Maybe it's an exercise in masochism. But I was thinking about the old days when I had a 500 and a 2400 baud modem dialing into various BBSs and downloading things at excruciatingly slow speeds. A friend of mine had a USRobotics 9600 baud modem, the big brown one that went under the phone. I always liked the look of those modems. Anyway...
I was wondering what it would take to simulate an entire phone system. I'm thinking an older PC running something like Asterisk. Coming into the back of the machine would be some number of RJ-11 connectors. From that I could run RJ-11 phone wire to various machines which would have real modems and a cool retro phone sitting on top.
I would want to be able to actually get a dial tone. Maybe assign different phone numbers to each phone in the room. Then run BBS software on other machines having the computers call each other.
I know there are BBS systems that work over IP and ethernet now. But they would lack the nostalgia and feel of real modems.
Has anyone done this before?
