Making this has made me think about the days of asking Mum not to pick up the phone while I used the line to dial-up on my 56.6K modem... back then it felt like such an inconvenience, so why do I miss it so much now? What vintage hassles do you actually miss? Thanks for watching!
56.6k modem? Luxury! My 300 baud and 1200/75 modem was what I had to deal with my BBC Micro. BT bills were astronomical and my mum put a stop to that. Strowger switched exchange phreaking using a resistor, capacitor and toggle switch was a way around that. BT/GPO wasn't as advanced as the USA with the 2600Hz whistle.
Swapping the 20 metre telephone line extension between my room and my brother’s room “are you done with it yet!” then making a contribution to phone phone bill money box!
Christian, I know were similar (almost identical I think from memory) in age... I started off a 300baud modem in 1985 calling local BBS's. This was on my Atari 130XE (an upgrade by then from the original 600XL I had) and also on my Commodore 64 which sat alongside it. Mine was a fancy model modem that also did 1200/75 but nothing supported that. In 1987 I got a 1200buad modem and in 1990 a 2400baud modem. I didn't get 56K until circa 2000... It wasn't so much my parents at the time that I needed permission from... but it did used to rather annoy my older sister when she went to ring her friends up and got an earful of noise! The vintage hassle I don't really miss... but have such vivid memories of... is the engaged signal and waiting...waiting....waiting... for the auto-redial to finally get a connection to a BBS! Luckily in my area there was maybe a dozen or more popular and well used sites so it generally didn't take that long to get connected... it was just the most popular and most widely used ones that were hard to get on at busy times! In another year or so... I will be able to celebrate 40 years of being "online"! P.S. Commodore was AMAZING being able to solder up your own RS232 cable... whereas Atari needed an interface "box" inbetween... luckily there was electronics enthusiasts in the local computer club who made those... I bet they didn't get their circuit boards from PCB-Way way back in the 80's!
Well I miss the 45 or so kilos color TV, an IIT Nokia, the first color TV that our family had at our home, after the revolution here in Romania. Exceptional colors but hard to go with it to repair service :)
I remember when my house got real internet for the first time. We had a brief stint with dialup in the late 90s, but quickly abandoned it because of the cost. That and the phone company had no interest in repairing the phone line to our house... especially after a wildfire took out some infrastructure. Sometime in the early/mid 2000s, we had a satellite internet service. I forget what it was called, Something Blue. Anyhow, it cost money the more computers you wanted to have internet service at one time. On the order of double the cost. So I copied the settings to all our computers (we had three), and we would take turns using the internet. My computer was in my bedroom, so I saved up some money over several months and purchased a 100 foot ethernet cable. Which I would drag into my room and connect to my 2004 EMachine every time I wanted to get online. Kind of like a blasted internet extension cable. At one point or another, I had it duct taped to the wall (didn't last long though). Some time in the late 2000s and into the early 2010s, a new internet service started in my area. It was a local company that offered radio based internet that used each customer as a part of a big network to expand service. That was when we were introduced to this amazing new device called an internet router. Specifically the Linksys WRT54G. Ahhhhhhhhh... sweet relief. I don't wish for these days to return, but I do miss the things I did on the internet back then. I played a lot of Command and Conquer games online. I sometimes remember names of friends who are long gone.
Nice quick video on using this MODEM. Its really fun to get online and visit these BBS sites again. Thanks for posting this! I enjoy all your videos. 😊
“Don’t be a jerk, that’s basically all you need to know in life…(long sigh)”. Loved the video, loved the format, what you do makes happiness and for us peanuts in the gallery admission is FREE. Can’t wait for your bbs! C64 and U2+ modem ready to go!
Thanks for bringing me back! Back in 86 I would dial-in to Compuserve and Q-Link over a 300 baud. Those were the days and OH the phone bills and Compuserve bills were out of this world. $6/hr for Compuserve @ 300 baud, I had to dial long distance to get to the node so that was another $12/hr. Added up real quick.
PCB Stands for "PerryFRANTIC C64 BBS"... I'll bet if you open the cart and see what it is there's an ESP32 under that running the show. It's so wonderful seeing the old tech running and ppl interested in it and supporting it.
How I would have loved to have this in the 80's. I still remember connecting my C64 to a 27mhz transmitter in the early 90's where someone's c64 in the neighbourhood living in a high flat apartment usually was used as a node to pass on messages further than my 27mhz transmitter could go. Later when I discovered there was something called ICQ to send messages online, I bought a modem to connect to my PC and that was my first time I actually connected to the Internet. And that was also when the extremely high phonebills came in :D I was instantly addicted. I started dating online which lead me to Los Angeles in 1999 (I lived in the Netherlands back then) which was remarkable for that time. Now everyone dates online, on their phone. The world has changed a lot since then, mostly for the good, but certainly also a lot for the bad.
