dial-up experiences (was Re: question aaout ISP's)

On Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 10:48:26AM -0500, Jules Richardson wrote: I didn't - my first modem experiences were with acoustic couplers and DECwriters in the educational environment (we didn't have one at my school, but I had access to one at the university down the block from where I grew up), and with a VIC Modem c. 1982. I got on CompuServe (until my parents balked at the mounting costs), and local BBSes. Up until I was a beta-tester for the C-64 VidTex client (for guys that became my co-workers 20 years later), I used my own, heavily- tweaked, terminal emulator program on a C-64 (first BASIC, then BASIC/machine-language hybrid). I didn't get a 2400 baud modem until the late 1980s - right before that, I was using non-Hayes 1200 baud modems (Cermetek and Ventel) with real VT100s for dialling into work and "computer aided instruction" classes at that same university down the street. I finally upgraded when several events coincided - I got a 20MB hard disk on my Amiga (ST-225 w/ISA controller and "The Wedge" ISA adapter), I got UUCP working on that Amiga, and Goldstar came out with a $99 2400 baud modem. That rig racked up many, many hours of UUCP time to a friend down the street who eventually founded an ISP. To tie it into another recent thread, he was part of a local UNIX club where everyone was running 386s and Interactive UNIX (I still have my diskettes and manuals; picked up at Weird Stuff Warehouse on a trip to the Bay Area). Once Supra came out with a sub-$300 19.2K modem, I upgraded the old Goldstar, but it was a long, long time until I went to 33.6K, so long that I think the prices for an external modem were down to around $50. I needed it because they hadn't run cable out to my farm, and the telco routing was so sub-optimal that it was well under the max distance for DSL as the crow flies, but 2x-3x as the cables ran. The analog lines were so long that 56K wasn't even close to an option. As it was, I couldn't connect reliably over 28.8K. That was about 10 years ago, and since then, cable (and cable modems) have penetrated to the edges of town. Much more satisfactory. I don't know that I've ever owned a 56K modem - I made the transition to broadband (back in town) so early that I just kinda skipped that era. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 7-Aug-2008 at 19:40 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -48.1 F (-44.5 C) Windchill -92.7 F (-69.3 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 28.6 kts Grid 5 Barometer 681.4 mb (10575 ft) Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html