AT&T's '60s Modem That Won't Die
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- čas přidán 25. 06. 2021
- AT&T made a modem 60 years ago that the market absolutely refused to stop buying to this day. It's incredibly simple, and there's a good chance you've actually heard it's data format before.
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If you have a Bell 103-capable modem, call this number for a special message: 509.569.7985
Set your serial port to TWO stop bits, not the usual one!
Please read my comment(s) below for some corrections (they don't fit in the description!) - Věda a technologie
Corrections!
The preceding narrative is based on several months of unstructured research in magazines and books, as well as some discussions with people who were around at this time, but it's still pretty hard to get firm answers about many aspects of topics like this, and after revisiting some subjects during editing I found some errors and oversights.
(Also, yes, I know *you* had a 1200 baud modem in 1981. You also spent way more money on it than most computer users did. The 103-compatible was The People's Modem (literally - Anchor made a bunch of 103s under the name "Volksmodem.") )
First:
After shooting this video, I noticed that one of the 1200 baud modems in the Popular Science article WAS an acoustic model. I then went looking and found others, in older publications, that I had somehow missed. Of course, I don't know if these speeds were reliable, and the Pop Sci one is twice the price of most of the others.
I also took a closer look at an Anderson-Jacobson acoustic modem I recently obtained, and noticed that it, too, supports 1200 baud - though it can also work in direct mode, and may not support 1200 when used acoustically.
The point of my story is not that faster modems didn't exist, only that the first practical consumer modem remained popular for decades, and that is still evident, in my opinion.
While professionals and enthusiasts were probably both willing to pay a considerable amount to maximize their computing capabilities, they represent a small fraction of users. It is clear from the material available that 300-baud modems were extremely popular and continued to sell well into the mid 80s.
Also:
I'm not certain my description of the Telex system is correct. It seems like Telex specifically was a European network, while the predominant US telegraph exchange was probably Bell's TWX.
While the 101 dataset WAS designed to make teletypes work over the phone network, it wasn't meant to work over normal phone SERVICE. Bell apparently required teletype modems to run over specially configured lines - basically ordinary phone lines, but that refused to connect to normal phone numbers. I have no idea why they did this.
Since this video wasn't about teletypes or Telex per se, I initially felt a basic, surface-level description was okay, but I decided my description of the early modems was pointedly wrong.
And:
While teletypes were used with some early computers, in the early 60s they were probably not common outside of industries that had a particular use for interactive ("on-line") computing, such as airline reservations.
With many early systems, users did not directly interact with the computer in any way. Programs were composed "off-line," by entering the instructions and data on a stack of punchcards or a strip of paper tape, and then run in batches as time and priorities permitted. Output may have been printed on a teletype / teleprinter, or just spit out as more paper tape or punchcards.
Interactive systems were certainly around, at least as experimental or industrial projects, but my implication that teletypes were COMMON computer terminals is probably a stretch.
Additionally:
The picture of the Bell 101 that floats around is apocryphal, as I said, with no sourcing or description. I guess the modem is in the cabinet in the bottom of the image, it's hard to say, but in the video it sure looks like I'm focusing on the box on top. I'm not; it's pretty clearly just a portable tape player, that's just where the one person in the image was, and I didn't want to focus on her feet.
Furthermore:
The ITU website only lists one edition of V.21, from 88; in fact it seems to be from 1964, and 88 was just the last revision. I've been told v21 was "103 for Europe" which would make sense.
The handshake sequence that newer modems expect is in fact from the v.8 spec. I haven't fully explored this topic yet but I believe that the problem with getting modern modems to talk to a 103 is partially that they refuse to disable the v.8 training sequence even if told to.
Finally:
I got the polarity of RS232 backwards! Negative voltage is a 1 and vice versa.
Always do your own research before passing on anything you hear in a CZcams video. Thank you for watching!
I think I have an ad for the bell 101 with a depiction of it in a Time magazine from 1962. Do you have an email address I can send the jpg?
Edit: after a some research, I've found its an ad for the Bell 103.
@@sleep_sounds Sure, cathode ray dude at gmail
another correction: CHU broadcasts in the shortwave band, not the AM band
@@Brok3nC4rrot dang, I know you're right, but I got tripped up by something else I read that said they were AM - whoops
Technically shortwave is AM - the frequency band of commercial AM radio is medium wave, but they are both amplitude-modulated, and some radio receivers can handle both, maybe that's what your source was saying?
At the risk of showing my age, I remember as a kid watching a, "high-powered business man type," pull out some early proto-portable computer and an acoustic coupler and use a payphone to connect to whatever he had to connect to (probably something stock market related) while waiting for a plane at Newark Airport. At the time, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
I started this before leaving for work, and finished it while at work...thanks for such a great video! Very fascinating.
He might have been getting data for some kind of insurance claim or contract, given that both Prudential & MBL were in Newark at the time.
@@endymallorn interesting. Thanks for the insight. I was just a kid at the time, so he was basically just, "generic businessman," to me, who happened to have a cool toy! Living just outside NYC in my early years, businessmen with cool toys were often stockbrokers.
It still is the coolest thing in the world !
Probably the 1990 equivalent of rushing to check your dogecoin investment after an Elon Musk tweet. Maybe Oprah sent a pager message about pogs and he was checking the value of his collection.
1960's TCP handshake was actually just human interaction lol
Neither TCP nor TCP/IP existed until the mid 1970's. Early modems used direct connection via POTS (plain old telephone service) lines and didn't use packet switching at all.
@@LionWithTheLamb whoosh
Well some times where a long way from the central office / exchange ie 6k yards plus - I had to some times whistle the right tone into the AC to being up carrier then quickly slam the handset down :-)
@@LionWithTheLamb TCP/IP didn't exist until the early '80s. Until then there were various programs for network communication. For example, ARPANET used NP (short for Network Program).
Alice: Hey, Bob! SYN.
Bob: Hi, Alice! SYN ACK.
Alice: ACK.
Bob: RST!
Alice: Dammit, Bob!
Fun fact, I used to work for AT&T in their ADSL support, every once and a while I would get a call where the DSL modem was so janked it was making audible noise on the line that sounded like dialup. I remember one call where the customer didn't realize the static on their phone line was their modem, within the first few minutes I had them unplug it, no noise, plug it back in, handshake, told them they needed a new modem.
