Dial Up Internet on Windows 1.04, using a 1960s modem at 300 bps 

Our forefathers did a great job defining HTTP for posterity. Really awesome stuff!

Unlike my iphone 6 which works perfectly but cant install many apps

Its amazing that a 1960s old modem still works over today's phone line. And then an 1980s PC works with that modem. But after that, he just logged on to another Linux machine to run Lynx. That machine could just be a modern server.

Modern age is from circa year 1500 to the present

​@@onearthonelegionok 🤓

😂😂😂😂😂

1980's.

@@Connection-Lost the description says 1960s.

That modem was used for a long while.

That modem is interesting

CP/M, baby! Kaypro II!

@@jamespfitz The father of a friend of mine in High School had a Kaypro II. He was a lawyer for a large corporation, and I guess he needed to be able to edit documents on the fly? First time I ever saw one of those in real life was in their dining room -- he'd set it down on the table when he got home from work one day, and I happened to be over there visiting. Very cool machine for the early-to-mid '80s.

Yes, exactly this! For Bell 103 specifically, the caller had two frequencies called 'mark' (1270Hz) and 'space' (1070Hz) and playing one or the other indicated a one or a zero, respectively. The answering modem does the same, using 2225Hz for mark, and 2025Hz for space. In the case of this 'pure' modem those are translated real-time to/from levels on the receive and transmit pins on the serial port. It's actually a very simple device operationally speaking. Check out the wikipedia article on Frequency Shift Keying: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-shift_keying

Yeah but it speaks KKKKKAHHHHH

Yeah it stands for Modulate-Demodulate.

Always has been, they just skipped the acoustic coupling bit in future models.

Kind of like how commodore 64 cassettes worked.

In reality it wasn't advanced at all, looking back it was very simple, but extremely clever. It still works thanks to the simplicity.

@@radoslawbiernacki It works fine in that it still does what it was designed to do. If you're interested, I use the same gear to surf Reddit, but using a local TCP/IP stack and browser here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-73w9vdNjYy4.html Note that I do go through a proxy to offload TLS though.

@@neoqueto it was janky, but it worked to utilize pre-existing infrastructure. It would be the equivalent of using email to send video frames to one another so that the computer could composite them together into one video. Yes it worked in a pinch, but it was extremely slow and not particularly clever. Now if you want clever uses of sound, wait until you hear about how they used piano wire and a buzzer as RAM.

@@sheeplord4976 or mercury memory, similar to delay line memory as it also made use of propagating waves. I'm saying that the modem technology was clever back in the days of its inception. Janky, yes, but hella compatible.

they are just as expensive. its just we have more cheaper options and premium options

for a computer that used to cost 2400 dollars, it better have a decent keyboard.

Where they actually mechanical though? I know that model M keyboards with the buckling springs still had a membrane layer underneath it so it really wasnt. I cant really find any info on this type of keyboard.

I don't think it is a mechanical keyboard. I believe it uses Alps integrated dome switches.

shop i worked in had maybe a 100 old ibm keyboards bought as a job lot and then windows 95 arrived.... they had no windows key making them worthless to customers, i was told to put them in the skip... horrible heavy noisy keyboards for dos nerds.... how i wished i had kept them to sell on ebay now lol

Wait, there's printers Microsoft can't support? I thought there was that whole thing about not being allowed to make folders called stuff like CON so 1980s printers could work. shame you can't use it any more.

@@stm7810 it was the apple LaserWriter - no proper model number - it was the first model of LaserWriter. When Internet Explorer printed to it the driver just gave a single page with a postscript(?) error that stated the printer wasn’t supported. I had other options for printing with the printer - configure as a text printer: fast but only one font, use Netscape instead: that worked fine, if 4pph is “fine”, because web pages are all about pictures, or (horror) pictures of text. Alternately, configure it under Unix: x-windows WAS a thing back then, but configuring printers with it was a little beyond the scope of my interests. It was a good printer, just slow with data xfer because tech was slow when it was designed.

@@Relkond cool.

