On 04/06/2018 12:52 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Thu, 5 Apr 2018 21:28:59 -0400, bitrex
wrote:

I thought about getting a ham license at one point and even as a US
citizen it all just seemed like a huge hassle for not much reward. If
I'd been born in the 50s or 60s I probably would've gotten into it, but
I was born in the dying days of disco instead.

I was born in the late 40's and obtained a ham license when I was
about 13 years old. Sputnik had been launched about 3 years earlier
(1957) and the US went nuts.
https://www.google.com/search?q=sputnik+fever
We were going to beat the Russians in the space race by cranking out
more scientists and engineers. Also, us kids also couldn't help
noticing that the parents were genuinely worried about Russia
attacking with missiles and bombers. So, any kid with even the
slightest technical ability was encouraged to go into some kind of
technical field. So, I got into ham radio.

My junior high school was built around that time and had a small
planetarium, I guess they wanted to get the students of 50s and 60s
thinking about space?

Sadly by the time I was a student there in the early 1990s the
planetarium dome hadn't been used in years and the room converted into a
lecture hall for larger classes, the planetarium projector gizmo either
damaged and no spare parts/too expensive to fix, or just nobody still
there who recalled how to operate it.

A few years later the little dome was torn down and the wing renovated
into the school's computer lab.

Instead of buying a secondhand shortwave radio I bought a secondhand
2400 bps modem. Mom and Dad humored me but thought this whole "computers
talking to each other" thing was just a weird fad, like CB radio. Oh well...

You missed the earlier 110 and 300 baud modems with acoustic couplers.
Nothing worked as expected or consistently. Turn on some music in the
same room, and the error rate would climb.
https://www.google.com/search?q=anderson+jacobson+acoustic+coupler&tbm=is ch
The nice part was that I could use it with a pay phone. Ah,
nostalgia.

The first PC we had in the house was a Leading Edge 386 16MHz probably
purchased around 1990, it came with 1 meg of RAM stock. A "budget" model
but still probably cost them fortune, we were never exactly wealthy
folks and a business-class 486 cost the better part of 10k then.

The secondhand modem I bought looked a lot like this:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71vePa6mXgL._SL1500_.jpg

but I think it was a generic "Hayes Compatible" model not a name brand.

We got a lot of life out of more or less the same rig though; the 386
with an extra meg of RAM and 56k modem from 1996 sometime ran Windows
3.1 fine and served as the household "email server" until they sold the
home circa 2001