Did you use a modem with your Amiga?

[laser]

my first connection to internet was using an external 33.600 modem (zoltrix)
on my A1200/apollo 1240 /40mz +16mb...november 1996
the modem cost me some money..about 200u$
but the apollo turoboard a fortune 850u$
16mb ram for the apollo about 150u$

also I have purchased Aweb ...Miami and a keyfile for AmIRC.....about 50u$ +50 +40

for the modem I have purchased STFAX .....about 60u$...to send faxes and to use the modem like telephone answering machine

hard days

[manicx]

I had a tiny 1200 baud modem. I think it was from an Australian company. It was fun going to BBSs with it. It was not fun when I was getting the telephone bill...

[ennio]

This is a case of my idyllic perception of the past trumping reality. I completely forgot about those nasty phone bills. Now it's coming back to me... every month my jaw hitting the floor when I saw the charges!

[cv643d]

Yes I did, but I ended up dedicating my 486 for BBS use, and later for MIRC use,

.. I remember back then 97/98 I actually did not raise an eyebrown for receiving a 3-4-500 euros telephone bill per month, I firmly though it was worth it in some way

My first Modem was a 2400Kbaud Modem which costed 399.- DM. But as the first Phonebill was as high as the Price of the 2.4KModem, i decided to sell my C64 and some other Stuff and bought an 14.4k ATRIE-Modem. (OK, US Robotics Dual Standard Ruled)

Can remeber some Boards i were on:

Dinkilator Palace (Spreadpoint?)
Lucky Strike BBS ""
Brooklyn Empire (sysop: Mr. Mistral)
Lightspeed
Amiga East
Defcon 5
Space Palace/The Desolate One (Sysop: Reaktors)
Sudden Death
Programmers Heaven
Berlin Phreaking Connection
Old Game City

Never hooked on

Fuck Shop (Fairlight?)
New Central Europe (Phil Thrust)
World Trade Center
Lighthouse
Reign in Blood

All running AmiExpress or CNet.

I've been Cosysop for a short time on a BBS called "Excalibur" (Nuernberg/Germany), no real Elite-BBS especially, but i tried.

Thomas!/SP (Coder of Scoopex World Charts 4) became Cosysop of "Brooklyn Empire" 'coz of me.

"Rat&Avenger - 2Fast2B4got10"
www.spreadpoint.com

[4pLaY]

Hoh yes, started out with a 2400 modem :-) then later on 14k4 etc as they came out, called lots of bbses and traded demos and stuff with the phonebills going crazy i thought why not just run my own BBS? and so i ran a BBS from 94 to around 2001.

[Paul_s]

Yeah had a trusty Tornado 28.8k jobbie back in around 93/94'ish. Used it all the way up until 1999 and must've racked up some nice phonebills over that time! I remember having my own line installed as no one could call the house when I was hogging BBS's!

Those were the days


My apologies if no one could get through to some local Manchester BBS's

[mr_a500]

I'm still using a modem. It's not the "good old days" to me. I've been using a 56k modem on my A500 from 2002-2008. This year I got an A3000 (no network card or accelerator) and I alternate between that and the A500 for my internet use.

Yes, I know I'm behind the times. I'm planning on getting high-speed internet soon. I recently bought an SGI Indy and PowerMac G3 ($20 each!) and I found a PC in the trash and installed BeOS on it. They've all got network cards so I'm going to network them all and put them all on the internet. (and when I can find a damn network card and accelerator for the A3000, I'll connect that too)

It'll be a retro network. (or "retwork")

[Jope]

Started off with a loaner 1200bps modem in 92, then occasionally loaned a 9600 one and finally around 1994, I got a 14.4kbps modem of my very own..

Oh the joy.

And the huge phone bills. My A500 got me on the internet back in 1993.

[adolescent]

I had a couple 28k8 USR Sportsters (upgraded to 33k6 when the chips came out). Always wanted the Courier V.Everything but even with the sysop discount I wasn't able to justify it. (I could buy a 2GB HD for every Courier, and the Sportsters were 1/3 the price...)

