Acoustic coupler? yeah, I almost forgot about those! The box had those big rubber cups that you placed the handset onto.
The next big advance was the dataphone.. remember they were the 'grey' phones that sat beside the black voice phone. You called the number, and when it started beeping, you pulled up one of the off-hook pins to go to 'data mode'.
There was a lot of finger pointing in those days.. when a transmission failed, we blamed the phone lines, and of course, the phone company blamed our equipment. Fun times!
If you like me have older HDs of well under 1gb or worst, 20mb, its time to get rid of them. Yeah, I found some in my closet, I forgot about. Besides using some parts for crafts, those disks make great clocks, I simply tear down for aluminium and such. The best part I believe to keep is the magnets. These babies can hold a calendar quite well or some wrench upon working on a car. There's not alot of good stuff to save and many may simply throw unto the metal pile for the metal recyclers. Of course, if you're handy, re-use the stepper motor control chip for projects as well as any other electronic compents but these are small power items. Further, you'll need some special tools if you don't already to strip any non-alumium metal in order to get best grade. Sometime maybe had doing all this rather pitching onto the junk heap, but those magnets really are good items. Just a thought and in some cases found true faults of why HDs failed.
junkman -----Willy ![]()

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