[cynwoody]

if you had a modem back in the early days you’d get the screeching too, during the “handshaking” between your PC and the server.

Back in the day, before internet connectivity was everywhere, it was common for credit card terminals to operate over 1200-baud dialup. This remained true even after 56K became the state of the modem art. The reason was, you only need to exchange a few hundred bytes to complete a credit card transaction. At 120 characters per second, you could place the call and complete the transaction before a much faster 56K modem could finish its involved hand-shaking process.

[LouieFisk]

Thanks for that interesting info, I never really thought about such computerized transactions back in the day. From what I understand, a number of ATMs are still running on Windows XP.

My first modem was 300 baud, when I got to using a 56k one I marveled at the blazing speed!