students living in a duplex across the street "magically appeared as I was bringing out the last box out of the garage... eyeing the stuff... politely asked if they could have it... and a nod and 3 stupid smiles later the treasure was hauled away across the street....

thank you for the memories
 


If you have ADSL or VDSL (mostly known as uverse, this is actually a brand) then you have 56k because it uses the same line, all you need is hardware that can recognize the signal and use it (modem) plus an username and password combination, in my case it's my name@provider and SSN
 
haha.... this thread brings back memories!!
First computer: Commodore 64 (c.1984).... and that was 64k memory.... NOT 64bit :) Some people had the 5.25" floppy disks (180k), but I had to make do with the audio cassettes (5-10minutes to load a game!)...
First family PC: an 8086 "XT clone" (c.1989) clocked at a whopping 5Mhz, instead of the usuall 4.77Mhz.... and it had a turbo button that took it up to 12Mhz, but some games were unplayable at 12Mhz as the character's movements were based on the CPU clock speed. This was upgraded from the usual 512kb RAM to 640kb with 16 little 16kb chips that plugged directly into the motherboard.
Firsty personal PC's: Dell 325 (386DX 25Mhz)(c.1992), Pentiums were out, but most had 1Mb-4Mb RAM, so this was faster for most stuff as it was upgraded to the gills: maths co-processor and a total of 40Mb RAM! (16Mb on the motherboard: 4x4Mb SIMMS) and another 2x Intel "Above Boards" (8Mb+16Mb), so it had the full quota of extended memory (16Mb), expanded memory (16Mb) and at least a an 8Mb RAM drive...
First modem (family): (c.1990) BAUD2400 "double speed" (most online experiences were 1200bps), but there wasn't anything out there really - just a few BBS boards and my dad's computer network.
First personal modem: US Robotics "Sportster" 14.4.... followed by the US Robotics 56k!

The say that I've been obsessed with the tinkering with computers is an understatement... here's a magazine article from PCZone in 1998.... back when magazines were on paper 😛


My computers then was actually DUAL P2 333Mhz, overclocked to 392Mhz.... until I replaced the Orchid Righteous 3D (4Mb) + Tseng ET6000 (2.25Mb) with a combined 2D+3D card (nVidia TNT 128Mb).... but the AGP bus was locked to the overclocked FSB and I had to clock the whole box down to 350Mhz 🙁
That system went up to 512Mb shortly after the article.... running either NT5 beta or NT4 + some hacked DirectX drivers that allowed any game to run... my LAN party box (mini tower+duct tape handle) had the old Tseng card and two Voodoo2 12Mb's (SLI'd) and a Pentium166Mhz overclocked to 250Mhz (with the aid of 128Mb PC100 RAM and LOTS of cooling)....
 
I remember our VIC20. I think it's still in a closet somewhere. Used to play all sorts of games on it. We'd press Play on the tape deck and come back 30 minutes later to play the hell out of a Pac-Man like game. Also plugged in cartridges to play Lunar Lander and Gorf. The game cartridges were even compatible with the Commodore 64/128 we got years later as an upgrade system.
 
I wonder if a dialup modem would work with my Comcast VoIP? I get the dial tone... I can fax over it... I wonder how much of a kick in their crotch it would be to run a dial up over their VoIP?
Reason being; they couldn't count it as part of their 1Tb/month data cap. My household regularly hits 900+Gb/month. One of these days, we're going to hit that ceiling.
Meanwhile, I wonder what it would do to my overall data speed to bridge the two? Now that would be an interesting experiment.
 


If you were to max out the bandwidth on a dialup connection, running it 24/7, it would not materially affect your 1TB monthly data cap.
 
56k modem used to net me abut 7 Kb/s up n down together. so that's, let's see, .....7 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 30 = 18,144,000 Kb/month or 18.14 Gb/month or about 1.8% of your monthly 1TB limit. 😀

name says it all......
 


Neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerd
 
got the old cruise control set at 35 and when i get there.....

revenge-of-the-nerds-the-panty-raid-edition-20070308023901420-000.jpg
 
My first PC was an Ohio Scientific Challenger 2P. It was built from a kit. It had a MOS 6502 Processor @ 1.2 MHz, 25 KB of RAM, a single 5 1/4" Single Sided Double Density Floppy Drive and an 80x25 Amdek black and white monitor.

It was a great machine. It came with BASIC interpreter and an Assembler Editor. There was a rudimentary DOS written in BASIC and you wrote files to entire Tracks on the Floppy. About 4500 lines of BASIC was all the RAM could hold.

But I was still able to write duplicates for several of the games at the Arcade like Space Invaders and Asteroids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Scientific#/media/File:Challenger_2P-IMG_4137.jpg
 
i miss those days where some BASIC code could write you a game in an afternoon. i could program BASIC but did not focus on games. a lot of stuff you'd use a spreadsheet for now i wrote programs for. was not to hard to do so long as i could map it out first on paper and get the formulas and dependencies figured out.
 


I think the first modem I had was some cheap generic Mac modem that plugged into the keyboard and I think it was a 14.4 modem but I can't remember all the specs. I got my first 56K modem back in the late 1990s and I think it was a US Robotics. Either that or it was a Creative.
 
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