This is a really enjoyable and informative video. Growing up in the 80s this really was part of the fabric of life. My uncle was a traveling salesman for Xerox and we had a terminal with an acoustic coupler modem in the house. My aunt and I would dial in to the mainframe and play computer games in 1985. A particular game "Castle Adventure" was my favorite. I wanted to play the game so bad I made my aunt teach me to read at 3 years old. I beat the game myself for the first time just before I turned 5. It is a watershed moment in my growth as I became an avid reader from that day forward and I truly believe it has given me so many advantages in life and I owe a good portion of that to the communication provided by that modem. I have been in the IT field my entire adult life, riding the waves of innovation to this very day.
Aaah the bee movie script, the lorum ipsum of the 2010's
My Dad had a Telex machine at his office in the early 80's - he used to communicate overseas. It was cool to watch when somebody connected and started typing.
oh I can't imagine how cool that would be!
@@CathodeRayDude It was a neat device - I remember it running off of thermal paper so it was very quiet and you could see its little print head moving across the page as things were typed in. He didn't have it long as it made way for a fax machine after that.
@@CathodeRayDude your a very interesting person I like the content of the channel I'm very much into electronics I like how you do this research I would never have known or even thought about it
I seem to remember Telex was hiding in what later became 1-900 numbers, (at least, in North America) so, while there were “special lines”, they weren’t really all that special.
@@CathodeRayDude I hated Dial-up.....it ties up the phone-line when you are on the internet and it was so slow
Back when we had acoustic modems, we didn't have "phone lines" attached with common jacks. Until the 80s, IIRC, the phone (rented from the phone company, usually) was plugged into the wall with a big four-pronged plug. Not convenient for adding more stuff. But almost all the phone handsets from the phone company were exactly the same shape, so the acoustic coupler was actually useful.
We had ours hard-wired. At the time, you pretty much *had* to lease your household phone from AT&T (or more accurately, the local affiliate, which was AT&T in all but name). As a kid I learned early on how to connect phones to the screw terminals, so my parents didn't need to call the phone company installer. When I was a teen, AT&T finally bowed to commercial pressure exerted by imported phones, and allowed us to purchase the phone from them outright.
Believe it or not, my mother still has that phone and still uses it. It's still hard-wired into the kitchen wall, too. There are other more modern sets in her house, but that old AT&T wall phone is still perfectly functional so she sees no need to replace it.
@@MrJest2 My paternal grandparents had pulse dialing, and still used their phone from the sixties as long as they were able to live in their home. It sat upon their rescued wind up victrola throughout my childhood, and is the phone I learned how to dial rotary phones with. Later they got a more modern push button phone in their bedroom, but it still had to be set to pulse dialing. They were promised touch tone service for decades, but died before it ever actually arrived. They were also promised city water and sewer lines, but that also never happened.
Incidentally, my grandmother had a computer, which I discovered in the early nineties. It was a Mattel Aquarius, new and unopened, that she'd won in a raffle a decade or so earlier. That was the computer I wrote my first program on, which I'm sure was 10 PRINT "HELLO", 20 GOTO 10.
I forget about that. Probably a good reason the couplers stuck around. Probably also useful for travelers who could plug into the "wall"
@@MrJest2 In this era of RAPID tech consumption, (I'm only 30 and have just come out of it the last few years) it is awesome to see hear of someone perfectly content with 40/50 year old tech that is perfectly fine. Guess they weren't built back then to CONSTANTLY be replaced, eh?
@@dylanherron3963 okay grandpa let's get you to bed
One of the advantages of the 103 modems is the low latency. I remember working for the military in the 80's and having to use a 103-style modem because the modern ones had too much (and unpredictable) delay.
I can see why that would be so electronically, though why would latency of the modem have been perceptible compared to the latency of transmitting the signal over distance? What application would allow you to even notice the latency of anything at 300 baud?
@@BobWidlefish I think it was timing data. Everyone needed to be on the same time and varying latency would have messed it up. If the delay was constant, we could have worked it out.
Who needs a cache when you can just time everything to work without it?
@@peterbonucci9661 What was the application that required everyone to have the same latency? BTW, variations in latency is generally referred to as jitter.
@@stevesether I use jitter for the hardware level. Latency is for the message level.
It was for defence. I think we where basically sending time of day information over old telephone lines. If the time got there consistently wrong, we could add or subtract a constant. If the offset was inconsistent, we couldn't fix it.
It was an odd system, but it worked.
My father worked for the Bell System and one of the Baby Bells for 30 years, installing and servicing Teletype machines. He would go out to remote locations like a plant or mill out in the middle of nowhere, under harsh industrial conditions and make sure those Teletypes were still functioning and sending data over country phone lines of varying quality, or through the tangle of lines strung through the city over the past 100 years. Your video helped me understand some of what he did.
He retired in 1994 and passed in 2020 from COVID complications. I miss him.
Must've been some adventures for sure. And, I hear ya man, lot of good folks gone away in these past few years. Far too many for the liking of anyone I'd think.
King shit
26 years of retirement after 30 steady years of employment sounds like he had a great life. My condolences on your loss. 💔
God bless you and the family
And i thought BabyBell is a kind of cheese...
Why does this feel like he's selling me this modem and why do I feel now buying it?
If you don't check eBay for stuff CRD talks about, are you a real fan?
We've all had to waste of our knowledge trying to sell electronics to people. You get good at it. lol
Same here... I'm basically banned from using eBay in my house... 😭
hey, it would allow you to properly decode that hidden Information Society track where Kurt and Paul start ranting about that time they got holed up in Brazil
This is a far better marketing video than the original marketing. I'll buy 1000 units lol shut up and take my money.
Great video! Really enjoyed it, brought back all kinds of memories.
The Tandy Model 100 combined with acoustic modem was default road gear for travelling journalists and foreign correspondents throughout the 80s and into the mid 90s. The benefit was that both items were very portable, abuse-tolerant, and could be made to work almost anywhere in the world.
The reporter could travel to the story in deepest darkest , gather the info writing in a notepad, travel back to the nearest town/village/cross-roads with a working phone line, type up the story with the Model 100 (runs on AA alkaline batteries, available everywhere), then go up to the single phone booth with the computer and battery-operated acoustic modem, make a (probably collect) operator-assisted call over a crappy phone line to the nearest foreign bureau for NYT/WaPo/AP/Reuters/TV network/whatever, and file their story directly into their employer's computer. I seem to recall AP and UPI handing out this setup by the hundreds. The European press used a nearly identical computer made by Olivetti; the only difference was that the keyboard could handle European alphabets.
