This video demo of a 1964 acoustic modem — at 300 baud — is pretty fantastic. It was all over the net last week; I’m just getting to it.

Some fun bits:

• It’s acoustic, obviously; there was no way to plug a phone line in otherwise.
• It has no digital circuitry at all — there’s no microcontroller, and no real command set.
• It does, however, still work — though loading Wikipedia over 300 baud is an exercise best left to museums.

300 baud predates me, but I did start at 1200. The jump to 2400 was enormous, and the jump to 9600 was even better — though it was a plateau, too, since the terminal controllers for the University mainframe ran at that speed, so here was no reason to go any higher until dial-up ISPs started happening.