Corrections!

At the risk of showing my age, I remember as a kid watching a, "high-powered business man type," pull out some early proto-portable computer and an acoustic coupler and use a payphone to connect to whatever he had to connect to (probably something stock market related) while waiting for a plane at Newark Airport. At the time, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.

Aaah the bee movie script, the lorum ipsum of the 2010's

1960's TCP handshake was actually just human interaction lol

My Dad had a Telex machine at his office in the early 80's - he used to communicate overseas. It was cool to watch when somebody connected and started typing.

Fun fact, I used to work for AT&T in their ADSL support, every once and a while I would get a call where the DSL modem was so janked it was making audible noise on the line that sounded like dialup. I remember one call where the customer didn't realize the static on their phone line was their modem, within the first few minutes I had them unplug it, no noise, plug it back in, handshake, told them they needed a new modem.

I remember circa 1998, trying to play "Top Gun: Fire At Will" with my friend over our modems. We never decided who would call and who would answer, so our landlines kept ringing, someone (our moms) would pick up, say "Hello? HELLO?!" and it would come through the modem as a static-y, quasi-human-sounding voice. It was creepy, hilarious, and frustrating all at once. Our parents never let us try again.

The breaking down of the meaning of modem just blew my mind lol

broadcast is still chock full of dial-up, and every single modem is that same US robotics 56k V.92 serial modem. they get used for satellite control networks, stock ticker info, and other weird specific things

When we used acoustic couplers, we had to whack the phone's handset every once in a while to unpack the carbon crystals that were used in it to pick up sound. After a lot of use, the crystals would settle and lose the ability to vibrate properly.

BTW, in Linux "tty" meant "TeleTYpe" from UNIX. Standards never die.

My father worked for the Bell System and one of the Baby Bells for 30 years, installing and servicing Teletype machines. He would go out to remote locations like a plant or mill out in the middle of nowhere, under harsh industrial conditions and make sure those Teletypes were still functioning and sending data over country phone lines of varying quality, or through the tangle of lines strung through the city over the past 100 years. Your video helped me understand some of what he did.

This is a really enjoyable and informative video. Growing up in the 80s this really was part of the fabric of life. My uncle was a traveling salesman for Xerox and we had a terminal with an acoustic coupler modem in the house. My aunt and I would dial in to the mainframe and play computer games in 1985. A particular game "Castle Adventure" was my favorite. I wanted to play the game so bad I made my aunt teach me to read at 3 years old. I beat the game myself for the first time just before I turned 5. It is a watershed moment in my growth as I became an avid reader from that day forward and I truly believe it has given me so many advantages in life and I owe a good portion of that to the communication provided by that modem. I have been in the IT field my entire adult life, riding the waves of innovation to this very day.

Back when we had acoustic modems, we didn't have "phone lines" attached with common jacks. Until the 80s, IIRC, the phone (rented from the phone company, usually) was plugged into the wall with a big four-pronged plug. Not convenient for adding more stuff. But almost all the phone handsets from the phone company were exactly the same shape, so the acoustic coupler was actually useful.

Great video! Really enjoyed it, brought back all kinds of memories.

One of the advantages of the 103 modems is the low latency. I remember working for the military in the 80's and having to use a 103-style modem because the modern ones had too much (and unpredictable) delay.

One thing to note about acoustic transmission is that it was also great for piracy and other software transmission from tape. That’s part of why you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes screaming down the Jersey Turnpike at 2AM.

"Even if you're 19, and you weren't there for any of this stuff."

I remember acoustic couplers! I never used one myself, at least not for computers, but my dad had an early answering machine (purchased at a time when it was still illegal to attach your own equipment directly to phone lines) that used a similar construct to quite literally answer the phone. That is, a sound-activated switch detected the telephone ringing, and then two struts in the "crown" from the answering machine, which sat between the hook and the handset, would lift the handset, after which the machine would "speak" the recorded message into the handset.

One interesting Modem of this time was made in Germany, the Datenklo (data toilet), it was made by the Chaos Computer Club because the only modems that you are allowed to use at that time could be only rented for like 50DM (routhly 50$ today) a month from the Deutsche Post (Telekom splitted from that company). So the CCC made their own modem which also go around the restrictions by being a acoustic coupler. To connect to the Telephone Handset it used Rubber sleeves that were bought at an plumbing supply store and usually were used with an toilet, this gave it its famous name.