For sheer portability and robustness, it wasn't beat until the arrival of the super-small DOS and Windows laptops of the mid-90s.
@23:00 When demonstrating the tape player sending modem data, I loved that the text output on the screen was the script you were reciting, synced up exactly. What a wonderful little easter egg!
I remember circa 1998, trying to play "Top Gun: Fire At Will" with my friend over our modems. We never decided who would call and who would answer, so our landlines kept ringing, someone (our moms) would pick up, say "Hello? HELLO?!" and it would come through the modem as a static-y, quasi-human-sounding voice. It was creepy, hilarious, and frustrating all at once. Our parents never let us try again.
hilarious! modems were an absurd concept
I had a friend in high school that would have to sneak onto the computer late at night because his mom was _convinced_ that modems would mess up the phone line. AFAIK, there was no rationalization for that. It was just "a fact."
@@nickwallette6201 & Cathode Ray Dude Somehow that "mess up the phone line" belief took hold in our collective memories. Not really sure how.
I did have an experience where I was forced to connect to a dial-up line via an "operator-assisted third-party" call (if you don't remember those, don't worry).
When I hung up the computer connection, I found that the NJ Bell operator had been struggling to "unlock" her console. She had been "locked out" of her console for the duration of my dial-up session, which was about 30 minutes.
Evidently, I was supposed to tell her that I was placing a "data call" before-the-fact so she could avoid being "locked out" of her console. Yes, this SURPRISED me too. The year was 1979.
If this or similar was the source of that belief, we should note that "direct-dialed calls" would not suffer any adverse effects.
Huh! I had no idea. :-D Must have been controlled by tones or something.
That could very well have made it around the Mom-o-Sphere and landed at my friend's house, 10 years later, when it wasn't the least bit relevant. haha Well, thanks for solving _that_ mystery. :-)
@@nickwallette6201 In the days of analog switching, a 2600Hz tone would be sent down a trunk line to the remote telephone office to signal that it was idle. When you called someone in a remote telephone office, your local equipment would pick up an available trunk line (either a wire line, or a channel in a multiplex carrier system), and the sudden absence of this tone caused the remote office equipment to start listening for a phone number (in the form of multi frequency tones, different from DTMF "touch-tone" tones). When you hang up, or when the operator needs to finish the call, your local office will start sending the 2600Hz tone again, and the remote end will be disconnected, and the trunk can be used for some other call.
If the modem tones were interfering with the 2600Hz supervision signal, that may cause the operator's board to get locked out, or something. I don't know enough about the old analog network to be quite sure, though, as I'm a 2000's kid, and sorry for making you read this if you already knew all that. :-P
BTW, in Linux "tty" meant "TeleTYpe" from UNIX. Standards never die.
Pretty sure someone on CZcams hooked a vintage teletype up to modern Linux recently just to show it still works.
Edit, found it: czcams.com/video/2XLZ4Z8LpEE/video.html
Cisco also uses that in their iOS.
@@skellious Yep. Here's an Apple ][ hooked up with telnet as a mainframe emulator consol. www.conmicro.com/apple-mstcons-web.jpg
@@MrMarci878 Cisco sucks though.
It is a good thing for standards to not die. Makes sure your equipment works as intended and prolongs it's useful life.
Hi Cathode Ray Dude; Thanks for a very interesting video. Another reason acoustic couplers were popular -- business travelers. In the 1990s I travelled a lot on business, and finding a hotel with an analog phone line where you could plug in a modem wasn't that common. Since phones are sometimes stolen from hotels, hotels often preferred using hardwired phones to reduce theft. Also, their PBXs were usually digital. It wasn't until later that hotel phone started to feature analog "data ports". I travelled with a portable acoustic coupler called the Road Warrior that you plugged your laptop's modem into using a phone cable , and then placed the phone's handset into the rubber cups. Much like what you showed with the TRS-80 but a universal product that worked with any direct-connect modem. Worked fine at 1200 baud and sometimes even higher speeds. Surprisingly, where I needed this gizmo the most was Silicon Valley -- area hotels were frequently overbooked during the Internet boom days, and you couldn't always find a room at a decent hotel with business amenities. Cheap hotel? Hardwired phone! PC Magazine even had an article once about how to use alligator clips to connect your modem. Keep up the good work!
Some music artists actually have put modem tones on their albums to have some special messages.
Information Society's album "Peace and Love, Inc" has one such track.
One thing to note about acoustic transmission is that it was also great for piracy and other software transmission from tape. That’s part of why you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes screaming down the Jersey Turnpike at 2AM.
I think the modern equivalent would be a Prius stuffed to the brim with Enterprise grade hard drives/tape cartridges/stacks upon stacks of 4-layer BD-ROMs
Amazon actually has a specially outfitted semi with tons of SSDs and all kinds of safety systems they use when they need to transfer some Really Big Data long-distance.
Andrew Tannenbaum wants his royalty check.
I saw a documentary about CD Project Red, the game studio that made Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077, and some of the creators behind the studio explained how in the '80s they'd record programs straight from a radio signal using acoustic transmission of data. I can't recall if this piracy radio was sanctioned by the Soviet Union, but it's more likely that it was broadcast from Germany.
The breaking down of the meaning of modem just blew my mind lol
Here's another one: the opposite process, turning an analog signal like audio or video into a digital one and back again is done by a device (sometimes hardware but frequently software) called a coder-decoder, or codec.
I got one for you. a device that takes any argument or idea and removes any logic them makes it cost 10 times the price is called a Politician lol
Mind blown 🤯
@@AlRoderick Matching a balanced line to an unbalanced line: a balun.
I remember acoustic couplers! I never used one myself, at least not for computers, but my dad had an early answering machine (purchased at a time when it was still illegal to attach your own equipment directly to phone lines) that used a similar construct to quite literally answer the phone. That is, a sound-activated switch detected the telephone ringing, and then two struts in the "crown" from the answering machine, which sat between the hook and the handset, would lift the handset, after which the machine would "speak" the recorded message into the handset.
There were several reasons why acoustic couplers were still being made after 1979. The first was that even though one could legally install a modular phone jack for a modem by that time, most people weren't handy enough to do that by themselves. (I'm an IT consultant who makes house calls, and I can tell you that most people still aren't handy enough to open up a phone jack, much less install one from existing wiring. In fact, most people still don't know how POTS works, much less what to do with the wires in the phone cable.) Since Internet access from home wasn't something most people had until the mid 1990s, and high-speed data applications didn't really become a thing for most people until the late 1990s, many decided it made more financial sense to just use an acoustic coupler.
