I’m in a class going over our serial products. All this talk of baud rates and other serially-type stuff made me curious about what “classic” modem hardware was still out there.
I found this amusing article about the Hayes Smartmodem 1200, a high speed, 1200 baud modem at a bargain $700 price!
Man, if I had all the money I had ever spent on modems 14.4 and less, I could buy 2 laptops in today’s currency. I remember being 17 years old and saving up $300 to buy a 14.4 modem when they were still just trickling into the user base.
On the other hand, try comparing what I spent on all those and phone bills to what a college education would have otherwise cost me. I think that the money my family and I spent on computers and telecom did more for my career than any class I ever took.
My favorite is still the 300bps modem my dad bought for me when I was 11. It plugged into the joystick port on my Atari 800 🙂
A fellow contractor asked me the other day what he could do with his “old” 500mhz laptop. My first question was, “Does it have an RS-232 port?”. His answer was yes and we both agreed that it would be a perfect toolbag laptop.
I can’t believe how many times I have cussed about my current laptop not having RS-232. It’s not like network infrastructure has begun providing console access over USB or anything. Maybe I should look for a USB to RS-232 bridge.