Lmao i actually "used" 10 kilobits per second speeds on weak 2g throttled internet out in rural america in 2018

​@@neonsamus Was it digital or acoustic communication?

It is! Though remembering things like going through 23 floppies to install Microsoft Office 95, I still live in fear of that sound repeating over and over, as it struggles with a sector on disk 17 or something. The floppy drives on this machine are great though, which is good since this machine only has the floppy drives - the unique mechanism on them means they'll be tricky to work on if they ever die.

@@retrocet ahh now I wish I was born in the '80s

@@yeppiidev buy the machine now if you like it so much.

@@gregdaweson4657 I wish I could, I'm just 14 rn, and I doubt my parents will allow me to buy one of those. Plus, space is a problem so the only way I'll probably see one of those is in a museum

@@yeppiidev Stay in school and you'll be able to collect as much as you want, the hard part will finding a woman of any quality in your generation.

Europeans were based?

@@tissuepaper9962 It was the monopolistic structure in most European countries pre-1995 (approximate year set by me). Germany was one of the first to remove the fixed line connections so you were allowed to connect your own equipment. But - it still needed to be approved by the federal telecommunications authority. So most modems from the US were not legal to connect. People did it anyway and there were raids (!) due to that and people got a criminal record by connecting a typical US USRobotics or a Taiwanese ZyXEL modem to the German telephone network... They did really bind huge amounts of law enforcement into this.

Thank you! Will do!

You probably had a 14.4 kbps and 28.8 kbps modem. Many times faster than this one at 300 baud/bps. Note that baud/bps are not interchangeable. It just so happens that the 300 baud modem will also be 300 bits per second. Your 28.8K modem would have been 2400, 3000 or 3200 baud, as it would have used clever signalling to achieve the higher bits per second throughput.

@@hairyclassics1789 If I remember correctly it was pre 14400 baud rate. Super slow.

@@guytero8812 A slower modem might have been 110B, though that would have been limited by the terminal. Other popular speeds were 1200 & 2400. Then after smart modems appeared, 9600 and faster. BTW, I have been a technician for 50 years, mostly in telecom and I got started as a bench tech overhauling teletype machines. Some of those ran at a blazing 45.4B! I have never heard of 11 or 22 baud and I have spent most of my career involved in telecom and networks.

@@James_Knott HI James. Thanks for that. Now I remember that is was a 1200 baud rate I started with and then went to a 2400 baud rate modem. It was like a turbo compared to the previous one. And then the 56k one with v32 bis compression. Those were the days.

@@guytero8812 Those were only 56K in one direction, with 33.6K going the other, IIRC.

It is a rotary phone! They are slow, though remember that back when they were common you would've been dialing seven (or even fewer!) digits most of the time. Ten digit dialing on rotary for local calls definitely wasn't a common thing. There's actually a funny tidbit that you can figure out how population dense/important your area was around 1950 based on how long your area code takes to dial. Since lower numbers take less time to dial (zero takes the longest, it's more like '10') it made sense to give the lowest ones to the most dense population centers. So New York City got 212 (the lowest possible), and Alaska got 907 (one of the longest).

I did not give you permission to tell my life story.

Thanks!

But it's in the name

Quick(ish) Answer: - The laptop has been 'in the family' since 1990 or so. I used to use it for science projects as a kid. - I've been a modem nerd for a while, and this modem is a bit of a holy grail for me. I had it set as a saved search on eBay that sat for seven years without a single hit. When it came up, I snapped it up immediately. It didn't work due to some cracked solder joints, but it was a relatively easy cleanup and restoration to get it into good condition again. - The phone was a random eBay purchase like ten years ago. I'm pretty sure I just wanted an old-school wall phone in my apartment at the time. Its number is actually the door buzzer for our apartment now, using a special VoIP bridge that converts pulse dial into DTMF, so we can 'dial' 9 to open the door. - The ISP I'm dialing into is an in-house affair. I'm working on a video about it, but I'm a very, very inexperienced video editor, so things like graphics and animations are pretty difficult right now. In the meantime, I have a text post up on Reddit about it: www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/tmyedk/comment/i1yy290/?context=3 Rambling Answer: I've been into retro computing for a while, and I really appreciate enthusiasts like Neil at RMC Retro that are focused on 'living exhibits', where machines actually function and can be used, as opposed to just being display pieces. I try to have all my machines in running condition, using original hardware as often as I can. Anyway, one of the most formative pieces of tech for me was dial-up; I was on BBSes and later dial-up internet in middle school and high school, so there's major nostalgia factor for me there. There are lots of WiFi modems that are great for getting old machines online, but I really wanted to create a 'living exhibit' where I could replicate the dial-up experience as much as possible. This channel is kind of the result of it all - I'm basically just screwing around with dial-up tech and making some videos of it.