This video takes me to my young years of accessing bbs with my speccy 16K with a 1200 Baud modem. 11 Meter Band never allowed data to be transmitted. But 2 meter (144 MHz) band used RTTY and SSTV, in the 90's i started using Packet, these are still use in these days. 73
Ive got a lovely rs232 hayes emulator wifi modem from Simulant here in the UK. I use it on my Atari ST, Amiga 1200, and hopefully my cpc 464 once i sort out a serial interface for it. Its a great nostalgic treat to browse the vast amounts of BBS sites.
Such a lovely video just think if we all had this sort of thing back in the day how good online text adventures would of been, sure it would of been a bit slow but i think it would of been so cool. Something like Cave i use to play one a BBC network in school back in the day, you would have about 15 players in a cave system running about looking for items and the way out. That said everyone just wanted to find the light switch room so they could turn out all the lights in the cave system haha. As always great work guys and i am so looking forward to what we get next, so until then have a great weekend and take care 🙂
Heh, the only time I got to use a modem on my Commodore 64, I was actually using Therm, which was a C64 terminal program that had 80 columns. Or, as the magazine where it was published on as a type-in listing put it, 80 blurry squiggles per line.
Great show again guys! Cheers! Do you remember when you had a Commodore c64 as a kid and constantly broke and snapped your joysticks and buttons! ( Quickshot 2 Turbo & ZipSticks! ) 🕹 I had a joystick graveyard in the form of a huge black bin bag (or bodybag lol) behind my tv as spares after me and my mates had knackered the poor Commodore controllers! Must have got through nearly 20 in the end over the years! Joysticks, that is! Not friends LOL 😂
Love the feel of the VHS and tape deck music. Brings back memories of doing the same thing with my friends when we acted out a “show”. Tempted now to get myself one of these “modems”. Keep up the great work Fractic Family!! ❤
Never owned a C64 (only a CBM B128) but loving the Fujinet for my Atari 130XE. It's pretty amazing to have 8-bit internet apps and multiplayer games. It's also a bunch of other things, all managed through a web interface. Brilliantly utilizes the Atari OS device handler to allow old apps to access internet resources as well.
My first modem in 1983 was a 1600 VICMODEM, the most primitive 300 baud modem known to man. I could actually read the lines of text as they scrolled across the screen it was so slow. No autodial. You needed to dial by hand, listen for the noise then unplug the cord from the handset and put it in the modem. But for all its flaws I loved every minute of it.
I had a 300 baud modem on my Timex Sinclair 1500. Not even sure what I connected to but I loved that little computer. Later I had a C64 and C128 with Hayes 1200 baud. Good times.
I needed that Retro Recipe, it was like a soothing cup of Horlicks, calming my senses down. This is surprising as the video was produced by a guy called Perifrantic! Thinking back to the days of 48K ZX Spectrum use, I do miss the operation of "Tweaking The Azimuth" using those tiny metal screwdrivers you used to be able to get from Pound stores. All in their brittle plastic, easily broken, cases. "Tweaking The Azimuth" sounds like a title for an electro-pop song from the 1980s. We had to make the sound from the cassette deck sound as tinny as the Seventh Doctor's theme tune. So armed with screwdrivers, Isopropanol alcohol and our Tandy-acquired demagnetising cassette we progressed toward steady loading signals. That, and looking at the static on a CRT television when detuned to see patterns emerge that were not really there. That was as close to mysticism as we early computer nerds got. This was another wonderful video Perifractic!
Not an inconvenience... but I have oh do many fond memories of getting a modem with the Hayes command set... that first time you type AT and get a wee OK reply... Oh! Perhaps my only example of an inconvenience I miss is setting up all the modem initialization strings in the terminal software!
I prefer this topic recorded on new cameras, it is very interesting topic. When I did it on my ultimate 64 I felt like a real hacker using the text interface and AT commands. Love you work and trying new idears.
I loved this quick byte. My poor re-capped Commodore 64 sits in a box waiting for me to use it. I don’t have a dedicated place for it yet. I’ve got the new adapter and the SD card drive (that I haven’t even connected to it yet and I’m not sure I’m clever enough to figure it out to get it to work.) But online? Sending messages? That’s just crazy in 2024! 😂 Side note: I should get my old SONY TRV 950, 3CCD camera out. I have a couple blank VHS-C tapes still too. But mine looks amazing. It was broadcast quality back in 2004-ish?
