Using an acoustically coupled modem over a cell phone

What can one do with it?

Game

Chat

Surf

and more…

plus vim…

With a low enough bitrate, considerable FEC built into the protocol, and robust mechanisms for retransmit it’s surely possible to work around the compression inherent to cellular voice.

Back in the days of dialup, I bought one of these at COMDEX.

http://www.konexx.com/koupler.htm

It never worked very well and I went back to taking the phone apart and hooking up my modem to the innards with alligator clips in those few cases when the phone did not have a data jack and was wired to the wall.

That brings back memories…

Use to use that and a palm pilot in the 90’s to dial up my favorite boards and shell accounts.

Hell, the world’s first smartphone was born out of these:

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hmm, I wonder if my bbs door botnet is still around somewheres…

Palm was ahead of their time. They were making the transition from the 68K based DragonBall processor to the ARM when the PDA market went away.

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I remember distinctively using my StarTac in 2000 to check my email and look at some websites. Wow that was an expensive phone bill. 400+ dollars for that month.

That was part of the problem back then. No free or low cost data. The other was slow 2G or even 1G data rates.

That reminds me.

I once worked on a project to build an emulator to run apps written for Palm OS on foreign hardware without requiring the ROMs from a Palm or compatible PDA.

The idea was to run Palm apps on Pocket PC devices and sell the company to Microsoft for a small fortune sort of like what Mark Cuban did with broadcast.com. The initial project code name of TestPilot was changed to OutCuban to make it more obscure.

We got far enough along to run the then popular games like Vexed! and Bejeweled. My favorite was Freewalk though it was rather slow.

http://vexed.sourceforge.net/

http://www.beiks.com/palm/freewalk.htm

We folded the company when the PDA market started going away and when we discovered that a large number of apps wrote directly to the display buffer instead of using the OS interfaces, making our job that much harder.

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Interesting. Surprised the cell providers were that courteous.

Back in the earliest days of supporting FiOS I remember customers calling us rather upset that they couldn’t dial in to AOL, their office’s modem pool, etc. Turns out that the PON standard used some compression on POTS that rendered modems useless past standard fax machine baud rates.

Calculus was enjoyable for me until we hit differential equations. We were later told that we were taught DiffEq so that we can appreciate “don’t do that!” when taught better techniques.