7 Aug
2008
7 Aug
'08
2:50 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Keith M once stated:
I started out at 300bps too. I didn't have a modem at home, but someone
had donated an Atari 600XL (with diskdrive and modem) to my high school, and
I used that nearly every day to call BBSes with. It was only after I
graduated (1987) that I got a 300bps modem of my own (the internal one for
the IBM PCjr).
I remember my friend upgrading his BBS to 1200 and above, so to call his
BBS, I had to dial into my college, and then use one of the outgoing 1200
modems to call him. Luckily, everything was local.
I did upgrade to 1200 and found that I could comfortably read at that rate
(300 was a tad too slow for my tastes). 2400 was a bit too fast.
Around 1994 or 95, another friend of mine started a web design/web hosting
company. We had a colocated server at a local ISP, and our office (his
dining room) was connected via a 28.8k modem. Fun times indeed.
Let's see, over the years, I've done 300, 1200, 2400, 14.4k, 28.8k, ISDN
(before HellSouth changed the pricing structure, and at the time I had 32
static IP addresses---woo hoo!), DSL and cable. My boss and I (still the
same) even talked about a wireless shot to the office (20 miles south of
where we live) but nothing ever came of it.
Pitty.
-spc (And for the most part, have never had to pay for Internet access---
perk for working in the industry)
On Thu, Aug 07,
2008 at 10:48:26AM -0500, Jules Richardson wrote:
I didn't miss the 300 baud era. I remember my first modem was a "direct
connect" 300bps model sold by radio shack. It had an "answer or
originate" switch, along with a big red button that said "Connect."
Push the button, carrier was activated. No Hayes command set, no ATDT,
no autodialing, nothing. You needed to dial manually, listen for
carrier, push the button, and hang up. I used a 4th-hand pulse phone,
because that's all my parents had to give me. Sridhar Ayengar 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. but dial-up sucks.
Surely it fits better
with vintage computer collecting? I'm surprised
that any of us are on broadband... ;)
Thankfully I missed the 300 baud (and earlier) era