This is a truely nerdy pet peeve that I've had ever since cable companies have been using radio ads with modem 'sounds' for DSL. DSL does not use the same technology that the old analog modems used. My first modem, honest to god, was an old 300 baud modem that plugged into an Atari 400. I was living large once I upgraded to 1200 baud.
I even ended up getting one of the 'brand new' 14.4k Supra modems through their BBS sysop deal, before they went bankrupt for the first time. By the time I was middle school, I was able to get the ultra l33t US Robotics dual standard HST modems. I think I still have one or two that used to run Black Horizons BBS way back when.
Yep, BBSs, where the closest you got to World of Warcraft was cheesy, but so very cool at the time, BBS doors.
I remember hacking away in Pascal on the old Telegard 2.5j source code that leaked, which eventually spawned the Renegade BBS craze. Running Desqview so I could sort-of multitask on my machine while people used the BBS. Desqview/X was my first 'dive' into anything Unix-like, outside of KA9Q and dialing into modem banks using SLFP instead of SLIP because SLFP didn't require a username or password. SLIP ended up getting replaced eventually by PPP.
Before Telegard, I ran the BBS on an Atari 1024ST with a ported version of Citadel.
I think the best thing I ever did when I was 8 or 9 was solder on 48K of chips onto my Atari 400, so I had a grand total of 52k overall, depending on what dipswitch I used. Some software didn't like the last bank of RAM so you'd have to disable it down to 48K overall. My dad helped me with the project and the memory upgrade kit looked a lot like something you'd see on a modern day X-box mod-chip setup. I guess I was born to be a hardware hacker. I love doing stuff like that.
First hard drive? A 10MB Seagate connected to the same Atari 1040ST with the bastardized Atari version of SCSI in an external enclosure.
It is strange what memories an annoying radio commercial will trigger sometimes.
