recently i watched a couple live streams by themaritimegirl in which she used her vintage
epson pc with a modem to dial some bulletin board systems and that made me realize i have this
computer which still has its original tandy internal modem
which i've never tried and in fact i considered removing it because i thought i would never have a
use for it but since there are some bbs's still in operation which you can dial using a modem
on a vintage computer like this i thought why not give it a try
and here is the original tandy modem installed in the computer it's kind of hard to read the
sticker but it says tandy 2400 bps half card modem and lists the catalog number and there's the two
phone jacks it doesn't say which is which but one is going to be for connecting to the phone line
and the other is for connecting your telephone and there's a switch for com1 or com2
now this computer does not have a built-in serial port so i can use com1
so let's turn on the computer and give it a try
i installed a copy of bananacom which is a popular terminal program for dos it's from
1998 which is rather late for a dos program and it's freeware and if we do the command find modem
it passed the hardware test and found the modem on com1
it says the speed is 9600 bits per second that's just the speed
communicating between the modem and the computer it's not the speed that the modem
can communicate with other computers through the telephone line that's only 2400 bits per second
but the modem is working it's responding to an at command
i wrote down a list of numbers to try first i'm going to try is the nist time server
which is in colorado the command to dial using touch tone is a t
d t and then you type in the number one three zero three four nine four four seven seven four
you can hear the modem's built-in speaker
and it connected at 2400 bits per second
and there it goes national institute of standards and technology
telephone time service and it's showing the current time in utc which is greenwich mean time
so right now in england it's 51 minutes past midnight
and it said enter the question mark character for help so i'll do that and there it goes
giving a description of the data it provides
i don't know why it kind of starts and stops like that
and it automatically hangs up after about a minute or so
so that number works next on the list to try is the borderline bbs which runs on a commodore 64.
and there's the number atdt
951-652-1690
connected at 2400 bits per second
it has a list of borderline bbs and cottonwood bbs i'll try the borderline bbs
it said press return slash enter to continue but then it already says connecting without
me needing to press return i'll press return anyway see if it works
there it goes are you using a commodore color graphics terminal program no
last caller was radio nomad okay press return if new user
please fill out the following application honestly
okay i'm gonna make up a name here i'll use my real first name but a fake last name
phone number well i'll have to again make it up a little bit
what handle do you use vwestlife
what password to log in well i'll make up something here
oh i didn't think you would just put it in plain text
what is your age can i do negative one is that going to crash the system
where are you calling from new jersey usa
well i didn't type the dollar sign in backslash there must be some corruption on my line here
because i'm using verizon fios what i can't type a comma
i'm using verizon fios so it's just it's kind of like voice over ip
except a little bit higher quality is my email address nobody at noone.com
okay yes
please save this information you will need it to log on again
i wonder if it's actually using a floppy disk on that commodore 64 it's running on
that would explain why it's taking so long your user id is 79 write it down well
even better i got it on video
you can call four more times today
have one hour and 30 minutes for this call well i'm not going to take that long
searching for mail no mail today you will not have access to online games
and file transfer sections until your account has been validated
main menu i have no idea what those letters mean so i'll type a question mark
can i just leave a message feedback to the sysop i'll do that
use your i didn't type a previous message
max 50 lines okay hello from vwestlife
trying out
my tandy 1000 internal modem 2400 bps
making a youtube video on my channel
thanks
hit return on blank line to exit okay uh
i don't know
what it hung up on me well i hope he got that message anyway
next on the list is the sursum corda bbs which is running on os/2
so i'll try that atdt one two five six eight nine five four seven eight six
2400 bps
no carrier well it connected and it just gave up
all right i'll move on to the next one the diamond mine bbs and the instructions said
to enter a username and password of dmine so i'll try that a t d t 1 5 4 0 3 7 0 91 40.
connected
okay well it told me to enter a user id and password of dmine so that's what i'll do
detecting terminal animation ansi okay this is the first one so far that uses
ansi which gives you colors i guess it's running on windows
and there you can see the graph... well it's
not really graphics it's just the upper ascii characters and colors
enter user name or number or new or guest well i'll do guest
ah it's doing that garbage stuff again
unknown user well i tried to type it
alright let me try to get that in without garbage characters mouse reporting i don't think so
yes we're already seeing those
that's neat it's like an animation
for our records enter your full name i'll use my assumed name again
email address
location new jersey usa
where did you hear about this i well i just looked it up on google
doing those ansi graphics and colors makes it slow down compared to plain text
the last few callers were dr what and two guests
read your mail now yes i don't think i have any mail what this is a test mail okay
there's the main menu
note to sysop we'll try leaving a note on this one subject title
i am trying out my tandy 1000 vintage pc with 2400 ah garbage characters
2400 bps internal modem so far so good making a youtube video for my channel vwestlife thanks
okay slash s to save all right email sent to diamond dave number one
list of users let's see that
308 total users
if you've called this bbs and your name is on this list leave a comment
a couple people from brazil and australia ontario england austria
switzerland
greece or grece
india someone else from new jersey diagnostuck
scotland quebec
florianapolis never heard of that argentina turkey
so they have quite an international following
sorry if i didn't make it far enough to see your name on the list but at 2400 bps it's
gonna take a while all right i think we're done with this one so i'll type g for goodbye
hit a key
alright disconnect
and click it's disconnected so aside from that one bbs which hung up on us as soon as we connected
and a couple of those garbage characters that showed up i think it was a successful
test of this modem certainly 2400 bps is not that fast but for just plain text it's okay
because it's not going any slower than what you can read
and mostly i just wanted to try out calling real bbs's on real phone numbers which is
something i haven't really done in over 20 years so it's nice that there's still some of
these bbs's out there that you can dial and some of them are
even running on vintage hardware like this one which is running on a commodore 64.
so that's it for this video if you want to learn more about how modems work and
all about the history of bbs's i'm sure there are other videos and other websites
which could explain it much better than i can so feel free to look that up on your own time
but for now i'm just gonna turn off the old tandy 1000 and thanks for watching