Another fantastic video! Getting my C64 online back in the day opened up a whole new world. My online place in the 80s was Viatel, run by Telecom Australia. I still remember the number to dial. I bought a Retro Rewind C64 WiFi modem some years ago and it was amazing to relive those old online days. Since then I've built some more Sven Petersen WiFi modems that use the same ESP8266 as the Retro Rewind modem. There is a Micro USB port on the ESP8266 that appears as a COM port on a Windows PC, it's easy to map this COM port to the virtual serial User Port on the VICE emulator so you can use your Wifi Modem with an emulated C64 as well 🙂
Thats so funny. I logged into ParticlesBBS and it said you had just been on. I did a double take.. is that who i think it is.. the spelling was off. The Sysop can get the name corrected.
Thank you perifrantic. I have a weird thing with tech. The older it is the more it blows my mind. Like records, radio waves, and the friggin C64 is online!!
0:27 - My wife says the same thing every time we're about to engage in some marital bedroom activities. Funny thing is, I didn't even know she had a C64, let alone a modem emulator for it!
Caught the card at the end and I'm a bit late watching this one. Happy Belated Birthday dude ;) I have one of these modems and used some online instructions to get me to and running :)
Ah yes, accessing the old BBS back in the day at a BLISTERING 300 baud! My friend and I would wait for an hour or more for a program to download and then cross our fingers that it was going to work. I seem to remember that it was about 50/50. LOL! Anyway, the following Christmas my mom bought me a 1200 baud modem and I thought I was in heaven. Good times! [edit: Oh, I wanted to add that the cleverness of some of the BBSes use of Commodore color graphics characters is something I miss. This included animation using those characters too.]
Love your channel, discovered a few years back and have been watching every episode ever since. My tech journey didn’t quite match, I went Spectrum then Atari ST, but every time I see a joystick or other item I had as a kid it is like instant recall of some things I had forgotten about!
I got my C64 online with the RR-Net adaptor in the mid 2000s connecting to Quantum Link Reloaded which was really cool. The original Quantum Link was the precursor to AOL online. Then connected to telnet BBS's which was something I so wanted to do back in the day on my Amstrad CPC.
I learned basic on my 2nd C-64 and it was so much fun. I was actually taught basic by the guy who sold me the C64. I made many text adventures. I could prompt for the players name and then add the name in where ever I wanted, etc. I wish I would have continued learning basic and then advanced basic but, the Amiga came along and sold the C64
The great format of presentation that I always loved about the channel. :-) Really interesting take with the camcorder too! I wonder how my old cam is doing in the drawer!
In the early 1990s I had a 1200 baud Commodore modem and did a few things with it - set up an email, browsed the web with the text-based Lynx browser, and even chatted to a friend for ages one evening. I've seen quite a few people using these modern WiFi modems and am intrigued as to whether I would really make use of it. Great fun, though.
Can you put your PCW online? I remember that they could do it, but I was too young to know how to make it work / had no phone connection to make it happen.
Had BBSs been around when the C64 was still current, it would’ve been the killer app! I always wondered what people actually did with these 8-bit machines besides playing games and learning to program (that’s all I and anyone I knew did). There just wasn’t enough memory to really do word processing or spreadsheets beyond just dabbling. But it’s plenty for use as a terminal to a much bigger computer - plus the whole social aspect. That would’ve been awesome
Yeah filming a CRT with a standard definition camcorder makes it look so blurry you can't read the screen...and yet seeing the glow of colored text brought back memories of dialing online to local BBS's back in the day. ❤
Never really thought about the Speedking only being able to be used by righties. Do you think that’s why they came up with the Navigator later on? To make it accessible to everyone?
The issue with this style of video is that it is very difficult to read what is on the screens being filmed. That’s an essential part of any video covers BBS
I'm confused, when I used to connect to BBS's, I use to connect by using the modem on my computer using ordinary analog telephone lines. How do you connect to BBS's now? when you only have Broadband internet and no normal telephone lines with a dial signal.
peri - please i know the past is important to you, but there is a reason we left crts and analogue video behind. your bloody killing my eyes friend!!!please at least de interlace it for us.
As much as I get the nostalgia using the video, it just isn't a good viewing experience. On this video the text on the monitor was pretty much illegible, making it hard to appreciate the device set up properly. As for hassles, I had an Atari 400 in I think 1982 & I started by typing in programmes from magazines by hand. On an Atari 400 that was an exercise in frustration & swearing 🤬. Got a floppy drive pretty quick. So funny to think back how computers evolved so quickly. I remember getting a Time desktop that had a mind boggling 27 gigs of storage. Remember telling mates how much & they were like "what, that's insane, you'll never use that up" 😂
