Ok, I notice that now this website is trying to be like Yelp, where we get to vote on "helpful" reviews. Well, I have over 170 reviews and I think I write darn good reviews! Ok, I know that at this point, 99% of my reviews are from the "old regime" and a lot of my reviews are from the dark ages where we talked about "modem connections" thusly they won't be seen because jillions of other reviews got posted after mine.... But what can I say, I want a "helpful" vote! My login name and my review name used to be different so I have no idea how my reviews appear. EDIT: Ok, I just found one of my reviews. They come under the same as my posting name.
Ahhh yess, I remember when it was a great park if they had a place in the rec room, laundry room oe where ever for a phone line so I could connect to the internet at a screaming 19000 baudor 24000 if I was really lucky.
Thank you! I appreciate it! Aw yes, the 24000 baud rate. Then there was 48,000 and then there was 96000...... I do not miss the screaming sound of modem connections.
In the interests of historical accuracy, drop a zero off of each of those speeds, making them 2400, 4800, and 9600 baud. My first "phone cup" connected modem ran at just 300 baud.
Where I work, some of our 28 year old building automation runs on 9600 baud... to get onto the local devices we use our compaq laptop with windows 95. Mike
Some of us thought 300 baud and thermal printing was pretty fast compared to the 100 baud teletypes we were using. It's all a matter of perspective.
Yep, I used the old 110 baud Model 15, 26 & 33 KSR TTY's too, Joel. Paper tape reader and all. That 300 baud modem was the first one I personally owned though.
I had introduced a 110 baud teletype system into the group I was working for in the early 70's and they thought they had died and gone to heaven because they could submit Fortran programs to a time-shared computer and get their data back nearly instantly instead of submitting a punched card deck and getting their results the next day (if the program ran). Then I found some quiet, nearly silent thermal "teletypes" made by TI, I think and coupled them with a 300 baud modem. I was truly a hero then!
I coded in ALGOL using a TI Silent 700, working from home with the integrated 300 baud modem, having graduated from waiting in line at the card reader.
Well, we've drifted a fair ways away from JJ's plea for votes, so I'll just add "Those were the days!"
Good pickup; I couldn't remember the name. I knew it was something catchy. The "Silent 700" those really were the days!
My 1st puter connected to Prodigy ( before internet in 1990 ) using DOS at 2400 baud. It was HOT back then with 1 meg of ram, 40mb HD and a color monitor. Had a 3.5 inch ??? real FLOPPY drive and a dot printer. I don't remember the name now. drive.
Not to try to outdo anyone, but our first home computer, an Atari 800, had 48kB of RAM and a tape cassette. We added a 177kB 5.25" floppy drive (that's when a floppy disk really was floppy). And we got real excited when we upgraded to a "doubled sided" floppy drive! Our first HD had 10MB and we didn't have one of those "new fangled" 3.5" floppy's for another year or two. My computer at work, circa 1974, was a 19" rack mount device that cost ~$25k and had four 8kB RAM boards with real magnetic core memory (you "kids" will have to read about how that stuff worked). You booted it in the morning by wrapping its "boot tape" around the takeup spindle, setting a few switches and watching how it pulled itself up by its bootstraps into operation--hence the meaning of the term "booting". This worked about half the time; if it didn't you wrapped the tape around the spindle and tried again.
docj, thanks for the memory. I worked for a company in 1973 that had a puter that was as big as a dining room table and it used key punch cards. Probably like the one you described. I often wondered where the term boot up came from.
Those truly were the days. You'd submit your punchcard deck and come back the next day to get your results only to find that you had a keypunch error (not a programming error) on maybe the second or third card and nothing complied as a result. Replace the bad card, re-submit and come back the next day. Repeat process until all cards are correct and then maybe you'll find out if the program would compile.
I had a 300 baud modem, because what we called a "high speed modem", a 1200 baud modem was fairly expensive. The early internet was mainly text so it seemed faster. US News & World Report changed my perception when they put the front cover of one of their issues on the internet on their previous text only site.After a couple hours of attempted download I gave up. My printer had two fonts- for larger type you had to add a go-to line in "basic" code to the program for that segment. "Quick brown fox" was considered a state of the art word processor----make a mistake and you switch into "edit mode" and space back to make your correction. It was pretty nice that you didn't have to use a typewriter eraser! The park I'm in tonight has 10 high speed internet transmission points to make sure all campers have a strong signal on several of them and can download tv shows etc..
I too was an Atari person when everyone else had apples and comodors. When i hooked up that Amdec 1200 baud modem, i was in heaven. I remember typing in games all day from magazines, saving them to cassette, then hoping they would work. I recently hooked it up again and challenged my kids to some Joust! Still fun.
