830 modem

[Ransom]

I dug my 830 modem out of storage the other day. I'd forgotten how nice it looks (although the box doesn't). The cord's probably never been unfolded. Just for kicks, I plugged it in and turned it on: the LED lit right up! Now if only I had a phone that fit the cradle (and a BBS that takes 300 baud dialup)...

 

Did you use one of these, back in the day?

 

I didn't get online until 2400bps was becoming common (with 9600 the bleeding edge). But I remember seeing a few folks on Compu$erve that were at 300 baud even then (1990 or so). I picked up this 830 at Weird Stuff Warehouse, circa 1991, along with a 1027 printer.

 

Anyway, I thought someone might want to take a trip down memory lane:

[+bf2k+]

 

Did you use one of these, back in the day?

 

 

I did

[sloopy]

that was my first modem... got it with a 850, and associated wires... eventually sold the 850 for a good chunk of cash and got a xm301... then went to 2400 baud...

 

sloopy.

[+Stephen]

That's in really good condition! My first modem was the XM301, then I moved to the SX212.

 

Stephen Anderson

[Ransom]

I wish I hadn't waited so long to get a modem, so I could have experienced using an acoustic coupled modem. But I understand that they were like cassette drives in terms of finickiness and reliability. And I didn't like the cassette drive, so . . .

 

I'd love to hear any war stories from anyone who did use an 830, or any other acoustic coupled modem, back in the day.

[Ransom]

I did

 

Cool! What did you think of it at the time? What was your experience like? Did you call CI$, The Source, or....?

[dafivehole]

I didn't have this exact modem with my 800XL (I think it was the style that was made for the XL series) but I clearly remember going onto bulletin boards back in 1985 or 86... I lived in Vancouver and the boards were all in the US... I completely lost track of time and our first phone bill with the modem involved was $700 Needless to say the modem got put up... for a very long time

 

Roger

[UNIXcoffee928]

I didn't have this exact modem with my 800XL (I think it was the style that was made for the XL series) but I clearly remember going onto bulletin boards back in 1985 or 86... I lived in Vancouver and the boards were all in the US... I completely lost track of time and our first phone bill with the modem involved was $700    Needless to say the modem got put up... for a very long time  

 

Roger

No, the 830 was introduced for the 400/800 series. It was the only Acoustic Coupler type modem made by Atari (meaning that you had to put your telephone handset onto the cups on the top of the modem).

 

All of the other modems for the 8-bit line were Direct Connect Modems (meaning you plugged the RJ-11 phone line into the back of the modem, then had another RJ-11 cable that daisy-chined your actual phone to the modem (&, thus, to the phone-line, itself, with the modem in the middle of the chain).

 

Acoustic couplers were mostly a product of the 1970s, with a slight wraparound into the early 80s. They were standard RS-232 serial devices, and there were a number of manufacturers that made them. They were VERY sensitive to external ambient noise, and the handset needed to have a snug fit in the cups, otherwise you would get garbled alpha-numeric & control character ASCII text mixed in with your data (in clumps, on the screen), which once in a while would crash/reset your terminal, or cause a loss of connection.

 

Even, when the direct connect modems came out, you could whistle into the handset, and produce electronic gibberish... blocks of random ASCII characters... streaming down your screen. Back then we got pretty good at it, and could whistle at the right frequency to trick the terminal into connecting, and less often, actually causing the terminal program to react to specific whistles, in other interesting ways. I would often cause two local computers & modems (in my room) to connect by whistling an originate signal... connecting two modems was a quick & dirty way of transferring files between both similar & dissimilar systems.

 

The 830 required the Atari 850 Interface to function. The 850 was nearly impossible to purchase on the east coast of the United States, during the entire stretch of the entire Atari 8-Bit product lifecycle.

 

The first year that they were introduced, I saw them in malls for a few months... then after that, no one had them, and you couldn't even get them mail-order. The mail-order companies would tell you that there was a year-long waiting list. Really. No Joke. & they were very expensive! An 830 & an 850 would run you about as much as an 800, itself. Back then, the 800 was around $899.99 USD... & that's in early 1980s money... very expensive, indeed, when you consider that you could get a full tank of gas, a 20 oz. coffee, and a pack of cigarettes for around $10.00. A much different world than today.

