More recently however I began looking into how dialup internet connections work at a nuts and bolts level, with the idea in mind that I might set up some kind of small dialup ISP for a hobby project. In doing this I had to learn a lot more about PPP than I expected, and I found the material difficult to understand, so I've written what I hope is a much easier and more contextualized explanation.

Having gotten the basic handshake to work, you are probably looking for a next step, and in many cases you probably want it to be "get on the internet."

This article will begin to help with that.

Of course, the idea peters out a little there because, well, we are never quite sure what we intend to do once we have what we "want" in this hobby. We are eternally cats pursuing laser pointers, but, the cat seems to enjoy the pursuit for its own sake, so.

The desire is not hard to understand - you want that scream and howl and hiss of static that says You Are Getting Online, as it did in 1996, 1990 or 1987... or 2007, if you lived in Idaho, but I doubt you're nostalgic for that; my first boyfriend certainly wasn't. But we will suppose you want to be able to replicate this experience. There are a number of reasons to do this:

• To get on the internet, of course.
• To dial in to someone elses old computer, somewhere else
• To get a serial connection between two devices that are inconveniently far apart for a normal serial cable
• Because You Just Damn Want To

I feel you on all these points, but there are problems with getting two modems to talk to each other in the modern era. In this article I will help you overcome them, so that you can dial in to one computer from another, and perhaps get on the internet if you like.