Post #3061199
2025-06-12 12:10 UTC
@rgammans@dice.camp @janeishly@beige.party
I remember the first modem I ever saw, before I knew the word "modem." It was when I was a kid in the 1970s, in the house of friends we only saw when we were visiting our grandmother in the summer. Their dad worked at MIT. It was a literal curly-cord phone receiver that you stuck into a cradle. Our friends showed us how, through that connection, they could chat about math questions with MIT students.
... one of those friends later went on to win a Nobel prize.
Replies (2)
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@janeishly@beige.party 2025-06-12 13:01
@asakiyume@wandering.shop @rgammans@dice.camp That's a lovely story. That kind of technology was so immediate and real, not like the shiny slippery slop we have today.
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@mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz 2025-12-05 03:15
@asakiyume@wandering.shop @rgammans@dice.camp @janeishly@beige.party My first interactions with a computer were over one of those. 300 baud acoustic dial-up, on a briefcase-sized portable terminal that my father would take home from work in the mid to late 1970s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_700