If 12 modems simultaneously handshake and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? You're damn right it does and probably shattered glass too.
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
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Kilobits or Kilobytes?
K....bps
Welcome to 1999.
I imagine it sounds amazing
Reeeee... BONG... Bong... ffffffftttttttttt... Bung..
Fffffffffftttttttt....
now stack ‘em on that poptart borzoi
I hate to be that guy, but... Is it time to get DSL?
My first modem was an AT&T 300 baud acoustic coupler. My last was a USRobotics 56k for the BBS I ran till the early 2000s.
I later switched to DSL for my Internet, but the reason we never did this sort of thing was the ISDN was just easier to get bandwidth and the tech existed to do what you needed with a few of them.
12x POTS lines, or 6 full duplex ISDNs.
My 56k never actually achieved that, most of the time it was 33.6 or 28.8.
This is neat, and fun to see them still being tinkered with.
Was your USR a courier or sportster? In my experience the couriers had better success connecting and operating at 48000+bps
My last modems (cannot remember my 1st modem) were also US Robotics. I ran 2 or 3 BBS’s and FidoNet, on Apple ][ and PC back in the day. Also an online dating system. They were fun times.
Here's the money shot: https://youtu.be/LZ259Jx8MQY?t=1240
I wish they had used a better mic but that was like giving my soul a really good scratch.
The whole video was really fun to watch!!
The hearing of 3 observers was lost during the handshake.
This was similar to a trick that a few smaller (less serious) hobby-ISPs did back in the days of 14.4k/28.8k modems to take advantage of the "reasonably priced" business plans for ISDN. They'd register multiple businesses at a single address to qualify for the plans, then balance new egress connections across the pool using squid and other magic. Fun times...
I remember doing this with NetZero accounts. You could trivially hack out the ads, and dial in-twice (if you had two phone lines), and do the bonding. Free slightly less shitty internets. Very useful for Napster and LimeWire back in the day.
I bet you could get slightly quicker speeds if they ran a pihole or something to block ads.
This is kind of an interesting idea. I wonder if it's feable to reuse all the old 56k modems?
Even 20 years ago you needed ad blocking to make sites load a bit faster on dial-up. Now you would need no script and an image blocker too.
More like masochists than enthusiasts.
They're the same picture.
Glad to see the USR Courier was used here. A venerable workhorse.
I can't seem to get rid of my last one. Sentimental, I suppose.
Who knows what might still be functioning after the apocalypse.
How would Euthanists use modems? Oh..
If you built it... Someone will min / max.
Semi-barely-related thing that popped into my brain on imagining the sound of this;
... the UNATCO theme from Deus Ex played by an 'orchestra' of floppy drives.
On an even unrelateder note but tangentially semi-related to your comment, may I present:
[the user] symphony for dot matrix printers
(I actually have a t-shirt from this artist - saw them at mutek festival in Montreal in 2000something.
Exquisite.
I absolutely love everything and anything that can make music out of something that isn't intended to make music.
The ISPs got complaints about the phacking noise from their hubs. So they moved them to the jungle where they killed off all animals except for the def animals.... And so that's why we cannot communicate with animals.