On Thu, 17 Nov 2011 19:31:31 -0800 (PST), BobR
wrote:

On Nov 17, 7:25*pm, "
wrote:
On Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:31:24 -0800 (PST), BobR
wrote:





On Nov 17, 10:38*am, "
wrote:
On Thu, 17 Nov 2011 05:41:40 -0600, "HeyBub" wrote:
wrote:
On Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:11:41 -0600, "HeyBub"
wrote:

Stormin Mormon wrote:
The earlier decades of the USA, we had fairly close to free
market. I wasn't alive then, but I'm guessing it was better
off than now.

It's a moving target.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, an individual could not OWN a
telephone. Long distance calls were upwards of a dollar a minute and
that was when a dollar was real money. When telephone modems first
came out, they were limited to 27,000bps because not everybody had
hard-wired lines that could support the higher speeds and it
wouldn't be "fair" for city dwellers to have better service than
those who got their POTS via a strand of barbed-wire.

Eventually the government got out of (most of) the telephone
regulation business. Only because of inertia has the government been
slow to react to the internet, but the FCC has bestirred itself with
new rules on "net neutrality" (in the interests of "fairness" for
the unwashed).

Bub, you must be young. The original modems were 300 BPS
As late as the 80s, the standard business modem was 1200 or 2400 BPS
and the 9600 BPS modem was leased line only.

No, the "original" modems were 110bps, or in the case of IBM, 134.5bps.

I wish I was young. An actual federal regulation prohibited modems from
working at the speeds over (if I remember) 56K.

53K bps, due to power levels, thus cross-talk, required for the extra symbols
needed to get to 56K bps.

Even today, most modems operate at 2400 BPS. And there are millions of them.
(Think ATM machines).

Right. *The line negotiations (those buzzes and beeps at the beginning) for
the simpler modems save more line time than the few bits transmitted, cost. *I
would imagine the number of 56K modems in use is quite small.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Damn, you guys are dragging me through times I had long since tried to
forget.

Sorry. *;-)



That doesn't look too sorry to me.

Sorry. ;-) ;-)

The times weren't too bad though.
It was really pretty good times to be on the cutting edge of an
emerging technology. Much more exciting than today with advances
being made at breakneck speed.

Advances are still being made, just not there.

I had an online service company back in the mid 70's that I
used to run order entry inventory and accounting services with. *Had
one client that wanted to run multiple users in different cities over
the communications lines. *I did some of the first experiments with
multiplexing multiple 1200 baud lines over 19.2, and 56k modems using
mini-computers. *Worked pretty well until ma-bell decided to
reconfigure how they billed for their leased lines. *When they went
from point to point billing as the crow flies to point to exchange to
exchange to point billing they killed me. *Communications costs went
up from 500% to 1000% overnight. *Multiplexing helped some but the
costs of the equipment were so high back then that I eventually sold
the software to my customers, helped them setup their own systems and
closed down.

It was a time when the cost of the computers was coming down very fast
while the communications costs skyrocketed. *As a result I was able to
setup my clients with their own systems including the software and
have them break even and in some cases save money within 12 months.
My clients bought all of my equipment and I was able to shut down the
business after 8 years with all my debts on my equipment paid off.
Can't say the same about a lot of other service companies of that time
period.

Adtran in Huntsville, AL made a pile of money in those days, building all
sorts of widgets to combine links. *Evidently there's still money to be made
because they're still at it and have gotten quite big.- Hide quoted text -


The amount of data being transferred was miniscule by today's
standards but even with the advances in bandwidth the amount of data
has still maintained the lead and they will always be playing catchup.

Not so sure about that. At least the best Internet speeds are outstripping
the content (I'm still stuck 768K). OTOH, disk space has outstripped
everything else in the computer. It's past the point where hard disks might
just as well be write-once. I've had a 500MB external (two, including the
backup) for over four years. It's not close to being full (though I'll likely
replace them soon).