A second reason, related to the first, was that even after it became legal to install one's own phone jacks, it was nearly 20 years before second phone lines, or even just accessory phone jacks, became commonplace, particularly in businesses, which were the primary users of modems until the late 1990s. Interestingly, this actually became more of a problem through the 1980s and '90s as phone systems evolved from POTS-based technologies to digital ones. Digital phone systems offered all kinds of cool, business-friendly features, and many could even work over conventional 4-wire phone lines (although they used the 4 wires differently from POTS), but they generally didn't provide a conventional jack for a fax machine or a modem. Such jacks could be added to some systems, but it was an extra-cost item, often requiring an additional line to be run to the desk where it was needed. Some companies dealt with the problem by installing conventional POTS lines where modems and fax machines were needed, but this, too, was relatively expensive, and incurred additional monthly charges for the extra lines. For small businesses, those acoustic couplers presented a very attractive work-around, especially since they didn't need high speed data.
A third reason for acoustic couplers was that business travelers often needed them. Wi-fi wasn't ubiquitous in laptops until the early 2000s, and many hotels didn't offer it until much more recently. Hotels were notorious for not providing accessory phone jacks for modems, and those that did often slapped on significant surcharges for guests who used them. International travelers often needed them in those days, as it wasn't guaranteed that they'd be staying in hotel rooms that had working phones at all, and they'd often have to use acoustic couplers to send data over whatever working phones they could find.
So, yes, acoustic couplers were never ideal tools for data communication, but we used them long after better technologies were introduced, because just because those technologies were around didn't mean they were always available.
The Novation JCAT was my first modem at home in 1980 (I believe). I've still got it and will be digging it out to get my special message. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
me too! and I still have mine. What is it about first modems?
broadcast is still chock full of dial-up, and every single modem is that same US robotics 56k V.92 serial modem. they get used for satellite control networks, stock ticker info, and other weird specific things
yeah it feels like usr must have made these for at least 15 years. I wonder how many users actually have the digital headend modems lol
@@CathodeRayDude so far i've only seen a "private" DSLAM once, i'd assume most companies are probably using the same four or five dialup service providers that provide absurdly over-engineered no-fail service that makes sure that those stocks make their way from the basement of nasdaq to the compositing evertz overture box even if there's ten hurricanes and five earthquakes happening in between.
also the very first frame of the video is a pogchamp expression
I used to have an isdn modern that I think was supposed to be able to do the v90 head end? Don't know if I still have one...
Dial up? That’s too complicated!
How about a string of relays controlled by parallel port on/off 5v rails which activate/deactivate a signal in order to initiate sequences/split lines, etc 🤣
We use that system with a Win2k pentium3 machine for localized commercial breaks management and it has proven more than reliable: it has been on 24/24 for 21 years now, with just a hard drive swap some years ago 😅
When we used acoustic couplers, we had to whack the phone's handset every once in a while to unpack the carbon crystals that were used in it to pick up sound. After a lot of use, the crystals would settle and lose the ability to vibrate properly.
Carbon granules.
@@johnbullpit9481 Whatever! Did you do the unpack routine?
@@tomlake2732 Yes I did, the most common reason for the granules sticking was from people cleaning the phone and using furniture spray on it liberally, which glued the granules together. Had intercoms that used the carbon granule microphones, and the same worked for them, though I also did make a few converters that used an electret microphone, a PNP transistor and a resistor, to emulate the carbon microphone in them, as the replacement ones were becoming very expensive. All would fit in the microphone unit after some surgery to remove the small pot of carbon, which then housed the electret insert in it's rubber bumper, and the transistor and resistor fitted into the rest of the shell. Still have 2 phones with carbon microphones in them, both rather elderly, though no longer have POTS service.
@@SeanBZA I doubt that any cleaner can seep into a carbon mike, or if it does, that's a garbage mike capsule, and also it will probably EOL it, it won't be OK after some whacking anymore. I busted the myth of moisture ruining carbon microphones in about 2002. I connected a carbon mike from an old intercom to the mike input of my sound card. Yes, it worked perfectly with the bias voltage intended for powering an electret mike. Then I tried to torture the capsule to death, and it wasn't easy at all. I submerged it into a glass of water for hours, and nothing happened, it worked fine even after that. IIRC the mike capsule was made by Tesla in the former Czechoslovakia.
On the other hand, electret mikes always die if they become wet. The effect is sometimes delayed, in some cases, even for months, but if once they become wet, they will die eventually, or develop about 40dB of sensitivity loss.
@@mrnmrn1 : The problem with cleaning products on carbon microphone capsules would not be with water, but instead with residues that the water didn't take with it when evaporating. It won't take a lot of sticky contamination to slowly cause the granules to stick together. Conversely, if you find a capsule that has the problem, a long soak in something (e.g. deionized water) that won't damage the capsule _should_ reduce the problem in the future (though perhaps won't be enough to fix it).
This is my favorite video on this channel by far, I watch it almost every day. Sure it has some things wrong like the +/-12 volts thing but the way it's presented, the backstory, the explanation and the basic language is fantastic. As a ftth technician I love learning how old computer networking works, it makes me appreciate more how things have evolved and surely this guy deserves way more recognition.
Also fun fact, here in Spain the lottery administration has a failsafe to validate the ticket if they don't have internet access for whatever reason, and yes, it uses the telephone line with Bell 103 modulation.
Good job. I taught high school computer science in 1992-4 with SO much of this hardware! I remember teaching ATDT (and other Hayes AT commands) and the kids taking turns at the librarian’s computer because our lab with 15 student PCs lacked modems. Her modem had 2400 baud capability. Meanwhile the kids learned to program in BASIC and Pascal under DOS and also the amazing new office software from
Microsoft. Wow, thanks for a trip down severely-limited-memory lane!!
I would have loved to be a kid in that class of yours, but I'm from the other side of the globe and to make matters worse I hadn't even been born yet then. 😂 I truly believe the 80s and 90s kids had the unique privilege to learn how computers work and grow an appreciation for the intricacies.