Oh, I had a Supra 14.4 before that for a couple of years.

[rkauer]

My first external modem was an US robotics 14400. With a 1200 with GVP 1230 and 4Mb RAM(!)

Back in that time, the only available Amiga BBS was in Sao Paulo (4 states away!). My first wife wants to kill me when the first phone bill arrived!

After I bought a powerful 28800 modem, which I still have in a cupboard. Last thing I did whit it was upgrading the firmware to 33k... Those where the days!

[Galatran]

I wish!!!! nah, my first connection was around 1993 with a PC... And that was mainly BBS and Fidonet of course!!!! Are there actually real amiga BBS still running ??? I mean without the internet.... I have a national phone flatrate!!!!

[Leffmann]

Bought my first modem for my A500 back in 1993, some 14400 thingy which costed about 400 euro. Me and my brother used to run Max's to host our two BBS's Time Out and Synergy. We probably added another 400 euro to the monthly phone bill, but damn it was fun! Our father, who payed the phone bill, was less amused.

Good times!

[Mick_AKA]

I remember when it got to the point where my job just about covered my phone bill lol

Last modem I used with a miggy was a USR 56k, first would have been my 1200 baud beauty, can't remember the make but it was black, very long and only about an inch high and had venting down the top, I remember it's software not working when I got an A1200.

[mr_a500]

Originally Posted by adolescent

I had a couple 28k8 USR Sportsters (upgraded to 33k6 when the chips came out). Always wanted the Courier V.Everything but even with the sysop discount I wasn't able to justify it. (I could buy a 2GB HD for every Courier, and the Sportsters were 1/3 the price...)

I'm using a Courier V.Everything to connect right now. I got two of them brand new for free a few years ago. They're huge compared to the 56k GVC I was using before that. (the GVC started having problems hanging up)

[Nomad of Norad]

I actually started out in 1982, on a Radio Shack Color Computer (or CoCo) calling Compuserve on a 300 baud modem. My folks paid for the Compuserve account (I was an adolescent back then...) and I didn't realize how much money it was costing them ($7 an hour!!!) until they told me the bill had gone to three digits (I think it was) one month and that I was going to have to give up on Compuserve. That was probably around 1983 or so, though... and over the summer of that year I'd found out about the local dial-up BBSs. I wound up spending all my online time there instead of Compuserve from there on out.

The 300 baud modem was one of the kind where you dialed the number using the phone itself, waited for the other party to answer with the modem carrier tone, and you then flipped a switch to Originate and quietly placed the phone back on the hook. I think I went through at least two 300 baud modems, one off the later ones actually let you dial the number through the modem, without you having to pick up the phone or deal with Originate or Answer buttons. That one actually dialed with pulse dialing (tone dial service was extra back then), and I found out accidently once that you could make it dial the pulses REALLY fast. Instead of Click-click-click-click-click, you heard BrrraAAAAAApppp!!! BrrrraAAAaappp!!

First time it did that, I thought I'd broken the modem!

Eventually, I went to a 2400 baud modem... but kept losing them to lightning or something... Sometimes I'd replace them with 1200 baud modems, sometimes with 2400.

In 1989 or so, when I got my first (used) Amiga, an A500 with AmigaOS 1.2 (!!!) roms and 1.3 disks... it came with the Amiga 1200 baud modem. Since then, I've gone through additional 2400 baud modems, moved to 14.4 (went through a few of those, too), but stayed at that speed for years...

In the interim, I got a used A1200 (after the 500 croaked...)

Eventually, I got a 56k modem for it, sometime after we'd gotten a peecee elsewhere in the house.

Anyway, now we're on high-speed internet, with all the machines in the house connected on the LAN, and my folk's peecee (in the living room) connected via wifi.

At one point, I actually had a router, an SMC Barricade I got off eBay, that let you connect to the Net via a dial-up modem, in addition to by regular high-speed internet. At that time, we didn't have high-speed, so it made it easier to get all the machines in this room (multiple old peecees, my A1200, and such) online at the same time. Otherwise, I could only connect one machine at a time to the Net (each having their own modem). I've since retired that router in favor of one that provides wfi, and then moved up to a later, faster type of wifi...