 

Personally, I think that it was SNAFU for Atari, and they had an entire warehouse (think Indiana Jones Movie, lol) filled with the damnable 850s... because they were Ultra-Rare, back in the day. Once ebay came around, in the 90s, all of a sudden they all turned up. It is very sad that Atari did this, because if the 850 had been commonly available for the Atari 8-Bit line, it would have given the system the Standard RS-232 connections that all of the critics complained were missing on the systems. These are the same widely-read critics that derided the Atari as a game-machine, and caused it to not be taken seriously, by about 1982.

 

Acoustic couplers were specifically targeted to "Traveling Businessmen", under the notion that a traveling salesman could connect to any telephone, particularly, in a hotel, where you couldn't unplug the telephone cable, to plug in a direct-connect modem. Then again, many houses didn't have RJ-11 modular plugs, back in 1980, phones were still commonly connected to screw-terminals at the baseboard. As a child, I upgraded the baseboard wiring at my parent's house, specifically to accommodate direct connect modems... (think "The Knack" Episode of Dilbert) ha... That was actually a big no-no, for citizens to do, because the "Phone Equipment" was under tight control by Ma-Bell (even the phones themselves, Western Electric built...ONLY). To digress slightly, I remember finding it highly amusing that the Nike Missile electronics (designed at AT&T / Bell Labs in the mid 1950s) used off the shelf Western Electric parts. hahahahahahaaha!

 

It wasn't until the early 1980s until you could actually Legally purchase a telephone from ANYONE that was not Bell, before then, you did not "purchase" a phone... they still owned it, and you basically rented it. It was around the time of the Intellivision & TI 99/4A being sold in stores that the first consumer phones that you could actually buy became consumer items.

 

Of course, AT&T had their own High-End "Direct Connect" 1200-9600 bps modems at the time, and they were ungodly expensive/out of reach of the ordinary consumer, and usually found on DEC minis, and likely mainframes & the supercomputers of the time. These had a BIG black clunker Touchtone handset (same style as the old rotary phones), multiline, had clear & red translucent (lit from behind) buttons, and the phone itself (which was a big 4 lb. thing that could easily kill you if Naomi Campbell was in a bad mood... ha) was hardwired into a box that Hayes obviously stole their famous external modem design from.

 

Well, there's Memory Lane for you. Maybe I'll write more about this later... it was a fun time.

[Ransom]

Thank you for sharing that, UnixCoffee!

 

As a side note -- I find it amusing that it seems archaic to have to rent your telephone, yet people are still paying to rent their cable/satellite boxes instead of being allowed to buy them.

[+bf2k+]

I did

 

Cool! What did you think of it at the time? What was your experience like? Did you call CI$, The Source, or....?

 

I only called BBS's with the 830 - no services. All of the local BBS's at that time were Apples so no ATASCII connections. I never ran a BBS on the 830. Generally the modem was a Pain in the A$$.

 

I only used it for about a month before getting the MPP 1000c modem. Heheh I do remember the first Atari 8 BBS I connected to that was running a MPP also - we connected at 450 baud!!!! WOW!

 

The first version of my BBS ran on a MPP 1000e... but that's another story.

[Ransom]

I only called BBS's with the 830 - no services. All of the local BBS's at that time were Apples so no ATASCII connections. I never ran a BBS on the 830. Generally the modem was a Pain in the A$$.

 

I only used it for about a month before getting the MPP 1000c modem. Heheh I do remember the first Atari 8 BBS I connected to that was running a MPP also - we connected at 450 baud!!!! WOW!

 

The first version of my BBS ran on a MPP 1000e... but that's another story.

 

Woah..450! Screamin' fast!

 

I miss the local BBS scene. I used to run a WWIV BBS in the early-to-mid 90s. It was nice having BBS gatherings and meeting people face-to-face. Now you have to fly somewhere to do the same...

[atari frank]

My first modem was a 1030 with a free hour of dow jones quotes and cannot remeber what software i used,had to be the one that came with 1030.

