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quote:
Originally posted by CacheCows:
You young whippersnappers! Why, when I was your age we had to hand carry each bit from our house to the Internet by hand, through 37″ of snow, in our bear feet, and were happy to do so, huh!I remember that.. I used a bit bucket to carry the data. Then we got our 300 baud acoustic modem. Were we living high! I loved watching the little lights on it.
tbquote:
Originally posted by Trudy & the beast:
I remember that.. I used a bit bucket to carry the data…Everyone here is staring at me wondering why I suddenly snorted coffee all over my monitor. Thanks a lot! 😛
quote:
Originally posted by Cheesehead Dave:
Everyone here is staring at me wondering why I suddenly snorted coffee all over my monitor. Thanks a lot! 😛Oh, please don’t encourage him.
TrudySeeing as the topic has turned to reminising, someplace in my basement is my 300 baud modem for my old VIC-20. I had friends at Wisconsin Bell and they got me a Bell phone with attached modem. 1200 baud! Back then we were all excited about the prospects of 9600 coming out. But even before all of this, some of us were already communicating digitally over the airways. I had a basement full of old Teletype machines. Those were the typewriters you heard kechunking in the backround on the old TV news broadcasts. Lots of early movies showed them getting messages from news services. We used these over the radio waves with the earliest forms of modems, which is a contraction for MOdulate DEModulate. Most of these were home-made from plans in the Ham Radio magazines. All this old stuff was a five bit per character device which only gave you upper case and a few symbols. Then along came the Teletype Model 33 which was the first ASCII machine. It was eight bit and could send both cases and all sorts of other characters. About this time the Apple Boys got the green machine on the market and all the mechanical thrashing around was forever doomed. But before the internet, we had bulletin boards that you could access over the airwaves. The trouble was that all these machines used rolls of paper rather than a video display. Sometimes a mischevious person would send a long string of carriage returns, emptying the spools of paper any Ham monitoring the frequency would have.
Everyone has heard the term bandwidth, but it started in radio as the frequencies we could use were in ”bands” That is, segments of the radio spectrum that are harmonics of each other, more or less. Bandwidth became important because the faster the speed of communication, the wider the signal or more bandwidth it hogs up. The morse code is a slow but effective means of communication and uses very little bandwidth. You can stuff a whold bunch of morse code signal in a small bandwidth. Video, as in television channels, gobble up tremendous chunks of bandwidth.
If this were a virtual cache, to log it you have to tell the significance of RYRYRYRY and *U*U*U*U*U*U.
Steve Bukosky
WaukeshaWow, lots of interest in this topic. Overall, I’m very happy with Roadrunner.
And to throw in my historical story, I’m a charter member of AOL (since 1989) and still have the minimum account. Before AOL I was a member of ExecPC when it was still a BBS.
Interesting stuff about your early ham radio days, Steve. You may be interested in some history research and writing I did 20 years ago for Collins Radio. See an excerpt here: http://www.wa3key.com/aacbio.html
[This message has been edited by kbraband (edited 02-06-2003).]
quote:
Originally posted by kbraband:
Before AOL I was a member of ExecPC when it was still a BBS.I ran a 2 node BBS in Neenah for over 5 years! Got wiped out by the InterNet a couple of years ago. FidoNet was the big thing
Ken, I remember execpc when it was just a BBS. A co-worker of mine at Ameritech was the account rep for execpc. He recalled going into the basement of the house where the BBS was run, and seeing dozens of PCs out of cases all on shelves, each with a modem and a phone line running to it. When Execpc first tried the Internet, I was a beta tester. You still dialed into the BBS, then there was a text interface to send email and a text web browser.
As yourself, I too was a charter AOL user (1985), back when it was Quantum Computers and ran only on Commodore 64 computers and was called ‘Q-Link’. The service was only available from 6PM till dawn, at which time the programmers came into their offices and fixed the problems discovered during the night! A year later they offered ‘Apple Link’ which ran on Apple IIs. It was the fall of the next year I believe that Quantum changed the name of the product to ‘America Online’.
Steve, my first terminal as a kid was a TTY model 31. It was a baudot tape printer (didn’t print on paper, it printed on the paper tape, you had to read one VERY long sentence). Next I had a TTY 33 and thought I was set for life, it printed on paper! In my life I also had a prototype of the rare TTY43, and the full family of dataspeed 40s (CRT, 80 & 132 char line printers). I also ran Compuserve, GEnie, and The Source on all but the TTY31. Ah, those were the days!
I remember once I got tired of saving the programs I was writing onto papertape, so I hooked a tape recorder to the modem to record the sounds, and then just listed my program to the modem. When I wanted to reload, I just played the tape back. WOW, 110 baud casette tape storage But it beat paper tape!
TTY31:
TTY43:
[This message has been edited by CacheCows (edited 02-06-2003).]
I used Q-Link back in grade school! It was great! If you wanted to play checkers, you popped in the q-link checkers 5 1/4″ floppy, waited a few minutes, and then the board poped onto the screen. I think you had to match up with another player before loading the games, but I can’t remember.
