17 Jul
2004
17 Jul
'04
11:21 a.m.
On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 11:50:44 -0400
"Richard A. Cini" <rcini(a)optonline.net> wrote:
Hello, all:
I was at VCFe yesterday and I have to say that the speakers and
demonstrations were great. Sellam did a fantastic job and where the
event was located at the Sun facilities worked out perfectly. One demo
that I missed was the ARPANET dial-up simulation which wasn't there
when I left at 3:30.
Anyway, this demo brings-up an interesting question. What kind
of dial-up
systems existed in the 70's before consumer-oriented services like
CompuServe? I remember the DowJones and CompuServe sign-up packs at
RadioShack in maybe 1979 (I joined CIS in 1988. I even remember my ID:
70153,3367). I also remember in high school (around 1983) using a
DECwriter to dial into the timesharing computer (at 300 baud; I don't
know the host system) at one of the local universities.
Just curious. Thanks.
Rich
When I started BBSing in the mid 80's I started out on a massive
DECwriter, a wide carriage printing terminal at 300 baud. I connected
it to an acoustic coupler, dialing out by hand on a regular telephone.
It was highly annoying that this was already the time when most people
had switched to 'glass TTY' CRT displays of one sort or another, and
sysops assumed anybody connecting had such hardware. It consumed feet
of wasted paper to get through the fancy 'welcome' screens on many
BBSes.
Within a few years, I was proud 'sysop' of my own BBS, running WWIV
3.21d (distributed only as Turbo Pascal 3.0 source code) on a non-turbo
XT clone with all 640K and a five meg hard drive. There were still
people then running C-Net boards on Commodore 64s with one or two floppy
drives as the only storage. My board was 1200 baud for the longest time
because it wasn't a 'file transfer' BBS, and most people couldn't read
text messages faster than 1200 baud anyways (and I was cheap). There
were times when I experimented with the hardware, i.e. the time I ran
the whole system out of a combination of RAM disk and only floppy disk
drives, which slowed the system up even more.
In that era, there was readily available CompuSERV dialup.
Lower-bandwidth connect time was only $6 an hour, not the regular
$12/hour you paid to dial in through the high speed (1200 baud) modem
pool. Near as I could tell, the only people 'hanging out' on CompuSERV
were people whose companies paid the connect time bill.
But I am talking about much later than the era of the 70's being asked
about. Back in the 70's all I connected to were big University time
sharing systems, and the MERITS system when in High School. 300 baud
was the 'fast' terminal we all vied for. Normally one got stuck on the
110 baud teletype in upper case only.