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| Woodworking (rec.woodworking) Discussion forum covering all aspects of working with wood. All levels of expertise are encouraged to particiapte. |
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On 3 Dec 2004 08:14:00 -0800, Larry Bud wrote:
You guys are the old sysops from the 80's and early 90's whose power has been taken away by the internet. Ehhh, just for the record, _some_ sysops from the early 80's don't care so much about power these days (or then, I don't think). Dave "Been there, done that, got the 1200 Baud Hayes Smartmodem" Hinz |
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#4
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"Dave Hinz" wrote in message
Dave "Been there, done that, got the 1200 Baud Hayes Smartmodem" Hinz That was high tech, dude ... my Fido BBS was first run on a 300 baud "hayes compatible". I clearly remember when I hit the big time with a US Robotics 9600, along with 4 MB of memory in the box. Jack Rickard, who ran "Board Watch" magazine, is who should have run for Prez in 04! -- www.e-woodshop.net Last update: 11/06/04 |
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#5
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On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 10:50:35 -0600, Swingman wrote:
"Dave Hinz" wrote in message Dave "Been there, done that, got the 1200 Baud Hayes Smartmodem" Hinz That was high tech, dude ... my Fido BBS was first run on a 300 baud "hayes compatible". Well, the first one was a Hayes 300 that I bought out of the back of Byte magazine for $239.00, in probably 1981. I wrote the BBS software (in Basic, of course), and it ran on a 64KB TRS-80 Color Computer with (4) 156K floppy drives (5-1/4" of course). 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? But, anything faster than 2400 baud is wasted anyway, because that's as fast as you can read text. Dave Hinz |
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#6
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"Swingman" writes:
"Dave Hinz" wrote in message Dave "Been there, done that, got the 1200 Baud Hayes Smartmodem" Hinz That was high tech, dude ... my Fido BBS was first run on a 300 baud "hayes compatible". I clearly remember when I hit the big time with a US Robotics 9600, along with 4 MB of memory in the box. Youse guys and your high tech. My first modem was 110-baud acoustic coupler (you know, stick the handset in the rubber cups) connected through current-loop interface to a Western Electric ASR-33 (complete with paper tape punch/reader). Getting that decwriter with the 300-baud AC modem was a dream. scott |
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#7
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"Scott Lurndal" wrote "Swingman" writes: "Dave Hinz" wrote in message Dave "Been there, done that, got the 1200 Baud Hayes Smartmodem" Hinz That was high tech, dude ... my Fido BBS was first run on a 300 baud "hayes compatible". I clearly remember when I hit the big time with a US Robotics 9600, along with 4 MB of memory in the box. Youse guys and your high tech. My first modem was 110-baud acoustic coupler (you know, stick the handset in the rubber cups) connected through current-loop interface to a Western Electric ASR-33 (complete with paper tape punch/reader). Getting that decwriter with the 300-baud AC modem was a dream. Is this turning into a retro technology ****ing match?? My first modem was a set of drums I used to communicate with the next village. :-) |
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#8
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On Fri, 03 Dec 2004 18:21:17 GMT, Scott Lurndal wrote:
Youse guys and your high tech. My first modem was 110-baud acoustic coupler (you know, stick the handset in the rubber cups) Yup, had one of those first too. Dumped it almost immediately, because it didn't fit my phone. connected through current-loop interface to a Western Electric ASR-33 (complete with paper tape punch/reader). OK, you win. Getting that decwriter with the 300-baud AC modem was a dream. Damn skippy it was. |
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#9
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On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 13:28:02 -0500, Lee Michaels wrote:
"Scott Lurndal" wrote Youse guys and your high tech. My first modem was 110-baud acoustic coupler Is this turning into a retro technology ****ing match?? Naah, just the old-farts club meeting. My first modem was a set of drums I used to communicate with the next village. :-) We used to _dream_ of having drumsticks. We had to take rocks, break 'em into pieces, swallow them, and then, er, Damn. Where was I going with that? |
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#10
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"Dave Hinz" wrote in message
Yup, had one of those first too. Dumped it almost immediately, because it didn't fit my phone. Yep ... it was damn hard getting the separate mouth piece and ear piece to stay in that acoustic coupler while you cranked the phone. -- www.e-woodshop.net Last update: 11/06/04 |
