I found the beginning of the internet on my TRS80 model 4P
I just thought I’d share my little project I’ve played around with over the past few years. I always wanted to try to access some bulletin board systems on my old TRS-80. After watching a video years ago where someone dialed into a BBS on a TRS80 with a rotary phone and an acoustic modem I was so fascinated. Shortly after I found a nice model 4P on Ebay and played around with it a little before losing interest for several years.
After moving into my new place I decided to have a go at configuring a VOIP landline over my Starlink. I got an Obidata gateway and pulse tone converter and dove down the rabbit hole of trying to get it all working. I was eventually successful and immediately set up my two old rotary dial phones and even bought an old cassette tape answering machine. I was so stoked.
Shortly after I decided to get back into trying to get my old TRS80 online. After many attempts and a fair bit of research I was eventually successful but only while using my internal dial up modem. It was finicky at best but I was beyond stoked. Shortly after I scooped up a few old acoustic coupler modems from Ebay and began further attempts at accessing some BBS’s with Rotary dial phone. I found this to be considerably more finicky and unreliable than the internal modem which was pretty bad to begin with. Also being a 90s kid, this is all a bit before my time so I’m sure I still have much to learn but nevertheless I was able to get it to work on few occasions and was sure get some photos and videos of it all. I thought y’ll might find this to be pretty neat. I know I did!