[gklinger]

My first modem was an acoustically coupled 300 baud Commodore 8010 which was connected to a PET. Looks like this:



Bit of a hassle to use but it got the job done. A few years later I got my first direct connect modem, a Hayes Smartmodem 300, and put up my first BBS shortly thereafter. The first modem I used on my Amiga 1000 was the 1680. I switched back to a Hayes modem shortly thereafter because the 1680 was very good at dealing with line noise.

I've still got all these modems piled up in the closet which is particularly silly as I no longer have an analogue phone line.

Originally Posted by chiark

Ennio? Isn't that the name of the dog in Tass Times in Tone Town?

Good memory. Spot the dog turned into Ennio the Legend when he was transported to Tonetown. We really need a WHDLoad version of that game. It was a lot of fun.

Originally Posted by Hungry Horace

mostly spent time on IRC #amiga on undernet as i recall. maybe under the handle 'Odin' or 'odin303' ? cant really remember.

Remember anyone called 'falco'? That was me.

[rkauer]

BTW: I still have a Supra modem 2400Z here. Far away from my 2000. Since I don't have a telephone switcher at home (for download archives from the PC via internal home telephone central...).

Originally Posted by Zetr0

ahhh back in the day.....

56k board modem, my miggy was the sh*t, with an 060 and 32MB of ram... and a £500 phone bill every other month LOL!!!!!!

used to flow around with the handle "_^Majix^_" back in the day..... sigh.... so much L337 and not enough time....

Things NOT to try... using BT's crappy dialing service and attempting to play Quake on your Amiga ONLINE!!!!! .... that i can tell you is a bad idea..... even if you DO have a gfx card LOL

ahh my friend LidLessEye, miss him we got upto such mishief.... and where is Skull Monkey !? he used to run a BBS back in the day.... i think he was the last person to turn it off....

Used to hang out on IRC a lot, namely on Efnet with #Gas and Dalnet with #Hyper, i miss them dudes....

ahhh.... back in the day where a 3MB file would take 15 minutes to download.... if your connection could download 15MB in an hour THAT WAS A GOOD CONNECTION!!!

then the dreaded 2 hour cutoff..... you just was unsure if you would ever get back on again that evening!!!!

lols maj im here still alive and still have the bbs but alas i think the files there may be outdated i still have the old amiga file base inc users ansiis etc intact i logged on it trying with win uae but it just was not same mate
yea s.n.s here was you that came to my house with ya gf once right ?
on ya way back from hols

[jPV]

I had some loaned 2400bps modem in early 90s. Couldn't afford for better until 1994 when Well offered cheap and fast(ish) 14k4 modems. Bought one for 1200FIM (200e) IIRC. That year I also got my first e-mail address through one BBS which offered some kind of bridge to the internet.

For some years I called around to elite and public boards and did use online banking by calling to TeleSampo, which was public service for government, banks, insurance etc companies in Finland. It was much faster to call that board directly than first dialing to internet provider and then opening browser to get to some online bank. I probably used that text based system for 1994-1997 or so, before surrending to internet usage.

MBnet was also historically important BBS in Finland, although considered lame in certain circles It might have been about the biggest BBS in the world by offering 250 nodes and tens of thousands users. It had very lively Amiga discussion areas and I downloaded big QWK packs to be read in Offline Orbit daily.

I started to use internet in some degree in 1995 and IRCing around 1996, but that didn't stop me going to BBSes too. Got some faster modems too, from 33k6 to 56k. Then I got massive 10/10Mbps static line in 1998, bought Hydra's Amiganet ethernet card (300FIM/50e as used), and really went for foreign telnet BBS:es and forgot the modems. I practically skipped whole ISDN and ADSL era. Ended up to fight with Case till the end of Amiga 0d trading days...

All the time I have been using Amigas, I never had modem in PC (actually no PC at all). It was exciting, but sometimes expensive times