I enjoyed the article. Acoustic couplers were common back in the day as well. I used an acoustic coupler a couple of years before I was able to buy my first H

I enjoyed the article. Acoustic couplers were common back in the day as well. I used an acoustic coupler a couple of years before I was able to buy my first Hayes modem, which was a 300 baud modem. The coupler was connected to a Zenith Z-19 24x80 CRT-based data terminal. The standard telephone handset was a friction fit into the two earmuffs on the coupler. To use the coupler, you dialed the remote computer by hand (rotary dial phones worked as well as touch-tone phones) and when you heard the whistling tone from the remote end, you shoved the handset into the earmuffs on the coupler. A few seconds later, you’d get a (sometimes garbled) login: prompt.