A thoroughly obsolete 1200bps Racal-Vadic thing that didn’t do the Hayes command set. Its command set was sufficiently different to AT that I couldn’t configure my terminal program to control it, so I’d pick up the phone, dial whichever BBS I wanted to call, wait for the beep, push the connect button on the modem’s front panel, and put down the phone.

I think it was sufficiently obsolete that the BBSes I called would have had 9600bps or 14.4kbps modems by then.

Found the manual! https://usermanual.wiki/m/e841e449995c65b1eb3d261c6cec7d97d5b42039de6114e9fed37628782b868a.pdf

Is it terribly hard to get a license in your country?

Here (New Zealand) the exam is multi choice and the questions are all online, and local clubs will run “ham crams” to teach you the material over a weekend, at the end you sit your test. I had enough EE/RF knowledge that I crammed the rest in an evening and then passed the test :)

Also here, you can’t legally sell an “unrestricted two-way radio” like the UV-5R to anyone but a licensed ham, and you can’t import them without a special license (which is stupidly easy to get, you just need to be a ham and ask for one). Not that this stops randoms selling them on FB marketplace as “police scanners.”