@@retrocet sim, meu amigo, a internet discada é mesmo muito nostálgica! Eu adorava aquela época mesmo com todas as dificuldades. Muito obrigado por compartilhar! 🙏✨✨

@@retrocet 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👾

@Michael Jay lol, I meant 1200 baud

Is that a common problem? Honestly this is like to _only_ LCD in my entire laptop collection that's not dying in some way.

@@retrocet These old laptops - I don't know what the screens are made of offhand but I seen it before, the plastic in the screen gradually decays with age and it will slowly rot and as it rots the brightness will keep getting brighter and brighter until its an unrecognizeable haze. It might seem blotchy or unevenly colored in places before that happens. It affects how the screen can transfer the data image through it. It's not repairable unless you know someone that can remake the screen in a factory or find some way to bodge a screen (maybe a small in-car HDTV screen of similar dimensions soldered into the VGA socket and sandwiched into the old frame bezel, i dont know). It seems to be a problem with early Macintosh and Acer laptops. If I remember, Zenith was a shared brand with Compaq I believe (sold for a lower price point) so not surprisingly they share the same problems.

The laptop isn't actually rendering the site, he called a modern Linux computer and used lynx as the browser.

@@Vaionko That makes sense. I was thinking probably something similar would enable a lq a/v stream.

@@uncrunch398 These early PCs just had a speaker that beeped. Although there were later hacks that let you bitbang them for PCM audio playback, this tied up the CPU for other work. You could probably take periodic breaks to perform brief tasks if you used a very low sampling rate. It couldn’t have decompressed an MP3 fast enough in real time though. It would have had to be raw PCM. And the modem itself is so slow that a bit rate low enough would probably have been unrecognizable. Video? No chance. Very slowly changing ASCII art, perhaps. 😏

@Michael Jay Nope. The laptop was used as a remote terminal over dialup.

They were definitely cool at the time, and they're actually super robust. This thing has been an absolute tank of a machine. It's been in fairly regular use for over 30 years now.

Acoustic couplers were often built into boxes to protect them from ambient noise.

Thanks! DOS 3.20 is what shipped with the machine, and there are some Zenith-specific bits that I wanted to make sure I was using. The choice of Windows 1.04 was mostly arbitrary - I just went for the 'latest' version.

@@retrocet Nothing like the latest and greatest to run the oldest and slowest 🤣

Acoustic Couplers were available even into the 80s.

Prior to 1984ish (in the US anyway) Bell prohibited users from connecting any equipment not sold by Bell to their network, so you actually weren't allowed to electrically connect a third party modem at all. As a result, acoustic couplers like this one were the norm for most of the 300 and 1200 bps era.

@@retrocet Thank you for that information!

Of course! Thanks for checking out the video!

Just a USB modem on the other side capable of negotiating at 300bps, after that it's just VT102 or ANSI terminal protocol, It's straightforward to make a remote TTY using `mgetty` or plain `getty`

@@WelshProgrammer thanks for an explanation! I tried digging a little bit deeper and found out that dial-up is not the same as DSL as I initially thought. Whoops... Turns out dial-up is modem-to-modem communication, while DSL is modem-to-provider, where the provider's hardware is a lot different from a cable modem, which made me think the author somehow emulated DSL host. Very interesting stuff indeed!