Yet another Hacker News

23 points ibobev 4 days ago 11 comments

tiahura 2 hours ago | parent

How do you write an article about an old modem without the word “baud”?

Nevertheless, I don’t remember this one, the Vic 20 wasn’t super popular in my circle, but dang $99!!! I think my first hays clone was $399 in real 1980s dollars.

teddyh 2 hours ago | parent

I came to say the same thing. “How many baud was it?” is the immediate question anyone familiar with modems would have, but it is nowhere in the text. Only in the image of the advertisement does it say that it is 300 baud. Because people who would want to buy one would want to know.

hagbard_c 1 hour ago | parent

My first modem, also around that time was... 10 Dutch guilders (around $4.50 at that time). That's 'cause I bought a suspiciously modem-looking (markings, phone line transformer, line relay, etc.) full-size rack-mount board at a swap meet, no documentation on the thing, bunch of switches and leds on the front, S100-like connector on the back, 'sold for parts'. I traced the circuitry, managed to work out its intricacies, figured out what voltage it needed to work, powered it up and started experimenting. After a few days I had it worked out, created an interface to my C-64 to run the thing through the user port - with pulse auto-dial! - and built ye olde wooden enclosure with built-in power supply and a single-slot rack mount for the thing. It worked for years and was my first way to get online with that machine. It was the classiest modem I ever had, bar none.

I wonder what that board was originally used for, it was quite an elaborate thing, a half-size board sandwiched on top of a full-sized one, a bunch of expensive-looking white ceramic gold-capped circuits on the top board, the bottom one full of discrete components. It must have been something serious and expensive. Still, I suspect the C-64 I ended up connecting it to may have had more computing power than the original host.

cbm-vic-20 1 hour ago | parent

I had one of these! You had to load the terminal software from the included cassette tape, pick up the telephone, dial the digits (literally, we didn't have TouchTone), wait for the Bell 103 handshake tones, then quickly unplug the handset and plug the cable into the modem. Set the handset aside so you don't accidentally hang up.

Then enjoy BBSing on the 22x23 display! Good times.

kstrauser 1 hour ago | parent

I think I typed in the terminal program from the book to start. That’s the day I learned that not every computer agreed what number “a” is.

An older peer quickly set me up with a better terminal on a floppy.

skeeter2020 1 hour ago | parent

tangentially related - I remember my Dad bringing home a Vic-20, pecking in a sample program and then nothing but syntax errors, despite it being entered exactly the same as the printed manual. Turns out the number 0 and the letter O are not the same thing to a computer.

kstrauser 51 minutes ago | parent

I learned very quickly that computers are simultaneously really smart and really dumb. That's served me well over the years.

Singletail 1 hour ago | parent

A friend found one discarded in a phone booth, and gave it to me, the only VIC-20 owner he knew.

It changed my life. It gave me places to go when I really needed them. It gave me an escape. I am forever grateful.

Shoutout to the rest of the PhoneLine Phantoms, Army BBS, Datanet, and especially Paladin's Palace, for which I can still dial the number on a rotary phone in the dark.

kstrauser 1 hour ago | parent

This got me online, dialing first to my buddy, whose dad almost bought him a modem. We chatted a few times and that was fun. I found BBSes. He wasn’t into it. The rest is history.

EmmEff 57 minutes ago | parent

I remember buying one of these at a computer flea market in Toronto sometime in ‘83 before my C64 days. It’s what got me hooked on being able to get “online” and see what the rest of the world was doing with their VIC-20s.

Soon after, I was able to afford a 1200 baud modem for my C64.

kiscica 32 minutes ago | parent

As a computer-obsessed preteen the VIC-20 was my first non-single-board computer. I'd initially gotten into computers via electronics and had had a KIM-1 on my "workbench" for a while, but once I got my hands on the Apple IIs in our 5th grade math classroom and discovered that they understood the same machine language as the KIM-1 but were vastly more exciting, I pined for a "real" computer.

