I know about phone modems, but I wasn't sure how it worked without a microcomputer (as they were called at the time).
Well, think about the old external modems, not the ones that were on a card plugged into the mobo. They were self-contained boxes that plugged into a serial line from the computer on one end and the phone network on the other end. (Or, for real vintage back in the Ma Bell days, an acoustic coupler that plugged into the serial line of a PC on one end and had a spot for your phone handset to sit!) But if you could rig up another device to output the same kind of serial output, it would plug in just fine. And you can get a lot done without a computer - remember that the early arcade games like Pong weren't running on computers, they were dedicated single-purpose electronics. No CPU capable of reading instructions, just logic chips.
I had no idea about the teletype.
Oh, that's a neat corner of history. Not my field of expertise certainly but one of those odd things I'd come across. While Telex didn't use phone lines - at least not at first - it had much of the same basic idea hardware-wise: Dial a number, type, your "typewriter" converts it into something analog that gets sent across the wire, and someone somewhere else sees the output in addition to you. Here's one in use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qv5xw4fsh8&feature=youtu.be&t=97
Or, if you take the modem out, here's a teletype hooked straight to a Mark-8, one of the earliest do-it-yourself minicomputers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzPHdoOU8DQ Add in two modems and a phone network (well, a phone network capable of handling fax/modem data connections - becoming less common these days) and you could have those two parts in different countries.
I know about phone modems, but I wasn't sure how it worked without a microcomputer (as they were called at the time).
Well, think about the old external modems, not the ones that were on a card plugged into the mobo. They were self-contained boxes that plugged into a serial line from the computer on one end and the phone network on the other end. (Or, for real vintage back in the Ma Bell days, an acoustic coupler that plugged into the serial line of a PC on one end and had a spot for your phone handset to sit!) But if you could rig up another device to output the same kind of serial output, it would plug in just fine. And you can get a lot done without a computer - remember that the early arcade games like Pong weren't running on computers, they were dedicated single-purpose electronics. No CPU capable of reading instructions, just logic chips.
I had no idea about the teletype.
Oh, that's a neat corner of history. Not my field of expertise certainly but one of those odd things I'd come across. While Telex didn't use phone lines - at least not at first - it had much of the same basic idea hardware-wise: Dial a number, type, your "typewriter" converts it into something analog that gets sent across the wire, and someone somewhere else sees the output in addition to you. Here's one in use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qv5xw4fsh8&feature=youtu.be&t=97
Or, if you take the modem out, here's a teletype hooked straight to a Mark-8, one of the earliest do-it-yourself minicomputers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzPHdoOU8DQ Add in two modems and a phone network (well, a phone network capable of handling data) and you could have those two parts in different countries.