1964 Antique MODEM Live Demo - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

3 Jun 2009

Jim Battle <frustum at pacbell.net> wrote:
...
  Golan Klinger wrote:
  Disclaimer: I wouldn't normally post this
sort of thing but I'm
 confident it will be of interest to more than a few on this list.

 "1964 Antique MODEM Live Demo"
 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9dpXHnJXaE> 
 Something weird there -- at 6:20 or so, he has a URL on the   screen.  It
...
  looks to me like "http://ww.wikipedia.org". 
And it connects.  But   it is
...
  "ww" not "www".  There is no
reason for him to go and fake it, but it
 bugs me nevertheless. 
Maybe the missing "w" was mangled by line noise.

In this session, echoing is done by the remote system (that is why
we don't see the passwords), so it is possible that he typed the
"w", but the echo had a parity error and was dropped by the terminal
emulator.

Remember these modems do not do any error correction, so any line noise
results in mangled characters. Nevertheless, line noise usu results in
strings of mangled characters, but 300 baud may be slow enough that
only one was damaged.

BTW 300 baud? Isn't 1964 a bit early for 300 baud?

**vp