Hey you kids, get off my FidoNet!
re: 3
56K?! Luxury!
[You can take the rest of the Monty Python 'Yorkshiremen' sketch as read ...]
It was never the same after someone actually had to write down the Jargon file.
6: Yeah, and it was *unlimited* 56K, too, none of this "pay by the minute" bollocks.
I just wanted the modem sound, but was too lazy to look for something less baudy.
I don't recall the exact technology, but at one point at home I had a VT240-type terminal connected to a Univac 1100 series mainframe via a 1200 (I think, maybe 2400) baud modem. Check batch job results and submit new ones from home using the fabulous Exec 8 operating system! Hot stuff!
9: Do you not even have a modem of self-respect?
[You can take the rest of the Monty Python 'Yorkshiremen' sketch as read ...]
Yorkshiremen? Take as read? Holy shit! Back in the day, when we used to connect with our 300 baud modems (at actual speeds like 160) to places where we had to pay by the hour to be online just so that we could discover, while typing on our 40-column all-uppercase screens that we were talking to OLD PEOPLE that had (no, wait for it, wait...) never heard of Monty Python which then forced us to TYPE OUT, at 300 160 baud, entire sketches on our 40-column all-uppercase displays just so those old programmer greybeard dudes would get the joke, and then (wait... wait...) they didn't think it was very funny.
The sick part of the above is that it's ACTUALLY TRUE.
max
['Twink√√le, twin√√kle, little st}|~Ʀ¥¼79NO CARRIER
12: Did you use a modem as shown on the right side of the pictures? I tossed mine a few years ago. I think it cost around $1K back then.
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/couplers.html
300 baud was torture.
I am almost embarrassed to admit that I still have a 300 baud modem. It is the only thing that works with my Osborne.
(Why I keep this old unused equipment is another matter.)
{Ben, used the No Carrier joke on the previous mouseover.}
You guys give me the gigagiggles.
This is the sort of thing that leads to unruly games of Trade Wars breaking out, after which point we'll all be deposited on ice floes and left to die.
after which point we'll all be deposited on ice floes and left to die.
xyzzy
11: No. Loss of self-respect is part of the post-modem condition.
12: Did you use a modem as shown on the right side of the pictures? I tossed mine a few years ago. I think it cost around $1K back then. 300 baud was torture.
No. Wouldn't have been able to afford. I had a Hayes (I think) that was reboxed by Atari. And it was like all modern and stuff and didn't need a coupler. Of course, by that point, anybody who could afford to do so had 1200. And then a little later I got an actual 1200, which did me no good because Compu$ucks was charging 12$/hour for 1200 service. So I got by with 300.
I am almost embarrassed to admit that I still have a 300 baud modem. It is the only thing that works with my Osborne.
Well, then it can hang out with my SuperXT. With which I should post here some time.
{Ben, used the No Carrier joke on the previous mouseover.}
Ja, but not know√√ing any bett√√er, he forgot the√√ the very special line-noise blips generated on non-error-correcting modems. Thes√√e kids.
This is the sort of thing that leads to unruly games of Trade Wars breaking out
{raised eyebrows} Trade wars? {loud, stilted theatrical voice} What's that?
max
['The problem with the The Shockwave Rider in the mid-80's was that it was pedestrian at that point...']
22: Right, everything is so 8P8C these days.
23: ooh, Hayes, who's big time.
Who are the AppleCat users among us, that's what I want to know.
{Ben used the No Carrier joke on the previous mouseover.}
How pleased I am that someone noticed!
Though it could have been Becks, you know.
This thread makes me feel so spring, sprung.
This thread makes me feel so young.
Me too. Although I think we've had more or less this same thread before.
Me too. Although I think we've had more or less this same thread before.
We've always already had more or less this same thread before, Mr. Filo.
31: you start to repeat yourself when you get old.
Didn't the ricochet modem use repeaters or something like that? A friend of mine had one. In 1998 he could get wireless in a few select urban areas.
Ricochet worked within 50 feet of about three telephone poles, nationally.
Yeah, but those were the coolest 50 feet radii EVAR!
31: you start to repeat yourself when you get old.
I repeat myself when under stress.
I try not to rank radii that way. They're each unique, special measures of the distance from the center of a round snowflake to its perimeter, and I love every single one of them.
37: Goddammit, Ben. Stop stealing my glancing thoughts.
I don't get any of these fucking jokes.
40: There's a dedicated blog for that issue, 'smasher. Don't play the nube card when yours has long since expired.
Which is to say, I came here looking for jokes about fucking, and I'm not getting any.
Be the change you wish to see in the blog, 'smasher.
There's plenty of fucking jokes about, amigo.
Jokes? We don't need no fucking jokes.
So does anyone know what this post is about?
Would this post be about the post spackerman made laughing at the reporter's prodding spackerman for info about the AB blog?
And also, old people talking about increasingly obscure technical equipment of now lost decades?
This thread makes me feel so young. Me too. Although I think we've had more or less this same thread before.
And let this be a lesson to you, young teo! There you are, all early 20's and the world is your oyster, and then a few years later... BOOM. What happened? Now you're old and the early twenties people look at you like you're some kind of idiot, babbling on about the brevity of life and the shortness of fads, instead of being a normal person with a normal god-given health and lifepan (which is like huge, and really long, nay, nigh-infinitie).
So enjoy it will it lasts, because the two minute warning sounded the day you were born.
max
['BLAM.']
Max, damn you make me laugh. I'm glad you're around.
My first modem was stolen from a nearby university with whom my alma mater has an intense rivalry and my first chair obtained purely for keeping at the desk on which my computer lived was stolen from my alma mater. Expensive toys are free when taken from those with large endowments.
Yes, I'm just leaving that low-hanging fruit right there.
Tandy! Tandy 100s with acoustic couplers, used for dialling into the Tokyo number from the London office, just to prove I could; later spending ~ $500 on a modem in Boston that would do *2400* baud and smuggling it back into the UK because I couldn't afford the duty and it was in any case illegal in those days to plug it into the BT phone network.
So why did it take 20 years to reinvent the Tandy and call it a netbook?
My first modem was a 300 baud one, I think. Although at the time I had it, it was already massively out-dated -- I think that the standard was 2400 by that point. I picked it up -- the 300 baud one -- for free just to try one.
My first real job after leaving school and dropping out of uni was for one of the earliest UK ISPs, so I was a fairly early adopter.
My first e-mail address was at the first commercial ISP! They did a shitty job, too.
I love that 2400 baud modems were forbidden by BT. All those bits, straining the system!
When I got my first email address, about 500 people on campus had actual email addresses that could be logged into and checked, but all university employees had fairly generic email addresses, auto-generated, listed in the phonebook. At that time, if one emailed a university employee at that address then it would print out in the basement of University Mail and then delivered to them via normal campus post.
When I got my email address - one of the kind that was a real Unix account that I could use to run elm - I spent ten minutes making the nice lady in some office somewhere assure me it wouldn't cost anything.