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#11
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On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 13:28:02 -0500, "Lee Michaels"
wrote: "Scott Lurndal" wrote "Swingman" writes: "Dave Hinz" wrote in message Dave "Been there, done that, got the 1200 Baud Hayes Smartmodem" Hinz That was high tech, dude ... my Fido BBS was first run on a 300 baud "hayes compatible". I clearly remember when I hit the big time with a US Robotics 9600, along with 4 MB of memory in the box. Youse guys and your high tech. My first modem was 110-baud acoustic coupler (you know, stick the handset in the rubber cups) connected through current-loop interface to a Western Electric ASR-33 (complete with paper tape punch/reader). Getting that decwriter with the 300-baud AC modem was a dream. Is this turning into a retro technology ****ing match?? My first modem was a set of drums I used to communicate with the next village. :-) I had the next version; two women meeting each other in the mall who have not seen each other in "ages". Ever notice how they sound like two modems connecting? "OOOOh, Judith!" "Eeeee! Connie" Handshake complete and data transfer starts .... |
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#12
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Dave,
Did you live in London in the 80's? David. "Dave Hinz" wrote in message ... On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 10:50:35 -0600, Swingman wrote: "Dave Hinz" wrote in message Dave "Been there, done that, got the 1200 Baud Hayes Smartmodem" Hinz That was high tech, dude ... my Fido BBS was first run on a 300 baud "hayes compatible". Well, the first one was a Hayes 300 that I bought out of the back of Byte magazine for $239.00, in probably 1981. I wrote the BBS software (in Basic, of course), and it ran on a 64KB TRS-80 Color Computer with (4) 156K floppy drives (5-1/4" of course). 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? But, anything faster than 2400 baud is wasted anyway, because that's as fast as you can read text. Dave Hinz |
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#13
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In article ,
Dave Hinz wrote: On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 10:50:35 -0600, Swingman wrote: "Dave Hinz" wrote in message Dave "Been there, done that, got the 1200 Baud Hayes Smartmodem" Hinz That was high tech, dude ... my Fido BBS was first run on a 300 baud "hayes compatible". Well, the first one was a Hayes 300 that I bought out of the back of Byte magazine for $239.00, in probably 1981. I wrote the BBS software (in Basic, of course), and it ran on a 64KB TRS-80 Color Computer with (4) 156K floppy drives (5-1/4" of course). 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. 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. 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. 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". 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.) 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 can _barely_ keep up with a sustained 1200 words/minute. |
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#14
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#15
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On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 13:28:02 -0500, "Lee Michaels"
wrote: "Scott Lurndal" wrote "Swingman" writes: "Dave Hinz" wrote in message Dave "Been there, done that, got the 1200 Baud Hayes Smartmodem" Hinz That was high tech, dude ... my Fido BBS was first run on a 300 baud "hayes compatible". I clearly remember when I hit the big time with a US Robotics 9600, along with 4 MB of memory in the box. Youse guys and your high tech. My first modem was 110-baud acoustic coupler (you know, stick the handset in the rubber cups) connected through current-loop interface to a Western Electric ASR-33 (complete with paper tape punch/reader). Getting that decwriter with the 300-baud AC modem was a dream. Is this turning into a retro technology ****ing match?? My first modem was a set of drums I used to communicate with the next village. :-) You had DRUMS??? My village just banged sticks against the ground!  Aut inveniam viam aut faciam |
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#16
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Prometheus wrote:
You had DRUMS??? My village just banged sticks against the ground! You had ground? -- Jack Novak Buffalo, NY - USA (Remove "SPAM" from email address to reply) |
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#17
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Bruce Barnett wrote:
