[Coco] Program Wanted (no more BBS's!!??)

[William Astle]

farna at att.net wrote:
> The only problem I can see is dusting off the modem! I don't have a phone line in my house, and probably won't ever again. Well, it's there, but no phone service. I've got cable internet and already pay for cell phones... who needs a land line? It was cheaper for me to add some minutes rather than to install a phone. I suppose one of the internet phone programs would work, but they are generally designed to work with a microphone. Shouldn't be hard to create a program that will emulate a modem and place the call over a broadband connection -- for a programmer who knows about such tings! 

Actually, that probably wouldn't work very reliably at all. The internet 
phone services are using a pretty aggressive codec to handle the audio. 
That means what goes in at one end doesn't come out the same at the 
other end. While the differences are not large enough to cause 
difficulty for normal speech under most circumstances, very minor 
variations will cause a modem link to fail spectacularly, or at least 
with a whimper. Modems make a pretty wide splatter across the frequency 
range compared to a voice, too, so it needs more bandwidth to encode it. 
I think it would run into bandwidth issues as well.

On the other hand, allowing folks to telnet into it over the internet 
for those like you and me who don't have phone lines would work, I 
think, and would provide a similar experience only faster. I suppose if 
a guy wanted the full experience including the terminal program and 
dialing a modem, a guy could create a program that emulated a modem 
device so you could use your terminal program to operate it. (Now that 
would be an interesting project but I don't have the time or knowledge 
to do it myself.)

-- 
William Astle
finger lost at l-w.ca for further information

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