[HN Gopher] BBSing at 300 Bits per Second
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BBSing at 300 Bits per Second
Author : zdw
Score : 17 points
Date : 2022-10-02 21:08 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jcs.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (jcs.org)
| metadat wrote:
| What year was 300bps the state of the art? Around 1995-1996 I had
| a 14.4k modem and it was pretty fast at the time.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _What year was 300bps the state of the art?_
|
| Until about 1985. That's when the first 1200 baud consumer-
| available modems like the Commodore 1670 started arriving.
|
| There were others available slightly earlier, but they were
| commercial-grade and prohibitively expensive for most people.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Wikipedia claims 1200bps was available in the 70s.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem I did start with a
| 1200bps modem back in the 80s, even then it was considered
| quite slow but was enough for email reading and basic bbs
| tasks. It sucked for any kind of download though.
| Firehawke wrote:
| I was using 300 baud back in 1986-1987 or so, though 1200 was
| definitely easily available by the late 80s and 2400 was
| cheap by 1991.
| daneel_w wrote:
| It wasn't the state of the art in the early to mid 1980s, but
| that's when they were still popular. The famous Supra Modem
| 2400 arrived on the shelves in the late 1980s. I had a 14k4
| modem in 1994, and a 28k8 one in 1995.
|
| Add.: the 14k4 modem cost me an equivalent of about $350 in
| 1994.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| I was about to ask how much they cost but you'd already
| edited your post.
|
| I remember hitting 48.8/56k in ~1996 after I got a modem for
| Christmas (aged 5).
|
| Now I'm on 1000/50mbit, or ~17.5 thousand times faster than
| my first connection if my math is correct.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Don't know about state of the art, but in the early 80s, 300
| bps was the economical choice, relatively speaking, for home
| users. 1200 bps were around but were a good deal less
| affordable and in quite a bit of the country, less reliable due
| to the general state of signal quality on the phone network at
| the time.
| aninteger wrote:
| Consider yourself lucky. I had a 2400 bps modem in 1995, my
| first year on the internet. The ISP recommended 9600 bps but
| everything seemed ok for 14 year old me. IRC was fine and most
| websites didn't have too many pictures.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Interesting that the terminal appears to have at least an 80
| character buffer, as it is able to print after an LF and while
| performing a CR.
|
| My first modem was 300 baud and while it was painfully slow, text
| interfaces of the era tended to be very efficient. File transfers
| of high resolution images is where it tended to get very painful,
| especially since watching the block count increase (if even that)
| wasn't anywhere near as engaging as actually navigating through
| menus and reading information.
| kcplate wrote:
| Reminds me a bit of a HP mainframe I was an operator on in the
| mid 80s. We had essentially a paper/typewriter style terminal so
| that it would record all input and output direct to continuous
| paper that would be saved for auditing if needed.
|
| Type a command, read your book until you heard it print a
| response, go read the response and do the next step. Repeat.
| [deleted]
| sf97ahgf wrote:
| Thank goodness we moved on to broadband.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| There were some short lived quirky technologies at the end of
| the dial up era, such as using multiple 56k modems bonded into
| a single connection, the increase throughput. Since this
| required two telephone lines on both ends, in addition to four
| modems, only the most data hungry went to that degree of
| effort. Most simply got broadband when it was offered.
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