(Larry Bud) writes: You guys are the old sysops from the 80's and early 90's whose power has been taken away by the internet. correction: You guys are the old sysops from the 80's and early 90's who BUILD the Internet. I think you mean "built" don't you? Maybe, maybe not. Experiences may vary, but my experience was that the internet was the realm of an elite, privileged few. Some big industry types, military types, college students, professors. We were off to the side doing the BBS thing in a completely different world. We had echo boards like FIDONet and the other one... Hrm. Anyway, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" calls guys like me "DOS hackers." We weren't part of the UNIX scene, and weren't part of the internet in the '80s. Not my generation, especially. Those born in the '60s, and who then went on to be in the right place (universities, big industry, military) at the right time were doing that deal in the '80s, but we children of the '70s didn't really get our first taste of the internet until the early '90s. I had a dialup shell account at my school for a year or so, as soon as I managed to cajole my way into getting an account, even though I wasn't a CS major. Shortly thereafter, they started one of the nation's first ISPs in the next town, giving me access to the internet "directly." It was pretty cool. I used to ftp stuff from some yonder to the university computer, and then download the files to my home computer with zmodem or kermit, at a screammmmmming 9600 baud, if I was lucky enough to catch the one 9600 baud modem in the pool. Most days it was 2400 if I was lucky. The web was in its earliest infancy back then, and I had heard rumors about it, but I couldn't do any graphical stuff with that original setup. We didn't even have lynx. I didn't see the web for the first time until '93 or '94, I guess, when I got the SLIP account. Even at that, only being on usenet since maybe '92, I once tallied up all my old posts in a fit of boredom. Projecting forward, and adding some email into the brew because most of the places I hang out these days are mailing lists, I have a pretty reasonable estimate that I have pounded out around 1,250,000 words on this keyboard, in about 25,000 messages. Damn I talk a lot. I hate Microsoft with intense passion, but if anyone has an original Microsoft Natural Keyboard in good shape, I'll take it off your hands. This one has served me well, but it won't be much longer before I actually wear through some of the keycaps. The lower row right hand keys are getting pretty thin on top, and they lost their letters five years ago. Like so many other things in this world, the ones they're making now are complete crap. I want to collect about two more of these olds ones, which I figure will tide me over until the machine can scan my retinas and tell what I'm thinking in about 20 years. -- Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621 http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/ http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/ |
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#18
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Dave Hinz wrote:
anything faster than 2400 baud is wasted anyway, because that's as fast as you can read text. And no one will ever need more than 512 MB of memory for any reason, wasn't it? As far as the retro ****ing match, Dad had a Heathkit dumb terminal he and I (mostly he) built, and a 150 baud acoustic coupler of some flavor to go with it. My one and only venture into the dark underworld of cracking was to play around on that thing. OK, I broke into the grocery store computer. I'm so cool. Now what am I going to do? Put filet mignon on special? LOL! The sort of cool part was I did it (broke into the computer where Dad worked) by whistling into the phone. Computers became more interesting once I got my beloved CoCo, but that's another story for another off-topic post. -- Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621 http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/ http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/ |
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#19
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On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 18:01:46 -0500, David Eisan wrote:
Dave, Did you live in London in the 80's? No, but I did spend 3 months in St. Albans (Herts) in 1992 or 1993....??? Dave |
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#20
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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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#21
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On Fri, 03 Dec 2004 19:24:33 -0500, Roy Smith wrote:
It was great to leave the speaker turned on when the 'Blazer connected. The noises they produced while analyzing the transmissions qualities of the circuit were really impressive. We used to call it "The Rhino Mating Call". Yeah, but can you whistle the handshaking tones for not just 110 and 300, but for the 1200 baud connections? |
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#22
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On Sat, 04 Dec 2004 02:31:13 -0500, Silvan wrote:
