Someone was fortunate enough to recover a 300 baud modem manufactured by Livermore Data Systems, manufactured circa 1964. It is a true acoustic modem with the large transducers and all. And, the best part, it still works as the video below will show.

This is as old-school as you can get concerning modems. Bear in mind this is pre-Hayes era.

In the demo below, the modem is connected, dialed and uses the Lynx text browser to surf the internet. It’s slow-slow-slow, but totally amazing considering it is FORTY-FIVE YEARS OLD.

Do you have anything tech that’s forty-five years old and still works? Probably not.

Unless you use your dial-up modem for faxing or internet you probably don’t have much use for it. However there are some good software titles to make it useful again.

PhoneTray is a product (and yes there’s a free version on that site) that will show Caller ID and also has the ability to "zap" telemarketer calls as well.

Telemarketing blocker more or less does the same job as PhoneTray does.

Using Windows Vista? Not to worry, there’s Vista Caller-ID software – and it’s free.

For those of you out there that don’t have a dial-up modem but are interested in using it per the methods above, there are USB 2.0 compliant hardware modems you can purchase like this one (and you’ll be amazed at how small they are).