@@praveendissanayake2509 every generation has its pros and cons. I graduated high school in the Bay Area (AKA Silicon Valley) in 1983 (and college nearby in 1988). Back then things were SLOW (300 baud slow). It was painfully challenging to learn much CS beyond BASIC. Besides programming calculators, I used BASIC on our district’s HP 2000 and 3000 “mainframes” and the IMSAI 8080s in our school’s computer lab; I had yet to experience a compiled language. All the really cutting edge things were deeply controlled by a few hyper-wealthy industrial and government-linked companies and the biggest universities.
The playing field is FAR leveler now. Any child on Earth with a bit of ingenuity (and the good fortune to have reliable electricity) has some access to it today. While those times were better in some limited ways, these times are better on balance. (Or at least they were up until 2020 when all the global plagues and warfare got rolling thanks to our globalist “friends.” (Alas, it’s probably best to avoid discussing such things.))
That man smoking a pipe while sending an impromptu email from a portable micro computer with an accoustic coupler modem coupled to a payphone...
Probably one of the most strangely awesome sights I'll see today.
it's incredibly powerful
@@CathodeRayDude what the source? One of those seemingly fantastical future predictions which actually becomes true
The ,portable micro computer was a Panasonic HHC. The dream pocket computer of that time. Imagine a 6502 powered computer as powerful as an Apple II in your (big) pocket.
The pipe is what sold it to me. Indoors too. Damn.
@@nathanferch5375 after quite a bit of searching, i finally found the full res original on the MIT CSAIL twitter. then used it to make a poster for an upcoming gig my band's playing O:-)
14:17 imagine going to a pay phone, smash the headset to some box and sending an email. That's MATRIX level stuff
Do it in a pimp suit smoking a pipe!, did you see that...omg.. I thought I heard Shaft music.
Actually used to do that in the late 90s I had a laptop with an acoustic coupler modem and AOL I could pull up to a payphone fasten the modem and dial the local AOL number and go online from my car. He's wrong about acoustic coupler modem speeds the one I had theoretically would work at 28.8 kilobytes per second thoughI never got it over 14.4,but it was good enough for e mail and online chat rooms.
Email really wasn’t a thing in the days of acoustic couplers. We did have messaging systems, but they weren’t called email and they didn’t work like email.
That man smoking a pipe while sending an email is badass
in the early 80s i was a system programmer at a textile company using an IBM mainframe, like thousands of companies did, and we did a dial-up transmission each night to pull product orders from a big customer (Kmart) which the operator would dial by hand using a telephone, and a 2400 bps Bell Dataphone. You'd have to keep re-dialing if you got a busy signal (Kmart, I'm sure, had a bank of auto-answer modems, but it could still get pretty busy during that time of the evening) and part of the reason it was done at night was because phone rates (cents per minute) were lower at night!
Oh, the communication software we used to transfer files, was a free public-domain piece of software, written by system programmers at (i kid you not) Whirlpool corporation. Yes, the appliance people. System programmers shared a lot of code with their brothers and sisters in other industries in those days. And we didn't have a BBS to do it, there was a set of "greatest hits" shared-software collections, distributed on reels of magnetic tape. One of the most popular "albums" was the "CBT Mods" tape, a project administered by the sysprog dudes at Connecticut Bank and Trust. This was largely how the "open source" marketplace of the 70s and 80s worked. Price of admission, was usually postage and the cost of a tape. Good Times.
Hey, you probably won't see this. But I just want to say that your channel is something truly special. The amount of work you put into these videos, coupled with the genuine knowledge gained, as well as entertainment is truly spectacular! I've grown irritated by low-effort youtubers, that offer nothing other than cheap thrills, and clickbait. I like to call myself a tech enthusiast, and you bring me back to the 90's and beyond with the tech you showcase. Its truly awesome. Keep doing what you're doing, bro. You DESERVE so many more views and subs considering the content you put out. Keep your temps low, and your performance fast. Much love!
Thank you so much. I did see this and it means a lot. I'm trying my best to be as genuine as I can.
The interesting thing about the Hayes smart modem is that the AT commands it used are still used today to talk to modern 4G and 5G cellular modems.
Can confirm, I'm working on some 4G M2M deployments and I've been blasting AT commands at the modem chipset to configure things like GPS
@@rampagerick +++ATH
I've got a script on my router to change the modem to LTE only thru AT commands.
The mark of a good standard. It's a shame that there are too many people who never learnt 'If it ain't broke then don't fix it' but feel that because a system is old then it needs replacing.
Epsons printer codes were another good one. Also PostScript is still being used over 40 years later by modern laser printers. And POSIX is still recognised as a good standard by all modern operating system suppliers, except MicroSoft.
@@Kimdino1 Innovation doesn't just wait for something to break
Man, out of all of my subscriptions, CRD is in my top 3 of "Dudes I will buy a drink if I encounter in the wild". Keep going strong, dude, and thanks for the hours upon hours of great edutainment.
there are very incredibly few things that I love more than obsessive backwards compatibility and robust systems. This is both, and I love it. If I ever find a Bell Telephone 103 at a thrift store or something (unlikely but possible) I'd totally get it and try to hook it up to things, just for fun.
19:58 ahahahaha so having converted the entire script to hexadecimal i then printed the entire thing out in minecraft as represented by the sixteen colors of wool. i unfortunately not only know the script but i know it in dimensions that never need to be experienced
that'll be important in a few decades when the bee aliens try to communicate with us using the bee movie script in hex and you are sitting there as an 80 year old man watching it on your news headset and recognize it "Oh Snap! I remember this! I must contact super NASA and tell them!"
@@pengwin_ lol @ supernasa
61 yo first time I've ever seen the workings of a rotary-dial telephone well, working. 🤭 Ingenious!
My grandpa had a rotary phone in the garage. I loved the sounds it made, the tactile feedback, the whole experience really. Wish I would have got that thing before their place got sold..
@@trajectoryunown my dad still has one, but i dont think you can call out anymore, I got locked out in winter and couldnt get it to work. I was around 10 and still knew how to work it
@@patrickf4462 It depends on who you phone service provider is and the area. Some still do offer pulse dialing as a default legacy feature as its actually just cheaper to leave that infrastructure in than remove it. Newer lines and switching centers may not offer this function unless the provider puts it in - it's also dummy cheap to install and a lot of big name providers still do. All rotary phones WILL still receive calls, although you will likely have to rewire the phone so the ringer works properly (its just simple swapping, removing, (or both) a few wires on the bakelite board inside). The ringer isn't broke on most of these, its just still wired for the decade it was used in.