As far as the retro ****ing match, Dad had a Heathkit dumb terminal he and I (mostly he) built, and a 150 baud acoustic coupler 110 baud maybe? ISTR that the speed was made to correspond with the tty (teletype) systems of the day? of some flavor to go with it. My one and only venture into the dark underworld of cracking was to play around on that thing. OK, I broke into the grocery store computer. I'm so cool. Now what am I going to do? Put filet mignon on special? LOL! The sort of cool part was I did it (broke into the computer where Dad worked) by whistling into the phone. Well, "broke into" for values of "got the modem to think I had data to give it", but yeah. Computers became more interesting once I got my beloved CoCo, but that's another story for another off-topic post. You know, a lot of folks I know who have turned into Unix admins got our start on the CoCo. I wonder what the correlation is there. Dave Hinz |
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#23
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Thu, Dec 2, 2004, 10:11am (EST-3) (Russ) come here
burbling: TIME TO VOTE- It is time to vote snip OK. My vote is you print your post out, on very stiff paper, crumple it into a ball, and then suff it . . . JOAT Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind dont matter, and those who matter dont mind. - Dr Seuss |
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#24
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Dave Hinz wrote:
As far as the retro ****ing match, Dad had a Heathkit dumb terminal he and I (mostly he) built, and a 150 baud acoustic coupler 110 baud maybe? ISTR that the speed was made to correspond with the tty (teletype) systems of the day? Yeah, 110. My bad. to play around on that thing. OK, I broke into the grocery store computer. I'm so cool. Now what am I going to do? Put filet mignon on special? LOL! The sort of cool part was I did it (broke into the computer where Dad worked) by whistling into the phone. Well, "broke into" for values of "got the modem to think I had data to give it", but yeah. Well, I mean I whistled his password. Or something. I got right in there man, with all the illicit power of a script kiddie just dying to get into a grocery store price database and wreak havok. Then I hung up and walked away before Dad could whoop my ass for messing with his terminal thingie. You know, a lot of folks I know who have turned into Unix admins got our start on the CoCo. I wonder what the correlation is there. Probably the tinker factor. I wasn't the active tinkerer so much as Dad in those days, being only like eight or something, but we tinkered. We put more RAM in than it was supposed to have, we twiddled something and burned a new EPROM so it could print lowercase characters, we burned some other EPROM to let it read both sides of a double sided disk and stuff. With PCs there was still some tinker factor in the early days. Jiggle this and twiddle that to get a few extra bytes of RAM to make this other work, and stuff like that, and you usta could get a compiler for less than $500 for even more tinkering. Then by about Windows 95 they had worked really hard to get rid of all the tinker factor. You can root around in the Registry if you really want to, but it's not fun. It's hard to twiddle around with Windows and make it truly your own. Some of that is a good thing in some ways, but it's often a bad thing too, because it's such a bitch to get in and fix something when it breaks. Not so Linux. It's a tinkerer's dream. All the tinkering you could ever want, and when you're not in the mood to tinker, most everything usually just works. It's rare anymore, especially in the last year or so, to HAVE to tinker with it if you don't feel like it. I can't speak for Unix more generally, but that's one of the things that really drew me to Linux initially. It put the joy back into computing. I have mostly gotten over the joy, and am more likely just to accept out of the box defaults these days. I can have it both ways, and I love that. -- Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621 http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/ http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/ |
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#25
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In article ,
Dave Hinz wrote: On Fri, 03 Dec 2004 19:24:33 -0500, Roy Smith wrote: It was great to leave the speaker turned on when the 'Blazer connected. The noises they produced while analyzing the transmissions qualities of the circuit were really impressive. We used to call it "The Rhino Mating Call". Yeah, but can you whistle the handshaking tones for not just 110 and 300, but for the 1200 baud connections? The 110 baud and 300 baud 'carrier' is the same tone. 'Bell 103' standard. at 1200 baud, it depends on which 'standard' was being used: 'Bell 202', 'Bell 212', or 'Vadic 3400', just for starters. I could whistle a Bell 103, or a Bell 212 carrier, Heck, I knew a guy who could _modulate_ his Bell 103 'whistling'. Well enough that he could transmit messages that way. |
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#26
