modem DAC

[Magnus Danielson]

Hi!

Well... to start off with the first trouble of your dream... an modem
is hardly much of an DAC or an ADC for that matter... it's true that
phone-lines are analog, but the modem does much more then just A/D and
D/A the signal... it will modulate and demodulate it according to
several modulation methods... (1200 baud modems is very simple
modulation wise to a 9600 baud  modem just to not speak of a 28800
baud modem... but and ISDN line is so very much simpler... but that's
next weeks lesson :).

Modern modems migth be friendly to you and allow you to pump audio
over it in the  way you want... but then I think you would be much
cheaper of with a SoundBlaster card and a cheap transformer instead...

It is much simpler to send audio over the PC speaker than over a
modem... but I do agree that doing an *strange* digital modulation of
a signal to achieve an analog audio signal at the other end of the
modem is very wierd and bizzare... 

Sorry if I killed your dream... but keep on dreaming since wierd
things have been achieved about this line of the road... you can
*still* do usefull stuff with a 8088 if you just keep away from crap
software and use innovative software and hardware solutions...

BTW. How many of you out there knows what the 8089 is?
It's an IO processor comanion to the 8086/8087/8088 suite... it is
*VERY* sad it never showed up in the IBM PC... things *would* have
looked diffrent nowdays... the 8089 had it's own assembler... or why
not the 80130 which had a lot of OS support in silicon... a truly
wierd and inovative chip for it's time... another companion to the
8086 chips.

Cheers,
Magnus