They had many modern features on Q-LInk, including chat, message boards, real-time games, downloads, etc. All of this on a commodore 64.
I always thought it would be really cool if someone could set up a q-link server, and also re-distribute the Q-link software. Heck, you can pick up a C64 and drive for about 15 bucks
I’ve got a couple of questions; one specifically for alan…
I’m on a dial-up with elknet and would like faster d/l speeds (getting about 52kbps)…
is the ISDN that elknet offers a residential dsl or something else? What kind of d/l speeds can I expect with the 128kbps ISDN line? I have a dedicated phone line for the computer so don’t think that I would need any TA work done. I have satellite TV but don’t want to go that route for the computer and since I have that; the cable modem isn’t an option. For THRAXMAN..Joe does SBC service the elkhorn area and if so what kind of price would I be looking at for a 128kbps dsl hook-up. I only live about 300 feet from elknet and I think thats why I’m getting 52kbps on my dial-up and I get good service from them, but would like to check out all my options.Thanks
LARRYHi Larry,
ISDN is not a DSL service. Its a telephone service. Normal telephone service is analog… stick a speaker anywhere on the line between your home and the telephone company and you would hear the conversation. ISDN is a digital telephone service… listen in on an ISDN line and all you would hear is hissing.
Regular telephone service is made for one thing; talking over. Modems try to make a telephone line do something it was never designed/meant to do; send data. And therein lies the problem; making something do a task it was never meant to do.
ISDN on the other hand was designed to send data. In fact, when you send voice over ISDN (say, calling in a pizza order), it converts your voice inside the ISDN telephone set to data before it ever leaves your house. Then before it gets to the destination (the pizza parlor), the telephone company changes it from data back into sounds.
Since ISDN was designed for data, it can connect your computer(s) to the Internet without fail. No noise, no disconnects, no changing speed. ISDN comes in two sizes; 1 ‘B’ channel or 2. A ‘B’ channel is the data channel that your call goes over, weither it be a voice call or a data call. A ‘B’ channel is 64kbps in size, always, without variation. So if you connect to the Internet with a ‘B’ channel on your ISDN line, it will always be 64kbps, both up and down. If you take the 2 ‘B’ channel size, then your connection will always be 128kbps (2 * 64kbps), everytime, up and down, without variation.
Note that the ISDN of course only exists between your home and the telephone company. Once you are out on the Internet itself, your actual download and upload speeds will be impacted by traffic on the net itself, remote server loads, etc.
Also note that if you go with the 2 ‘B’ channel size, each channel comes with its own telephone number, so you end up getting two ‘lines’ on the same ISDN line. Say you choose to make the first channel your Internet channel, and the second you want to also use for voice calls or a fax. You connect to the Internet at 128kbps. While using the net, you want to make a voice call, or a voice call comes in to your home. You pick up the phone, and the ISDN telephone set drops the second ‘B’ channel that connected to the Internet, reducing your speed to 64kbps. Once you finish your call, you hang up the phone, and the ISDN telephone set automatically puts the second channel back up to the Internet, bringing your speed back to 128kbps.
Latsly, note that while I’m using the term ‘ISDN telephone set’ for familierity, its actually called a Terminal Adapter, or TA.
Hope this helps
Thanks Alan, that really did clear it up for me. Appreciate it. By the way I was reading your post concerning paper tape and a tty 33. Boy does that take me back. I learned how to read paper tape (without the printing) in the navy back in 1973. The fun thing was if you had a reperf that would completely remove the chad from the tape. You could take that chad and use it as confetti!
Thanks again,
LarryI am totally amazed at the depth of experience related by the technogeeks on this board. I thought that having the experience of having once held a 1K magnetic memory core in my hand was unique. Now, that I read where the rest of you guys have been, my experience reading octal code and programing in LINC assembly language is rather humble. I started in the mid-70s as well. Teletype, papertape, punch cards, programs and data on casette tape, I have been there and I really am glad it was short lived.
My first computer was a Sinclair 100 I picked up for $40. My first REAL PC was an XT with 64K of memory and a 40M hard drive. I bought it about two years after release at a cost of about $2000. Times have changed! but it is fun to reminisce.
tbquote:
Originally posted by Trudy & the beast:
My first computer was a Sinclair 100 I picked up for $40. My first REAL PC was an XT with 64K of memory and a 40M hard drive.I remember these days. And now the chips in some of my kids’ toys are probably more powerful than that, or my first computer, a TI-99/4A. I wonder whatever happened to that…?
My brother has eight years on me and was an engineering student at Marquette U. He took me to the computer lab once and I was amazed at all the punch cards and tape. I brought back a big tape reel and that hung on my wall as art for years. Wish I had it now. Might be worth something on eBay.
Steve Bukosky
WaukeshaI can relate Trudy…I remember when we went from octal to hex in the navy and thought we were living the good life. Then when we went from old analog 1200baud modems all the way up to 9600baud digital jobs, I knew I was on the cutting edge. A 3 year old kid with an x-box has more computing power than we had in any system in the navy in the early 70’s. It is mind boggling.
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