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In article ,
Dave Hinz wrote: 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. Arghh!! my mistake. There was _no_ *USR* Smartmodem line. that was Hayes's _registered_ trademarked name. Hayes and USR had no common history. USR was originally named in honor of the company that employed Dr. Susan Calvin, in the analysis of positronic brains. The Hayes extruded aluminum 'box', *was* copied by a whole _bunch_ of people. and I _THINK_ (but at this point I'm no longer sure) that USR offered an 'in between' model in that style case. The 'sportsters' were the budget home-use line, and the "Courier" was the high-end commercial line. USR was _very_ late in introducing a 9600 baud model in the Courier line. the early spec for the 9600 baud 'standard' had technical problems, and units built 'to the standard' did _not_necessarily_ work with other brands that were _also_ built to the standard. USR had the higher-performing and also "incompatible-with-anything-else" HST protocol -- they didn't see a need to jump on the 9600 bandwagon -early-. They _may_ have even built on the V.32bis (14.400) standard -- which came out about the same time the 'corrected' V.32 (9600) standard was released. 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. If it comes time to get rid of 'em. I'd be interested in 2 of them, for my 'museum'. 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. Before the advent of the 28.8k (and subsequent 33.6k) modems, Telebit practically *owned* the long-distance, high-speed, modem market. USR's Courier HST, was somewhat more finicky about line quality than the 1200/2400 baud "bell 212"-esque 'smartmodem' and equivalents. Good for across town, not so good for inter-state. and particularly not for international distances. It was a "given", however, with the Trailblazers, that if _they_ wouldn't connect, you couldn't get through with _anything_, not even an 'old reliable' Bell 103 at 110 baud or below. A *lot* of skull-sweat went into the DSP software in those boxes. And the way they chopped the audio spectrum up into a _lot_ of independent narrow bandwidth sections, and put a separate carrier in each section. Skipping over the sections that were 'too noisy' to use reliably. 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. 240 char/sec, at 6 ASCII characters/word (5 'printable' plus the inter-word 'space') is 40 words/sec. -- 2400 words/min. Note: bits/sec, and words/min have an "interesting" relationship. *POSTULATING* 10 bits/char, it takes 60 bits (6 chars * 10 bits/char) to represent a 'standard word' for speed calculation purposes. thus, bits/sec * 60 sec/min --------------------- == words/min 60 bits/word The 'units' conversions cancel out, as do the two '60' scaling factors. _X_ bits/sec === _X_ words/min If the 'character' is something other than 10 bits, you have to adjust accordingly. thus: 110 baud - 100 words/min (11 bit characters) 300 baud - 300 words/min 1200 bps - 1200 words/min 2400 bps - 2400 words/min |
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#27
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In article ,
Dave Hinz wrote: On Sat, 04 Dec 2004 02:31:13 -0500, Silvan wrote: As far as the retro ****ing match, Dad had a Heathkit dumb terminal he and I (mostly he) built, and a 150 baud acoustic coupler 110 baud maybe? ISTR that the speed was made to correspond with the tty (teletype) systems of the day? 110, 150, and 300 were _all_ common serial-port speeds of the day. The _same_ modem protocol ("Bell 103") was used for all of them. In fact the same _modem_ itself, could be used, *without* any changes at the modem , for any speed below 300 baud. 110 baud was for the _high_speed_ teletype circuits of the day -- 100 word/min. vs the standard circuits at 60 word/min. 300 baud was for high-speed devices -- 'glass terminals', and some printing terminals that were built suitably. 150 baud was used for 'selectric' type devices, because that was as fast as the mechanical parts could operate. of some flavor to go with it. My one and only venture into the dark underworld of cracking was to play around on that thing. OK, I broke into the grocery store computer. I'm so cool. Now what am I going to do? Put filet mignon on special? LOL! The sort of cool part was I did it (broke into the computer where Dad worked) by whistling into the phone. That's a "higher level" approach. You weren't exploiting a 'bug'. rather you used a "weasel". groan |
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#28
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In article ,
J T wrote: Thu, Dec 2, 2004, 10:11am (EST-3) (Russ) come here burbling: TIME TO VOTE- It is time to vote snip OK. My vote is you print your post out, on very stiff paper, crumple it into a ball, and then suff it . . . No, _no_, *NO*! _Don't_ 'crumple it into a ball' -- the correct approach is to 'fold it until it is -all- sharp corners" *then* emplace it. |
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#29
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Dave Hinz wrote in message ...
