First Contact

A barbecue on the Rhine embankment

I was a member of the AUGL, the Amiga User Group Liechtenstein. They had put on a small barbecue on the Rhine embankment, where the Amiga crowd met up. We talked about hardware, software and whatever everyone had been up to. And a word came up that I had never heard before: DFÜ – the German term for sending data down a phone line.

I listened closely to what you could do with it and what it was good for. After all the stories and explanations, one of the group offered to lend me his modem – a Supra 2400, for a week.

My first phone installation

I rode over to his place on my moped and had him quickly show me how it worked. Back home I plugged the modem into the A500 sitting in the living room. Then I looked at the cable: it had to be connected somehow. But the open phone socket had only two wires anyway – so, left and right, no problem. And with that I had completed my first "phone installation".

The first connection

Back to the Amiga. JR-Comm started, dialing into my friend's AUGL mailbox. After the dial, the tension rises, a hiss sounds. Is it connecting? Is it supposed to sound like that? And then, all at once, it goes quiet – and the login screen of the AUGL BBS appears.

A week that stuck

I was, of course, very active that week – to my parents' dismay. The phone line was constantly busy. If anyone wanted to make a call, the receiver hissed, and at the same time my connection collapsed. It was with a heavy heart that I returned the modem after the week.

After a little while, and with some savings, I bought my own modem – the same model. Later came the upgrade to a Courier 9600. And my parents presented me with the phone bill: nearly 200 CHF for that one week. It made a noticeable dent in my savings – but the spark had long since jumped.