As someone who has been fascinated with vintage telecommunications equipment for quite some time, as I was born well after they had long gone out of favour, I always wondered how it was done, since the original numbers mostly go to talk lines now. I have built an electronic registration server for vintage software that came out in the 1990s, a replacement for the originals. Currently, symantec, central point and quarterdeck are supported, with powerquest, datastorm, adobe, microsoft and delrina coming soon. If you have a real dial up modem and some software, you can replace the original toll free number with mine, which is +18006879579. This number only works for symantec software, I haven't yet assigned a number to quarterdeck software yet.
If you would prefer not to use a real modem, you can also use a virtual modem, such as tcpser. Point the address at modemreg.australiaeast.cloudapp.azure.com port 2324 for symantec or 2424 for quarterdeck. As you can see, it goes to my virtual machine in azure.
What should be mentioned is that, you obviously don't have to send your real information, but any information that you send is discarded and deleted immediately in case someone does. No information sent is logged at all. I am well aware that we live in a world where the government wants to spy on us and I am also well aware that many of you will not feel comfortable sending information to my server.
Thanks to flexnsniff of 2600.network for using my number as a dedicated number to connect to his network and bridge the connection between real modems and my server.
submitted by /u/Ok_Bear_1980 [link] [comments]