What Modems have you used?

Just curious.... what Modems have you used to surf the internet? Below

don...

My first PC, a 486, came with a 14.4 which I almost immediately upgraded
to a 28.8. My current PC has a 56 in it.

I've listed the most-common ones used for phone connections.

hancock4...

Bonus question: In what year was the first modem introduced and what
company introduced it? (to send data to/from an information automated
system over a voice telephone line).

videonovels...

1960s - AT&T

(checks wikipedia)

NOPE. Missed it by a decade: "Modems in the United States were first
introduced as a part of the SAGE air-defense system in the 1950s,
connecting terminals located at various airbases, radar sites and
command-and-control centers to the SAGE director centers scattered
around the US and Canada. SAGE ran on dedicated communications lines,
but the devices at either end were otherwise similar in concept to
today's modems. IBM was the primary contractor for both the computers
and the modems used in the SAGE system."

hancock4...

That's correct.

IBM developed the modem in 1954. Companies used it to send and receive
data without conversion between branches and the home office. Before
the modem the data had to be coverted to printout, then read by a
person and transmitted via teletype, then keyed back by a person into a
machine-readable form. Aside from being slow, it was subject to error
since people had to handle the data twice.

Transmitting data direcctly via telegraph (teletype) was developed in
1941. IBM developed machines to convert their data processing machine
format to telegraph paper tape format (Baudot). Also at that time IBM
developed a radio teletype which was used by the army in the war.

By 1960 Western Union realized that the basic message telegram would be
obsolete because of cheap long distance telephone and it sought to go
into other types of data handling. It handled transmission of high
volume data between computers in the 1960s for both the military and
business and developed high speed microwave transmission. For reasons
I'm not quite clear on, Western Union dropped the ball in the 1970s
when data transmission was exploding. One reason was that WU was
dependent on AT&T for the "last mile" of transmission and that was
costly. WU also had very high labor costs. The original WU went
bankrupt and no longer exists, the present day company bought the name
only.

If you were referring to the commercial world?

"AT&T introduced two digital sub-sets in 1958. One was a wideband
device... The other was a low-speed modem which ran at 200 baud. In
the summer of 1960 the name Data-Phone was introduced to replace the
earlier term 'digital subset'"

kbps
53.3 (download speed in V.92)
48.0 (upload speed in V.92) (with compression ~3x faster or ~150 kbps
effective)
33.6
28.8
19.2 (unratified standard)
14.4
9.6
2.4
1.2
0.3

.

To answer my own question: Here are the various modems I have used,
along with the dates & hardware acquired:

53.3 ----- (2002 Windows XP)
33.6 ----- (2000 Windows 98)
28.8 ----- (1998 Windows 95)
2.4 ------ (1989 Commodore Amiga)
1.2 ------ (1987 Commodore=128)

Bob Brogan...

Who uses modems any more?

videonovels...

.

People connecting to the internet via phone, digital subscriber line,
cable, or wireless.

Brenden D. Chase...

LOL, what a dorko!

me...

not everybody has access to broadband (which, by the way,
some types still use modems, just not at slow dialup speeds)
I'm pretty much stuck at about 40-50Kbps dialup.

Mr. Impressive...

Agreed, I've already been to the end of the internet.
http://www.turnofftheinternet.com/