I alarmed my teachers by skipping recess to use the computer and read every issue of Creative Computing and Byte I could get my hands on. I even had a floppy that I would bring to the handful of New York City computer stores so that I could surreptitiously get a little extra time in; sometimes they even wouldn't kick me out for a while.

I begged my parents to get me an Apple for at least a year before they relented - partially - and bought me the VIC a few months after it came out. A twentieth of the RAM of a fully-loaded Apple and a 22-column display? No problem, you could still do a lot with that!

Less than a year later, I persuaded them to buy me the newly-released VICmodem. The first night I had it, I was dialing, one after the other, the numbers I found in a magazine article for the various NYC bulletin board systems, mostly running on Apples and TRS-80s, maybe an S-100 box here and there.

I was hooked. I just had to have my own. But what can you do with a 3KB computer? I begged and pleaded again and managed to wangle an 8KB expansion cartridge and, more importantly, a 1540 disk drive. A few days of coding and I had a rudimentary BBS with a message base, private mail, a "chat with sysop" feature, and even text file upload/download/

But, as the linked article mentions, you use the VICmodem by plugging in a modular handset cord. No autoanswer. What to do? Off to Radio Shack to buy an optoisolator with my pocket money - I think I had everything else in my junk box - and shortly I'd put together a janky circuit that would pick up the phone with a signal from, I forget now, maybe the VIC's cassette interface? The "user port" was occupied, of course, by the modem.

And thus was born VTUG-BBS ("VTUG" meaning "VIC Technical User's Group," a mostly-nonexistent organization that, at least, I managed to recruit a few friends into). Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, my parents had granted me my own phone line after the first few times they picked up the receiver only to hear a carrier squeal. So I advertised the number on the local BBSs and soon enough I was getting nonstop back-to-back calls. I'd come back from school, run to my room and check out the call log, maybe break in and chat with whoever happened to be on at the time.

VTUG was, I believe, the first BBS ever to run on a VIC-20, and I got many inquiries about the software, so I started selling it (as RAVICS, "Remote Access VIC System"). $79 a pop, simply because that seemed (from ads in COMPUTE! magazine) to be the going price for "serious" software, and with my naïve kid's idea of what things were worth I offered to bundle the autoanswer interface for an extra $20 - mind you, it probably had almost $20 of Radio Shack components in it once my junk box ran out, taking into account the enclosure. Of course as the orders started coming in I realized that building autoanswer interfaces for zero profit was a bad use of my time and stopped advertising that. (Not to mention that, of course, hooking such a thing up to the phone lines was strictly prohibited by Bell Telephone rules!)

By the time the Commodore 64 came out, I had enough to buy one on the first day, and I had the BBS running on that within a few hours. I remember discovering I had to make a change that would turn off video whenever the 1540 disk drive was accessed; there was some subtle timing problem that Commodore soon corrected with the 1541 model, which I promptly added to my setup. 64K of RAM and two 170K disk drives made for quite a powerful BBS setup by those days' standards and I added lots of nice features, including a hierarchical message system inspired by NYC's multiuser A-Tree BBS of which I was an early denizen.

As for the VICmodem, it worked fine on the C64 and I continued to use it and my homebrew autoanswer for a while, even though I knew my customers were using various autoanswer modems. There was no obvious need to replace it, although I now had enough money to buy whatever modem I wanted. I do recall I played around with a Novation JCat for a while, just because it was kind of cute.

Of course the C64 went on to be wildly popular and as the source of the first, and for a while the only BBS that ran on it, I sold quite a few copies across the country, enough to "live large" through junior high and my first year of high school. But then I discovered math, and more importantly girls, and I figured I didn't have time for that stuff any more. I sold the "business" to some guy out in the Midwest - probably at the best possible time. C64s weren't the future. I used some of the proceeds to buy myself the newly-released IBM XT (10 MEGAbytes of disk? How could I ever use all of that?!), switched to C and Lisp and never looked back...