On Sat, 04 Dec 2004 00:07:42 +0000, Robert Bonomi wrote:
In article ,
Dave Hinz wrote:
On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 10:50:35 -0600, Swingman wrote:
I clearly remember when I hit the big time with a US Robotics
9600, along with 4 MB of memory in the box.
Always wanted one of those. White plastic case, wasn't it?
Nope. The white-plastic case was the 'sportster' -- came along later.
Yeah, that was it.
The USR Smartmodem 9600 was in the same aluminum case, with the black
band front and rear, as the Smartmodem/Smartmodem 1200/Smartmodem 2400 line.
Heh. On my desk right now (OK, I cheated and went and got it) is a Hayes
"V-series ULTRA Smartmodem 9600" (V.32). That lovely aluminum extrusion
and all. I wonder if USR came out of Hayes? I don't remember that
history.
But the really desirable one was the 'Courier' line. black case, slanted
edges on the front 3 sides. and *expensive* On the other hand, they got
you circa 14kbps, when most of the rest of the world was having trouble
getting above 2400.
We've got 3 of those in the lab here too (just checked). We need to have
a cleanup day, I think.
First was the 'Courier HST', then, _as_ the standards
developed, they added 9600, and then 14,400 support. Then there was an ISDN
model, and finally the "V.everything".
That's the 3 we have, V.everything.
The true top-of-the-line, however, were the Telebit "TrailBlazer" products.
_started_ with 19.2K throughput, and worked over nearly _any_ kind of a phone
line. trans-oceanic, satellite bounce, whatever. durn near _nothing_ would
cause those units trouble. Of course, they were *expensive* -- circa $700
each, and frequently had more processing power internally in the modem than
the computer they were connected to. (The Trailblazers had an internal
Motorola 68030 processor, playing like a DSP.)
Sweet. I started out on the 6809, so I've always liked the 60xx(x) families.
But,
anything faster than 2400 baud is wasted anyway, because that's as fast
as you can read text.
You can read in excess of _two_thousand_ words a minute?
I think your math is off. Hang on. OK, 2400 baud, assume 10 bits per
character (stop bit, parity, plus 8 bits of ascii, right)? So that's
240 characters per second. That's 3 lines. Yeah, that's a bit much.
Maybe it's 1200 baud that I could keep up with.
I can _barely_ keep up with a sustained 1200 words/minute.
That's prolly it.
Dave
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