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>An important warning before we continue: from the telephone company side the line pair carries voltage used to power the phone and ringer, so never plug this cable into a wall jack — doing so could potentially send up to 48 volts to the computer, with likely undesirable and even fiery results. A cable like this should only ever be directly connected to another modem.

I tried this exact thing way back in 1985 or 1986. I wanted to use the C64's sound chip as a modem. I also had a PLL chip to decode received tones.

I was a teenager at the time and I didn't realize the voltage on the phone line was so high, so yeah, I fried my C64 pretty quickly. That was the end of that experiment.

I did eventually make a 300 baud modem using speaker coupling to a telephone handset, but I had to save up to buy a new C64 first.






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