Hi. I was wondering if there was such a thing, as I have a spare PCI modem card.

Can I plug my phone line in and use it to dial out and receive calls?

Can I then use say, my Xbox 360 headset (or any headset / microphone) as an input device, with the speakers being my output to talk??

I'm sure there is still telephony software out there, but the last time I saw any it was for Mac OS 7.

The only thing I can think of is Asterisk, but it's deigned as an enterprise PBX and might be a pain to configure.

What a coincidence. I have a 1997 Power PC 5500 with OS 7 next to me.

What software was it?

I think it was called ApplePhone. It could act as an answering machine, but it didn't have Caller ID and required a Power Mac with a GeoPort Telcom Adapter. It was more like a demo than an actual usable piece of software.

Unfortunately, Telephony never really caught on. Everything went to cell phones and VoIP.

Ah ok. Thanks.

I hate how the phone rings is all, and the speaker / mic is terrible quality. I would rather talk through the mac handsfree. lol.

But yea, cell phones have taken off and replaced them. Steve Jobs you legend

Well, using the PC as a phone won't do much for the sound quality. Ma Bell only used a certain frequency bandwidth for phone communications (I don't recall the exact values), to make long distance transmission easier. As long as you're going through POTS at some point, your sound is getting clipped. Phone services through your cable company or Verizon FiOS basically put the phone system in your house and stream the audio as regular Internet traffic, making the frequency cutoff irrelevant, so the sound only suffers from digital compression like you get on cell phones. (Landlines have also beend oing this as long as the trunk lines have been digital.) The bottlenecks in those cases are your phone handset and the equipment at the other end of the line.