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Steve Garcia in BYTE (1983) had a DIY acoustically coupled modem ($20 in parts ) I was (in the UK) sorely tempted to change a couple of components and get our

Steve Garcia in BYTE (1983) had a DIY acoustically coupled modem ($20 in parts ) I was (in the UK) sorely tempted to change a couple of components and get our electronics shop to build a batch for a project we where doing to avoid the huge GPO tax £300 for answer and £650 for answer origionate. All Illegal of course - though that didn't stop us hacking the modems we did buy to have variable gain. For information we brought 6 modems (more than my salary at the time)

KSS42 8y ago
Steve Ciarcia?
- spc476 8y ago
  He wrote the hardware column in Byte magazine for years. He wrote articles about making just about anything hardware related, from video cards, to printer spoolers (dedicated computer to accept a print job from a general purpose computer and dole it out to the printer), to modems, to simple computers running BASIC (think the forerunner of the Raspberry Pi).
  - pvg 8y ago
    I think the poster was pointing out the misspelling of his name in the original comment. He's Steve Ciarcia not Garcia.
    - C1sc0cat 8y ago
      Oops my Bad apologies to Steve Ciarcia
keithpeter 8y ago
UK 1976 I was doing a computer science O level at the local technical college (Wednesday afternoon release from my school). There was a 19" rack modem with accoustic coupler on the front and a dial to dial the number. That was connected to a teletypewriter. We did some BASIC 'interactive' programming (the main projects used coding sheets). The system was vulnerable to thunder storms I remember (line noise). All good fun.
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  I rember my first Job (based at Cranfield Uni) and we where a long way away from the Exchange - Some times you had to whistle into the acoustic coupler to get the carrier to pickup then quickly put the hand set in.