@@BT-ex7ko I still have a working dial up phone. It plugs in with an adaptor, receives calls well, can make direct calls. Most menus don’t work, but a few older ones do!
When I was at college in the early 1990s, the campus phone system still supported pulse dial telephones. If you could move your hand fast enough on the hook switch, you could actually place a call without using the dial or buttons. One trick is that 0 required ten pulses.
A lovely demo. I used FSK in a different context in the 1980s as a recording studio engineer: to sync a multi track tape machine with MIDI sequencers. One track would be 'striped' with FSK at the desired tempo and it would then keep MIDI gear in time with the parts added later from musicians.
omg solved a problem. genius
These standards were also applicable to military-grade TTY equipment. In addition to going through a switched network, connections or certain branches of it could also be established via HF FM-radio connections. Ours actually had three frequencies: nominal, low and high. In operation nominal was never actually sent or heard.
“On my side I have a terrible knockoff Bell 2500 set, in this distasteful color of beige….”
Somewhere out there, LindyBeige just shed a single tear.
A good description of acoustic coupling modems and the Bell standard. It's quite accurate and a great half hour. I lived, ate and breathed modems in the early part of my career.
Thank you! I'm always worried I'll get these things completely wrong, haha.
Great video; thanks for doing this! I'm about halfway through it and have a couple of comments. First: I drove a longish-distance rural delivery route in the early '90s and used a handheld scanner for package tracking. Included with the scanner was a one-way (single cup) acoustic coupler. I would periodically stop at a payphone, put the coupler on the phone's mic, plug a wire from the coupler into my scanner, then dial a toll-free number to upload my data.
My second comment relates to using a modem with radio. One application where 300 baud is still relevant is on HF radio, where going much faster than 300 baud exceeds the allowable signal bandwidth. For that reason, packet radio on HF still uses 300 baud.
I want to thank you for all the effort put into this video as well as money. This is an extremely informative video not only for those of us who lived through it but for the younger people who’ve never even heard of it. Thank you so much for this great video I just subscribed and will come back often. Keep up the great work
One interesting Modem of this time was made in Germany, the Datenklo (data toilet), it was made by the Chaos Computer Club because the only modems that you are allowed to use at that time could be only rented for like 50DM (routhly 50$ today) a month from the Deutsche Post (Telekom splitted from that company). So the CCC made their own modem which also go around the restrictions by being a acoustic coupler. To connect to the Telephone Handset it used Rubber sleeves that were bought at an plumbing supply store and usually were used with an toilet, this gave it its famous name.
Fun fact: on the CCC Hackercamps (Chaos Communication Camp) we use Portable toilets to build in Hardware like Network Switches and Server to be used, the standard portable toilet has the perfect form factor for it and its pretty water sealed. We also call them Datenklos (data toilets).
Awesome!
The rubber part in question is called a "no-hub coupling" but generally referred to as a "fernco" after a popular manufacturer.
Computer geek, raised by plumbers.
I remember hearing from an Italian sysadmin that they had to use official SIP/Telecom Italia modems if they wanted to run their service publicly or SIP would have sanctioned them for sending "unauthorized whistles" over the line.
Obviously those modems where bulky, costly and slow as heck even for those days.
I'm 37 and in 1998 I was so jazzed about the internet and yet lacking much money and a PC I begged for a WebTV for X-mas. Life changing and in Feb of 2002 I got a HP Desktop that had a CD writer...I WAS THE SHIT! lmao
I just found your channel, love your way of talking and explaining, meanwhile being entertaining.
I wish you the best future for this channel! I'll probably sit and binge watch all your uploads now.
Grew up in a very rural area and dial up was a standard for us up until around 2008 or so. That sound will always make me feel some twinge of excitement for exploring the internet, which seemed like such a rare treat for me then. Great informative video as always!!!!
One of the things about the lower baud rates is that they negotiate really quickly - if you're using it for a credit card terminal for example, you don't want to spend 30 seconds connecting for a 10 second data burst
A few local shops still use dial up for that exact reason. I got a pair of boots last year, then the ran my card. I heard that screech and though OMG dial up in 2020?
@@gotioifyRetail still uses tons of dial up and modems for most of their infrastructure, as well as broadcast (as stated in an above comment), and manufacturing. I mean a place I worked still used terminal style computers, dial up, as well as software from 1976 to make advanced electronic components for products such as a certain luxury electric car brand and a fruit based tech company. It was truly a weird experience but shows how older tech is still preferred for certain applications.
@@BT-ex7ko I see older tech as foundations and building blocks to what we have today. I see nothing wrong with having that history embedded in current tech. It shows the progressive efficiency of technology.
@@stefanhoimes Admittedly though, we could do to make it a bit smaller at times. But yeah seeing super old tech, making super new tech is rad, it's really cool.
So fast that caller-id is implemented on POTS by sending the calling number as 300 baud data between the rings.
Cute that when you completely reboot the modem at 20:40, the first thing to get sent to WYSE terminal is "Hello!"
I remember this!
"Even if you're 19, and you weren't there for any of this stuff."
I feel called out. lmfao
Its insane how far we come from 110 bits per second to 10 Gbit/s
My man, you just wove an amazing story around a 60 year old technology. As a ham, I'm predisposed to like this, but this was absolutely fascinating!
I used 56k, but didn't know any of this. So to me it was like an amazing movie for the first time. He is an excellent communicator! And in case CRD happens to read this, this is my second favorite to the "History of Home Video" video.
Well, without a POTS line to connect a modem to, that was a small challenge to decode the 'special message'. But the reward was worth it! Thx for setting that up.
Hey, I really like the way you present and demonstrate stuff in your videos. I've learned so much already!
Great video! Was pleasantly surprised to find the special message is still there and now I've got a lovely printout of it from my terminal lol. Thanks for putting out such interesting content!
Oh man, I really appreciate this video. I had dial up until December of 2008, and poking around with Palm devices and others with modems, I never could wrap my head around how the communication was actually established. This explained it well, you've made another video that made me realize I had a much smaller grasp on something than I thought!
...Now, to get an old Cisco/Sipura SPA so I can get the Dreamcast online again!
(Oh, and 26 here. I think I'm past the tail end of when anybody should have legitimately been using dial up, but that's what ruralness does for you.)
Talking about notifications, I remember when CZcams had an RSS feed for every CZcams channel and you could use your RSS feeds as a way to get surefire notifications when someone uploads a video.
