Really cool being able to see the status with the lights. And the cool dialup sound of course.
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Hayes was the gold fucking standard…
An official Hayes one? No.
I started with an 1200 baud Commodore 1680, then upgraded to a SupraModem through a BBS sponsor program. USRobotics pioneered these, but other manufacturers followed suit on. Basically, if you ran a BBS and displayed a banner ad for the modem, you could buy it (the modem) at a pretty reasonable discount.
It worked really well for years, especially after the initial ROM upgrade (which came supplied not as a flashable update you could download, but as ROM chips that you had to physically swap out).
Supra, like USR, supplied upgrades as well, in the form of a motherboard swap.
I did always want a USR Courier; there was something to the big, black, red LED-lit badassery that was appealing to my teenage self, but the Supra had a little green matrix that told you the status of the session, which was really nice.
As far as I’m concerned, the downfall of little blinking lights on the hardware that showed you the status of what’s inside, was the beginning of the making-shitty of the entire internet and computing world.
I think it’s still in the attic. Now, all I need is a landline.
And a server to call
Ha Ha nice try but you’re not tricking ME into admitting that I played Tradewars 2000 using that thing!
I kind of regret getting rid of mine years ago. You really don’t know in the moment what will be nostalgic and what is trash.
I have three of them at work that I still use daily.
What do you use them for? Still maintaining a BBS?
Dialing into security alarm systems that are still connected via POTS lines. They’re certainly on their way out but there’s still plenty out there.
Hah, no one alive back then is going to miss spotting that. I knew it would say Hayes before I clicked. 😁
My first modem: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1644
And my second: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1647
I was so excited when I got the 1200 because I could no longer easily read faster than the BBS output. I always wished I had a Hayes though, because back then the red LEDs were so damn cool. 🙂 😎
I remember getting my 9600 baud modem. Compuserve was smoking with one of those!
I always envied the Compuserve folks - the most “online” I got during my C64 days was QuantumLink (which would go on to become AOL) - Compuserve was real internet to me for a long time, but I was never a customer. More or less the same as I felt about Prodigy.
