Connecting to The Internet at 300 baud? No problem!

I remember my first time on AOL in the early 90s. I think the modem on the computer was 2400 baud, and I’m pretty sure I was amazed that I could read headlines from the New York Times after waiting just a minute or two. Hey, I had 5 free hours! If I couldn’t download a few stories in that time, I could use the password on the 3 other floppy discs they sent me a week.

In college I messed around the local Freenet with a slow modem and realized that text-only Internet ran pretty quick on a good-old 14400 modem. I think I even downloaded a few news clips from the BBC and VOA on that thing by letting it sit an hour or so. I think I dealt with a connection at 1200 before, which was crawling but able to run old-fashioned talkers without issue.

But I never got around to trying 300 baud, and all of the modems I tried were much more advanced than this one. Check out this video of someone playing with a 300 baud, wood-encased modem from the mid 60s — and successfully reading a Wikipedia page as a result.

For some perspective, it would take about one full day to download a 3 1/2 minute song from ITunes on this modem.