It still has, but you have to "compose" the RSS links manually, using the channel id in the URL.
There was also an export function in CZcams, perhaps it still exists, which exported all subscriptions of a user to an file which you can import your RSS reader of choice.
I still us RSS on the PC for some channels, although nowadays I tend to click on recommendations instead.
Go to the channel's main site. View the source code. Search for RSS. There it is.
czcams.com/users/feedsvideos.xml?channel_id=UCXnNibvR_YIdyPs8PZIBoEw
You can still do that, i have my rss program with all the youtube channels i follow. You have to set up each url yourself but is not a big hassle.
in past there was not that much youtube users :P today anyone has a channel :P
One big reason we turned the speaker on when dialing out was, sure, diagnostic, and to hear if it was a really noisy line, but also to tell if there was a busy signal or a ring. Yes, modems were supposed to be able to tell that, but they didn't always get it right. Plus, it was exciting to hear a BBS ring when it had been busy once a minute for the past hour.
I'm thoroughly enjoying this video.
I just discovered your channel and subscribed.
Congratulations!
Based on a previous history of a couple dozen other CZcams channels I've discovered at about this stage (many of which are also tech-based), that means your channel has arrived at the exponential subscriber explosion stage. Well done, you will soon be raking in 100's of thousands of views per video within a week of posting them, I'm quite sure of it. And from what I can see in this most excellent video (and browsing your back catalogue of video topics), it is very well deserved!
You may now commence celebrations.
The fact that you said you're 32 is insane. You definitely look about 10 years younger than you are.
Love your videos! The explanations and demos in this video are extremely fascinating.
In the early eighties there was an acoustic coupler (I can't remember the maker) that could transmit 1200 bps to a Bell 202 dataphone. The only difference from the 103 coupler was you had to remove the carbon microphone from the handset and replace it with a microphone that came with the coupler. I didn't understand why the microphone had to be changed since the 202 tones (1200 ans 2200 hz) are within the range the line should be able to handle but the thing wouldn't work reliably with the carbon mike.
that's absolutely remarkable. I'll see if I can find it, maybe I can get some explanation.
Probably Anderson Jacobson.
Thanks for this video! I discovered so much I didn’t know about the old modems. This is really a great video!
This is an amazingly detailed video presented in an entertaining way. Keep up the good work.
Also. Couple that accoustic coupler with an imsai 8080 and I've been told you can find a pretty neat version of Global Thermonuclear Warfare on a lone server at NORAD.
I too was reminded of Wargames while watching this video.
How about a nice game of chess? 😉
For those that want to "play a game".
I used those acoustic coupler modems in the '70's. Most phone lines were too noisy back then to use 300 baud anyway, so the phone line ended being the limiting factor. Maybe 1 in 100 times, 300 baud would work, so we ended up not even wasting time trying it. Normally we used 110 baud.. Occasionally, the line would be pretty noisey, so we'd use 75 baud.
The phone network was pretty much all analog back then, so it accumulated a lot of noise over distance.
amazing video man! I learned many amazing things today haha. Subscribed for sure, and can't wait for more awesome videos!
I'm into all this stuff and this is the first time I've come across one of your videos. I hope that means the algorithm has decided to bless you. Great video.
That cat @14:10 sending an email at a payphone using an acoustic coupler while smoking a pipe is maybe the coolest dude I've ever seen.
Once, a long time ago, a nerdy friend and I set upon an experiment to see if we could re-create the screeches of a modem. I (as in, my mouf) managed to successfully connect with his computer at 300 baud.
I would love to dig in to the technical details of all the incremental negotiation protocols and design a new (but compatible) modem today, because I'm still a nerd, and I want to go faster than 300 baud.
I already knew about the technology you covered because I kind of lived through it, I just wanted to see how you presented it and explained it. Kudos, good job. I have seen several of your videos and I have subbed after seeing this one.
This is one of the most informative videos I've ever seen, such clear and concise information. Very very very good work!
I'm 26 and grew up with dial up. My family farm used it until like 2008. We had the equivalent of "super dial up" with multiple phone lines by then tho.
Same apart from the multiple phone lines, haha
Super interesting content as always! I actually use HyperTerminal and a 56k modem on a daily basis for HVAC and lighting control for a retail company you're probably familiar with lmao. Its still amazing how often modems are still used nowadays.
The 300 baud TRS-80 modem changed my life! I was 8 and loved typing programs in from magazines and saving them to audio tape. The first time I called my local library’s modem and did a catalog card lookup, I was addicted to networking. 40 years later, I still work in networking.
TTYs were popular in the deaf community as well. My parents had s huge one back in the day before it was replaced by a more modern digital TDD.
I believe the older machines (in North America) were 45.5 to 50 baud, using 5 bit ASCII and while FSK was used, they were carrierless (no audio when not sending data). They operated in half-duplex mode so it wasn't possible for both to be sending at the same time.
Canadian govt services also still have TTY lines, not sure about elsewhere
@@vivicomplex I'm sure a lot of places still have TTY services. With my parents, video relay services have replaced their TTYs.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_relay_service
ATT was also doing cool experiments back in the day with video services for the deaf.
czcams.com/video/XUJWX1H8ohM/video.html
@@adampope5107 interesting thing about tty. They still existed in different form and they are in your smartphone. They are called Real Time Text (RTT). Android and iPhone have them. Basically everyone can use tty.
Yet another awesome video!
I'm almost 37, so most of the equipment shown here is just a bit before my time.
I did grow up with a 486 that we eventually added a 14.4 modem (which got upgraded over the years until we capped out at 56k on a Pentium). Really interesting to learn about these extremely simple devices, I have always been so used to the idea that the modem had some intelligence and would dial, etc for you.
One thing I did pick up on over many years of dialing into my favorite ISP was that you COULD hear if a connection was made at a slower bitrate than usual - as I recall, each different speed had its own unique handshake sound and I can remember hearing that it didn't sound *quite* right which would inevitably lead to a lousy connection and usually necessitated a hangup and redial.
Anyways, just wanted to say this channel has turned into one of my favorites, I love hearing and learning about tech from this time period...everything seemed so limitless back then, like anything was possible. And now here we all are with supercomputers in our pockets!
Thanks for the video. My parents both worked for the Bell Systems and my father eventually retired with a company that was spun off after the divestiture of ATT/Bell. Those were incredible days of the infancy of computing. Remember it well as a kid. Great video. Oh and what you talk as history was part of our everyday life😀
As someone who used a 300 bps non-dial modem (and saw plenty of acoustic couplers) I loved this! Thank you for spending so much time to honor our roots!
