Software & Soundcard Projects
The first softmodem-related announcements were made by Motorola, Intel and other companies, back in 1997, claiming that an ordinary sound card and some CPU power would be enough to emulate the functionality of an actual modem, although "sound card telephone adapters" and related software was never released or at least never caught on.
Reasons for that might have been the lack of standardized and fully functional audio card standards by 1997 (AC'97 was not standardized yet, and most sound cards were partially functioning "Soundblaster clones" which lacked even full duplex capabilities) and the lack of CPU power on entry-level PC's.
The approach of using a standard sound card was used by an experimental open-source 96 kbit/s leased-line softmodem called AuDSL in 1999.
Read more about this topic: Softmodem
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