[doctor_x]

I didn't have this exact modem with my 800XL (I think it was the style that was made for the XL series) but I clearly remember going onto bulletin boards back in 1985 or 86... I lived in Vancouver and the boards were all in the US... I completely lost track of time and our first phone bill with the modem involved was $700    Needless to say the modem got put up... for a very long time  

 

Roger

No, the 830 was introduced for the 400/800 series. It was the only Acoustic Coupler type modem made by Atari (meaning that you had to put your telephone handset onto the cups on the top of the modem).

 

All of the other modems for the 8-bit line were Direct Connect Modems (meaning you plugged the RJ-11 phone line into the back of the modem, then had another RJ-11 cable that daisy-chined your actual phone to the modem (&, thus, to the phone-line, itself, with the modem in the middle of the chain).

 

Acoustic couplers were mostly a product of the 1970s, with a slight wraparound into the early 80s. They were standard RS-232 serial devices, and there were a number of manufacturers that made them. They were VERY sensitive to external ambient noise, and the handset needed to have a snug fit in the cups, otherwise you would get garbled alpha-numeric & control character ASCII text mixed in with your data (in clumps, on the screen), which once in a while would crash/reset your terminal, or cause a loss of connection.

 

Even, when the direct connect modems came out, you could whistle into the handset, and produce electronic gibberish... blocks of random ASCII characters... streaming down your screen. Back then we got pretty good at it, and could whistle at the right frequency to trick the terminal into connecting, and less often, actually causing the terminal program to react to specific whistles, in other interesting ways. I would often cause two local computers & modems (in my room) to connect by whistling an originate signal... connecting two modems was a quick & dirty way of transferring files between both similar & dissimilar systems.

 

The 830 required the Atari 850 Interface to function. The 850 was nearly impossible to purchase on the east coast of the United States, during the entire stretch of the entire Atari 8-Bit product lifecycle.

 

The first year that they were introduced, I saw them in malls for a few months... then after that, no one had them, and you couldn't even get them mail-order. The mail-order companies would tell you that there was a year-long waiting list. Really. No Joke. & they were very expensive! An 830 & an 850 would run you about as much as an 800, itself. Back then, the 800 was around $899.99 USD... & that's in early 1980s money... very expensive, indeed, when you consider that you could get a full tank of gas, a 20 oz. coffee, and a pack of cigarettes for around $10.00. A much different world than today.

 

Personally, I think that it was SNAFU for Atari, and they had an entire warehouse (think Indiana Jones Movie, lol) filled with the damnable 850s... because they were Ultra-Rare, back in the day. Once ebay came around, in the 90s, all of a sudden they all turned up. It is very sad that Atari did this, because if the 850 had been commonly available for the Atari 8-Bit line, it would have given the system the Standard RS-232 connections that all of the critics complained were missing on the systems. These are the same widely-read critics that derided the Atari as a game-machine, and caused it to not be taken seriously, by about 1982.

 

Acoustic couplers were specifically targeted to "Traveling Businessmen", under the notion that a traveling salesman could connect to any telephone, particularly, in a hotel, where you couldn't unplug the telephone cable, to plug in a direct-connect modem. Then again, many houses didn't have RJ-11 modular plugs, back in 1980, phones were still commonly connected to screw-terminals at the baseboard. As a child, I upgraded the baseboard wiring at my parent's house, specifically to accommodate direct connect modems... (think "The Knack" Episode of Dilbert) ha... That was actually a big no-no, for citizens to do, because the "Phone Equipment" was under tight control by Ma-Bell (even the phones themselves, Western Electric built...ONLY). To digress slightly, I remember finding it highly amusing that the Nike Missile electronics (designed at AT&T / Bell Labs in the mid 1950s) used off the shelf Western Electric parts. hahahahahahaaha!

 

It wasn't until the early 1980s until you could actually Legally purchase a telephone from ANYONE that was not Bell, before then, you did not "purchase" a phone... they still owned it, and you basically rented it. It was around the time of the Intellivision & TI 99/4A being sold in stores that the first consumer phones that you could actually buy became consumer items.