Love the old AT&T promotional video for installing a modular jack! I’ve watched that one in full myself before, haha
Ahaha oh wow that guy with a pipe and a pinstripe suit sending an email at an 80s payphone!
And now I know why the Hayes called itself “Smartmodem”. Even though I knew you manually dialled with a real phone with earlier modems, I didn’t add them together.
Ah, when you showed the tape, I was thinking it might work well over RF, just like TTY was used! Nice you went there.
I always liked the part right after the opening few bytes, where the noise pinged back and forth and got all echo-y. Then briefly white noise. Which I guess is actually testing the echo and noise cancellation on the line and stuff? Hm.
But yeah QAM sounds nasty.
Your ability to thoroughly explain things without dumbing it down is phenomenal! I was pulled right in.
He did dumb it down.
Admittedly, he said he was going to...
i.e. He never even attempted to explain the difference between baud and bits-per-second. Admittedly, there is no difference with a 300 baud modem, but it's very different with a 56K modem, which generally runs at 2400 baud, but essentially managed to send 56K bits per second.
@@michaelleiper thanks for clearing that up, Mike. Don't know what we'd do without you.
This made me smile. . . as I grew up with an uncle, working for IBM, old acoustic modem on his desk he downloaded new builds with to test at home. . . to my first 9600 baud.
and now I work in fiber.
and I never knew about that initial 300 baud being this balling.
Your videos are excellently written, very witty and informative.
I remember the first time I heard a V.34 modem connect and I heard that pinging noise in the middle of the handshake and all I could think was "whoa, what the heck was *that?*"
Very cool video!
My first modem was for Tandy's Color Computers (CoCos) and plugged into the ROM port. It transmitted at 300 baud (300 bytes per second). You had to set parameters such as even or odd parity (the 1 bit reserved for error checking by making sure the sum of it and the other bits in the 8-bit byte was always odd or even). The other 7 bits were used to represent a character or action done by the computer as interpreted by the ASCII code. Last note, good job CRD. Keep doing the episodes. I'll be watching.
Thanks for sharing this video, it must have take a considerable amount of time to put all of this together! I appreciate all the work you do for your videos, both the presentation type like this one, but I also enjoy the more "off the cuff" kind of videos too.
I remember in the early '80s I had a Tandy 1000HX that I got a 300 BAUD modem for and I thought I was a cool guy, I had the first modem on the block! Lol, ah the memories! 👍🤓
Cool video. I look for computer and tech history videos on CZcams all the time. I haven't seen one in a long time that was about something I knew nothing about. Well presented. Thanks! You've got a new subscriber.
These modems are SO simple that you can make them out of a handful of op-amps, some relaxation oscillators to generate the frequencies, and a few bandpass filters made from discrete capacitors - as long as both computers on the ends had serial port bitrates that weren't too far off. Hell, you could legitimately make one out of vacuum tube and neon bulb logic if you added an impedance transformer to make the phone line signal high enough to run the control grids.
TCM 3105
The first modems I ever saw had a big vacuum tube sticking out the front - used also as the "on" light. (Connecting an ICL 1904S mainframe to a GPO telephone line).
Fantastic work as usual. Loved the bits where you used recordings and played with the distance of the phone from the coupler. Excellent demonstration. Brings to mind having a Tomy Chatbot remote controlled robot when I was a kid, bringing it to my friend's place, and hearing the tones generated by the remote on his dad's shortwave radio.
This was more informative than I could have hoped for. I've been wanting to find ways to generate modem tones for music purposes and this has brought me one step closer.
Omg I just saw the name of the channel. Brilliant! Subscribed!
My parents had pulse dialing (in Canada) until they moved in the early 2000s, and we had self dialing modems on that the whole time, including with the 300 baud modem I had for my Commodore 64
Another great tech explanation video. You are going to be one of the well known names for tech CZcams channels. That play button is coming, you are well on your way.
This bought back some fond memories of having all nighters with friends as we hung out on BBS's. It was great to share my ASCII art work with others (and later ANSI) and get their feedback. :)
Good times. 😊
Great vid CRD. 👍
Great video dude. You know your stuff and your videos are great. Thanks!
I really love the fact that your channel is finally growing by the day, you deserve all the best, And keep on doing this my friend .. we love your content
Thank you so much for making videos on these old technologies. It helps see the sheer amount of effort humanity has gone through to develop what we have now. As someone who has grown up with smartphones for almost my whole life its very interesting to see what came before and just how simple it could be.
I definitely knew about modems as a kid. I remember an early 80's technology tv program here in Canada called "Bits & Bytes", from I think 1982 (so the era of TI-80 and Commodore and similar machines). I remember they dedicated an episode to communication/modems, and the guy on the show used a modem like the one shown around 7:30 in this video, the kind you directly put the handset into to use. I love learning about vintage tech like this, I didn't realize modems were even older than what I remembered as a kid. Very well done video.
Very well done video. I have been in IT for 30 years and am 50 years old. I did all sorts of installs in the 90s with modems, the apex being Total Control Chassis by US Robotics which were quad modems on a card stuck into a chassis to receive calls from dozens of people simultaneously. Then broadband came out and we just switched everyone over to VPNS (Which used to just be called "encrypted tunnels"). I especially liked the demo where you showed the modems talking in real time. Great stuff!
Hats off. This is next level content! I started BBSing in 1990 with a 2400 modem and went from there. This walk down memory lane was great. Take away the photos and video but with today’s website articles being black text on white backgrounds, that ancient Bell standard could probably allow just enough data through to be readable and worthwhile.
Oh, man. I just got r***r***'d over a very old modem protocol and I loved every minute of it.
Really fantastic content. I look forward to your videos more than any other creator at this point.
11:48 1977 Vadic Modem ad featuring "Ma Bell"! And her witty sarcastic son, Alexander Graham Bell, Jr...I LOVe these ads...and you are the first I've ever seen use them on CZcams! Yes!
Asking the real questions... why does Jim have a copy of the bee movie script?
A copy is included with every release of Windows, in c:\windows\media.
He could have used Hamlet and gotten some of the same puns out of it.
Ubuntu 13.10 or later sould have it pre-installed. Look in /usr/share/bees.
@@josugambee3701 This pleases me more than it should.
Don't you dare shit-shame him!