My brother had an acoustic coupled 300 baud modem for his C64, but that stuff was off limits to me. My first was a 2400 baud on ISA card, I bought for the family IBM XT Clone when I was maybe 13, I came up with the money with a hustle. I bought an old lionel train set at a garage sale with $20, sold it to a train shop for $100 (they probably screwed me over). It was my first pc component install, I remember setting the dip switches for the IRQ channel.