 

Of course, AT&T had their own High-End "Direct Connect" 1200-9600 bps modems at the time, and they were ungodly expensive/out of reach of the ordinary consumer, and usually found on DEC minis, and likely mainframes & the supercomputers of the time. These had a BIG black clunker Touchtone handset (same style as the old rotary phones), multiline, had clear & red translucent (lit from behind) buttons, and the phone itself (which was a big 4 lb. thing that could easily kill you if Naomi Campbell was in a bad mood... ha) was hardwired into a box that Hayes obviously stole their famous external modem design from.

 

Well, there's Memory Lane for you. Maybe I'll write more about this later... it was a fun time.

 

excellent, excellent, excellent writeup..

[HiroProX]

Had one of those. It was in the stuff I got for christmas in IIRC 1983. 1200XL, 1010, 1020, 850, and the 830. The summer of 1984 I mowed lawns like a madman and got a 1050, 1030, and bought my dad's Epson MX-80 (w/Graf-Trax) from him.

[Ransom]

Had one of those. It was in the stuff I got for christmas in IIRC 1983. 1200XL, 1010, 1020, 850, and the 830. The summer of 1984 I mowed lawns like a madman and got a 1050, 1030, and bought my dad's Epson MX-80 (w/Graf-Trax) from him.

 

Awesome setup for 1983/84!

[lykewyse]

I didn't have this exact modem with my 800XL (I think it was the style that was made for the XL series) but I clearly remember going onto bulletin boards back in 1985 or 86... I lived in Vancouver and the boards were all in the US... I completely lost track of time and our first phone bill with the modem involved was $700    Needless to say the modem got put up... for a very long time  

 

Roger

No, the 830 was introduced for the 400/800 series. It was the only Acoustic Coupler type modem made by Atari (meaning that you had to put your telephone handset onto the cups on the top of the modem).

 

<snip>

 

Well, there's Memory Lane for you. Maybe I'll write more about this later... it was a fun time.

 

Brilliant write-up, man.

 

I got one of these in 1999 with my first vintage machine (an Atari 800). To preface this, I was fifteen and incredibly bored. I later had the 850 interface as well and tried to call FamilyNET in Dallas from Kentucky on a calling card. It was utterly hopeless. I connected perhaps twice very late at night. Additionally, the acoustic coupler didn't quite fit my phone, which I quickly discovered was crucial for this to actually work. Eventually I got a 14.4k modem and started calling more local BBSes until I gave up on trying to create an authentic early 1980s technology exchange experience. Instead, I started using Telnet.

[MTippin]

On 2/5/2010 at 7:48 AM, Ransom said:

I wish I hadn't waited so long to get a modem, so I could have experienced using an acoustic coupled modem. But I understand that they were like cassette drives in terms of finickiness and reliability. And I didn't like the cassette drive, so . . .

 

I'd love to hear any war stories from anyone who did use an 830, or any other acoustic coupled modem, back in the day.

I had an acoustic coupling modem that I used with my Atari 800 to dialup to CompuServe in the late 80s, but it was not the 830. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and my father did some work with Rand corporation. One of the engineers heard that there was a young pre-teen at home just getting into computers, so he gave my father a 300 baud modem that was about 12" x 12" with an RS-232 connector on the back. I can't remember the manufacturer, but at the time I used the phone book to look up the company, which had an office in the South Bay. I called and sheepishly explained who I was and what I was trying to find out (pin-outs for the RS-232, although at the time I wouldn't have known the terminology). I was transferred to one of their engineers who took the time to look through their file cabinets for a manual (this modem was already old at the time) and then read the pin-outs to me which I dutifully scribbled down in my notebook. I remember my father taking me to a surplus place there in San Carlos and finding some wide ribbon cable - much wider than I needed - and a male RS-232 and (if I remember correctly a 9-pin DIN for the Atari 800?). I carefully soldered it all up and then tried it out. It worked, and I felt like I could do darn near anything at that point.

Thank you for jogging that memory loose!

