1960's wood-boxed modem in action

[NathanAllan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9dpXHnJXaE&feature=player_detailpage

I had to share this. He also asks if anyone had a modem like this one that he'd love to hear from them. I can't think of a better group of guys/gals to ask than here

 

[Chuck(G)]

I'm old enough to have used one of the wood-boxed AJ modems. They're uncommon, but findable.

 

[NathanAllan]

I'd love to find one, that's for sure.

 

[glitch]

I've seen a few on eBay over the years...IIRC, they went for reasonable prices too.

I've got a later A-J plastic boxed modem from the late 60's/early 70's, but the tone generator circuits aren't working correctly. It was given to me by my boss, who used it with a terminal and connected with it at 110 baud to an IBM mainframe for an APL course.

 

[nige the hippy]

I picked up a slightly more modern one on ebay for 99p about 3 years ago (still wooden box etc., but better designed triangular lid for phone receiver). well pleased as it was the type I used to use to communicate with the HP2000 TSB at the local college. I was given a phone with the round receiver parts to fit in it.

 

[Chuck(G)]

If I were a collector of such stuff, rather than the wood-boxed acoustic coupler rigs, I'd be looking for a Bell System dataphone. There must have been a jillion of these made, as they were very common right up until the mid-1970s, but I haven't seen one in the wild for a very long time.

I suspect that since they were all rental units, that they were all scrapped when returned.

Sad, that.

 

[atod]

Do you know what type of modulation and baud rate the dataphone has?

 

[Chuck(G)]

AFAIK, the 300 bps dataphone uses standard Bell 103 tones. Inside, they're a marvel of gutlessness. Only a very few transistors. Ma Bell didn't trust transistors, I think. The early DTMF (Touch Tone) used only a single transistor to generate both tones.