A weird idea I had

[blanning]

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?

[vince_6]

Not like this but sometimes I dial up to a friend and we play some games :-)
I love the old modems, I have a bag full from 2400 to 56k.

[b0ris747]

Interested if such solution exists!

[Iggy]

Interested if such solution exists!

Somewhere around here I have two external 56K modems that can be used in tandem.
But explain to me why you would want to use a modem instead of a network connection, into pain?

[_ThEcRoW]

Nice idea. You can go to http://www.projectmf.org and see the system it is running on. You can even play with blue box calls.

[Ral-Clan]

Such devices exist.  On a recent episode of the Retrocomputing Roundtable podcast they discussed a device you could buy on eBay for about 30 dollars that would simulate a phone system/network.

It was originally sold for offices and businesses that wanted to set up an internal phone system.  It provides power to the phones, generates a dial tone, phone numbers for each phone on the system, etc.

It's like a mini-telephone switching system.

Sorry, I don't remember what the device was called. Have a look on the podcast's website for a mention of it (or listen to the podcast's "ebay" feature).

With this device, you could take two computers with telephone modems in the same house and have them call each other.

EDIT: I found the device.  It's called an "Open House H650 Integrated Voice Network"

http://www.ebay.com/itm/380660700507