RJ11 clips into the back. There was a time when you had to plug in a handset but it was gone by the mid 80s, as a direct connection to the wall allowed for higher speeds than a hand fitted coupler could.
I couldn’t find a picture, but my 2400 baud modern was a Prometheus, it was tan and had a slightly upward facing face. Designed for your phone to sit on top of it.
As far as I'm concerned, the downfall of little blinking lights on the hardware that showed you the status of what's inside, was the beginning of the making-shitty of the entire internet and computing world.
I started with an 1200 baud Commodore 1680, then upgraded to a SupraModem through a BBS sponsor program. USRobotics pioneered these, but other manufacturers followed suit on. Basically, if you ran a BBS and displayed a banner ad for the modem, you could buy it (the modem) at a pretty reasonable discount.
It worked really well for years, especially after the initial ROM upgrade (which came supplied not as a flashable update you could download, but as ROM chips that you had to physically swap out).
Supra, like USR, supplied upgrades as well, in the form of a motherboard swap.
I did always want a USR Courier; there was something to the big, black, red LED-lit badassery that was appealing to my teenage self, but the Supra had a little green matrix that told you the status of the session, which was really nice.
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