Ancient Web: William Bader Opened a 2002 Museum of Modems and Minicomputers

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

William Bader's online computing museum begins with the sort of hardware that makes a modern Wi-Fi router look suspiciously like magic.

Visit William Bader's Museum.

The hand-linked museum identifies itself as a collection with over 300 photographs and carries a July 2002 revision date. Its index is organized by equipment families: modems, early personal computers, DEC minicomputers, Sun workstations, terminals, programming tools, and the occasional Rubik's Cube. Bader uses small images and direct links rather than a modern gallery interface, leaving the descriptions to do a substantial amount of the work.

When connecting required a handset

The 110-baud modem gallery records a Bell System 113A unit made by Western Electric. Bader photographed its case, old four-prong telephone connector, dial mechanism, line buttons, interior circuit board, and labels. The reader can see a machine from the period when computers used communications equipment almost as physical as the telephone itself.

One note observes that there were no Hayes-style AT commands: a person had to dial the phone number manually. Another says the machine did not survive a January 2002 move intact. The museum records damaged and dismantled objects as willingly as pristine ones.

The 300-baud acoustic modem belonged to Bader's father. Bader recalls using it in the early 1980s with a Lear-Siegler ADM-3A terminal. To connect, someone dialed a number and rested a phone handset in the acoustic cups. The gallery includes photographs of the Novation DC-102A2's switches and circuits.

Beyond the telephone equipment, the index points to a Franklin Ace 1200, a Zenith PC, IBM PC AT hardware, an Atari 1040 ST, an Apple Macintosh II, and a Sun SPARCstation IPX. A separate DEC VAX history makes the archive more than a collection of personal computers; it reaches back to institutional computing systems and their operators.

These pages are not formal conservation records, and the captions should not be mistaken for a complete manufacturer's service manual. Their value is more intimate. They record exactly what Bader had, how he remembered using it, and what he thought a future visitor would want to see.

The Internet brought much of this equipment's era to an end. Its surviving photographs now explain how that earlier Internet was reached.

Explore the modem photographs and hardware index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.