-Mark

[DavidMil]

Our first modem was an 830, but we had young kids who would open and close doors, yell at each other, and run around the house

(Deliberately running into wall for effect).  And yes, they were both boys!  Anyway, that kind of background noise played havoc with

the acoustical coupler.  That noise problem caused us to invest in an Atari 835 direct connect modem.  From there we eventually went

on to a Hayes 1200 baud modem.  I still have all three of those modems, and I believe that there are still several BBS's that will take

300 baud.  Is Dark Knight's BBS still up?

 

DavidMil   

[+Nezgar]

19 hours ago, MTippin said:

One of the engineers heard that there was a young pre-teen at home just getting into computers, so he gave my father a 300 baud modem that was about 12" x 12" with an RS-232 connector on the back.

Heh... something like this wooden box?

 

 

[DavidMil]

Very cool Nezgar!  How in the world did you find this?

 

David

[+Nezgar]

14 minutes ago, DavidMil said:

Very cool Nezgar!  How in the world did you find this?

Not my video, but came across it on my YouTube adventures. I do have that same beige touch-tone 2500 handset seen in that video though that I plan to use with my 830 though.

 

Also... EVERYTHING you ever (and never) wanted to know about Novation CAT modems, which had many incarnations, one of which being the Atari 830... When I originally found this video, it answered "how to open my 830" so I could re-solder broken solder joints on the power connector... An amazing amount of info here:

 

[Tillek]

So... ebay should find you an appropriate phone if you're serious... Also, found a similar style phone on Amazon for around $30 or so.

 

There is at least one (actually I think 2-3?) Dial up BBS's... of course, far more Atari telnet ones.

 

So if you're serious, there are people who can help... though I'm guessing that's not the case.

[rayik]

BITD I used an XM301 with a 130XE to connect to Compuserve.  If I remember right there was a charge per minute.  Charge might have been due to an out of area local number.  Thought it was great to download stuff.

 

Folks may forget, but when you used "dial up" the house phone was out of service.  Anyone calling the house would get a busy signal.  I remember when we first got DSL and thought that was the neatest thing.  Could be online and on a phone call at the same time.

 

Amazing how 300 baud was actually useful back then.

 

Neat review of the XM301:  https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue70/070_2_Reviews_Atari_XM301_Modem.php

Edited January 26, 2022 by rayik
added review link

[bfollowell]

Yeah, I remember using modems on a phone line. Then, later, we had codes that had to be dialed in with the number being called that would disable the call waiting tone. Then, even later, when home Internet started gaining traction, some people would actually put in a second phone line so that they had one just for online use and the other for regular phone use. And yes, Compuserve, The Source, AOL, GEnie many of those old 80s & 90s online services charged by the hour. It seems like most were in the $5-$6 per hour range, but of course, the bill was always worked out by the minute. Also, you had to pay extra for the long distance, assuming that you didn't live in a big city that had local numbers. In the 90s, at least in the U.S., it became common practice to pay a little extra on your bill and get "free" local calling to some big city if it were close. For example, when I bought my first home, I lived in Georgetown, KY, a small town famous only for having Toyota's first solely owned U.S. auto manufacturing plant (I still work for Toyota 30 years later by the way.) We were about twenty miles north of Lexington, which is Kentucky's second largest city and had lots of BBSes, local online service numbers and, later, ISP numbers, so I paid extra to get local calling to Lexington. I think it was an extra $12-$15 a month. Ahhhh, the long lost days of us early online pioneers. Thanks for bringing back all those memories and making me feel ancient!

 

My first modem was an MPP-1000C by the way, then I moved on through a couple of Atari 1030s. I didn't really get anything faster until I moved on to PCs in 1993 and moved on to U.S. Robotics internal modems. I think the first one I bought was probable a 9600 baud version, but quickly moved on to 14.4K 28.8K and 56K versions as they became available.

 

Edited January 26, 2022 by bfollowell

[Mclaneinc]

 

I'm pretty sure that we in the UK never got the official modem but we at Maplin had a 300 baud kit which I built. I can't say I was a BBS person, and I never went on to one on the Atari (I did when the Amiga came out). The last thing I did with mine was download Buck Rogers off another person, which was painfully slow. I only built the kit to have a modem, everybody else I knew had one, so I followed suit like a lemming. The daft things you do when you are young.