Lost Technology

My niece and I were talking the other day I happened to mention that we used to use an acoustic coupler to connect a laptop to the Internet.

She had no idea what the heck I was talking about. My lovely wife and I started traveling during the winters about 20 years ago. We had to do a certain amount of business remotely. It’s hard to believe right now, but cell phones weren’t all that common.

Back then I used to carry a bunch of prepaid calling cards to make long distance calls. I’d do my banking over pay phones. Getting e-mail was an issue. That was back in the day of phone modems. Some places had phone jacks customers could plug into to connect to the Internet at dial up speeds.

A number of places only had pay phones. There was no way to connect directly to a phone line. For that I used an acoustic coupler. It looked sorta like a old school phone handset. It would attach to the phone with a velcro strap. Since it worked by actually making tones, it was even slower than regular phone modems. Often it would take 15 or 20 minutes to download my e-mail.

The best thing that could be said about them is that they worked . . . sorta. Old beat up pay phones didn’t have the best audio quality and that degraded speeds even more. Most of the time we made it work. Sometimes we’d connect late at night when it was quieter out as even outside noise could mess up the signal. Since we were tying up one of a handful of payphones, it was best to do it when most people were sleeping.

Why did we even bother? As clunky as the system was, it worked just enough to make doing our business possible. That allowed us to travel and have adventures so it was worth the hassle.

-Sixbears