
Apple II connecting via acoustic coupler modem and rotary phone (2015) [video] - tomhoward
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAg0cQJ8Aag
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mark_l_watson
A coincidence to see something posted on the Apple II. I had serial number 71,
and I wrote the shitty little free Chess program that for a while Apple
distributed on their Apple II demo tape.

I was thinking last night how far Apple specifically, and technology in
general have progressed since the late 1970s because I was reading docs and
articles about my Apple Watch and experimenting with everything that I could
do just on my Apple Watch: it runs a surprising large number of cool iOS apps
(Night Sky being one of my favorites), can directly access the App Store, can
locally store and play audio books, podcasts, music, etc.

The Apple II was amazing and I really loved it, even though I stretched my use
too wide for the hardware (I developed a commercial Go playing program in UCSD
Pascal, and had FORTRAN on it also).

It makes me happy to see people still hacking with old Apple IIs.

~~~
thatannoyingguy
I was about to get myself an Apple II but I couldn't decide which model and in
the end I got myself a C128D which I am restoring at the moment. The Apple II
is still on my wishlist.

~~~
rasz
Have you ever used 128 mode? What software other than GEOS if any at all?

Btw C128D BOM cost Commodore as much as Amiga 500, and they barely made any
money on them.

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dehrmann
Fun trivia about rotary phones: it takes longer to dial higher digits (0
taking the longest), so major cities (more people, more calls) got lower area
codes like 212 (Manhattan) vs 307 (Cheyenne, Wyoming).

The general idea is like Huffman coding.

~~~
octetta
Personal trivia... I once lived in area code 909, which was the worst of the
rotary-dial era.

~~~
Aloha
909 was not established though until well after the rotary-dial era was over,
I had a rotary phone in the 90's and was calling 909 numbers, but I was a
distinct minority.

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op00to
I miss modems. I miss the noise, I miss the magic, and I miss the community.

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fenollp
Acoustics is such a high dimensional medium yet one humans can readily
manipulate... This reminds me of [1] (2016), where they optimize a 3D series
of conduits so that they produce the desired output signal (given object shape
and output audio frequency).

I wonder if one can arrange such conduits (6-way connected pipes and chambers)
to replicate a feed forward neural network. If it can be done with light...

These pipes could be interesting to work with, maybe in order to build DAGs.
Plenty of software take DAGs as an executable input! Can someone put me in
contact with the people at [dynamicland]?

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JbN9vXxGYE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JbN9vXxGYE)

[dynamicland] [https://www.dynamic-land.com/](https://www.dynamic-land.com/)

~~~
MrEldritch
> I wonder if one can arrange such conduits (6-way connected pipes and
> chambers) to replicate a feed forward neural network. If it can be done with
> light...

It actually _can 't_ be done with light, not without active switching
components or very high intensities. (The "optical neural network" papers
published so far are fully _linear_ networks, lacking the nonlinear activation
functions between layers that are critical for deep neural networks to have
any more power than a single matrix multiply).

However, I think nonlinear _acoustic_ properties are actually more accessible
than nonlinear optical properties, and so an acoustic neural network may be
more plausible.

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HoustonRefugee
I had four Apple IIs (IIgs, rest IIes) and I had a network going and
everything. Sold them all in 2003 because of no job for over a year. Sold them
all for $250. I could get $3000 today if I still had them, but I wouldn't sell
them.

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ThePadawan
The whole plot of Hackers (1995) would not be possible without pay phones and
acoustic coupler modems!

~~~
reaperducer
Heck, a whole chunk of my career wouldn't have been possible without pay
phones and acoustic coupler modems!

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dekhn
I purchased an AppleIIe recently with a serial card and connected it up to my
linux box as a dumb terminal. I was able to do load the Google home page and
do a search and navigate to results via the keyboard.

I remember quite clearly in my childhood having an Apple IIe with a 2400 baud
modem; I couldn't use BBSes that ran faster than 300 bau, because the built-in
terminal was "too slow". I ended up getting Proterm and later talking to the
author, who said he used interrupts and a buffer (I had no idea what that
meant, and managed to fry my Apple later trying to invoke an NMI). ALl
valuable lessons!

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person_of_color
This is awesome. When he put the phone on the modem it was a revelation.

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ChrisArchitect
(2015)

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dang-it
I remember seeing and acoustic coupler used for the first time in, I believe,
Mission Impossible. Ethan Hunt takes out an adhesive pad and sticks it to a
payphone and "dials in" to a mainframe or something.

Seemed incredible at the time!

