2022: Year of the Dial-up Modem

Here’s my relatively new, old modem. The Avtek MegaPlus V.32bis Modem – Model CD950. We have an initial power up to make sure that anything I do from this point in doesn’t put us in a worse position than from when we started.

This year I’ll be primarily dealing with dial-up modems, retro website development and probably a bunch of random ramblings as per normal. To start it off let’s talk about this modem briefly.

The Avtek MegaPlus V.32bis is *almost* the modem of my childhood. What I hadn’t realised is we likely had a V.34bis not V.32bis. What the difference? Double the speed! We’re comparing 14.4kBit/sec to 28.8kBit/sec.

The ITU-T recommendations state:

V.32bis (02/1991) allows up to 14.4 kbit/s bidirectional data transfer.

V.34 (09/1994) allows up to 28.8 kbit/s bidirectional data transfer.

Wow, even if it was just V.34 I would have been flying along the old information superhighway.

For me, modems are going to be needed for browsing the GeoCities Archives on my MiSTer. Next up we need to replace some capacitors, and of course do some test dialling.