On 3 Dec 2004 08:14:00 -0800, Larry Bud wrote: You guys are the old sysops from the 80's and early 90's whose power has been taken away by the internet. Ehhh, just for the record, _some_ sysops from the early 80's don't care so much about power these days (or then, I don't think). Dave "Been there, done that, got the 1200 Baud Hayes Smartmodem" Hinz Didn't mean to lump all sysops in together, but when I read the stuff these guys say, it really takes me back. |
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#30
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Sat, Dec 4, 2004, 10:23pm (EST+5)
(Robert=A0Bonomi) says: No, _no_, *NO*! _Don't_ 'crumple it into a ball' -- the correct approach is to 'fold it until it is -all- sharp corners" *then* emplace it. I stand corrected. JOAT Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind dont matter, and those who matter dont mind. - Dr Seuss |
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#31
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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. No - that was Hayes Smartmodem. -- -Mike- |
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#32
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On Sun, 5 Dec 2004 04:07:02 -0500, J T wrote:
Sat, Dec 4, 2004, 10:23pm (EST+5) (Robert*Bonomi) says: No, _no_, *NO*! _Don't_ 'crumple it into a ball' -- the correct approach is to 'fold it until it is -all- sharp corners" *then* emplace it. I stand corrected. I'm not sure. Is "emplace" a real word, then? |
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#33
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On Sat, 04 Dec 2004 15:01:12 -0500, Silvan wrote:
Dave Hinz wrote: You know, a lot of folks I know who have turned into Unix admins got our start on the CoCo. I wonder what the correlation is there. Probably the tinker factor. I wasn't the active tinkerer so much as Dad in those days, being only like eight or something, but we tinkered. We put more RAM in than it was supposed to have, Yup, did that, both the 32K "piggyback", the 64K "cut & jump", and later, the 512KB mod on the COCO3. we twiddled something and burned a new EPROM so it could print lowercase characters, Yup, we burned some other EPROM to let it read both sides of a double sided disk and stuff. Not familiar with that one. With PCs there was still some tinker factor in the early days. Jiggle this and twiddle that to get a few extra bytes of RAM to make this other work, and stuff like that, and you usta could get a compiler for less than $500 for even more tinkering. I liked that you could poke into a certain address and double the clock speed all the way to nearly 1.8 MHz, up from 0.9MHz. And it almost always didn't crash the system, if your RAM was fast enough. Then by about Windows 95 they had worked really hard to get rid of all the tinker factor. You can root around in the Registry if you really want to, but it's not fun. It's hard to twiddle around with Windows and make it truly your own. Some of that is a good thing in some ways, but it's often a bad thing too, because it's such a bitch to get in and fix something when it breaks. I lost interest completely in computers somewhere from DOS4 to DOS5 days, didn't get back into it until the 486s were in vogue. Had to do with burnout, starting college, and a very bad boss for a programming gig (if you're someone reading this and wondering if I mean you, then yes, most likely, if you had someone named Toni working for you). Not so Linux. It's a tinkerer's dream. All the tinkering you could ever want, and when you're not in the mood to tinker, most everything usually just works. Yup. For my utility boxes, Linux is the answer. My desktop at home is an Apple iMac, which wraps Unix in a pretty GUI, and everything "just works". It's rare anymore, especially in the last year or so, to HAVE to tinker with it if you don't feel like it. Yup. I can't speak for Unix more generally, but that's one of the things that really drew me to Linux initially. It put the joy back into computing. I have mostly gotten over the joy, and am more likely just to accept out of the box defaults these days. I can have it both ways, and I love that. Exactly. I've found myself prototyping stuff for work, on my system at home. One is running FreeBSD/Mac OSX, the other is running Solaris, but they're both Unix and even config files transfer; just recompile the binaries. Fun stuff, this "anything other than Windows". We do miss out on the viruses, though...and the spyware... Dave Hinz |
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#34
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On Sat, 04 Dec 2004 22:13:40 +0000, Robert Bonomi wrote:
In article , Dave Hinz wrote: We've got 3 of those in the lab here too (just checked). We need to have a cleanup day, I think. If it comes time to get rid of 'em. I'd be interested in 2 of them, for my 'museum'. Noted. What continent are you on? It was a "given", however, with the Trailblazers, that if _they_ wouldn't connect, you couldn't get through with _anything_, not even an 'old reliable' Bell 103 at 110 baud or below. Yes, that was the modem of choice for people on crappy connections. A *lot* of skull-sweat went into the DSP software in those boxes. And the way they chopped the audio spectrum up into a _lot_ of independent narrow bandwidth sections, and put a separate carrier in each section. Skipping over the sections that were 'too noisy' to use reliably. I didn't know they were doing that, but it makes perfect sense. Is that how they're doing it these days as well? I'm not up on that side of things; I prefer 802.11b these days. *POSTULATING* 10 bits/char, it takes 60 bits (6 chars * 10 bits/char) to represent a 'standard word' for speed calculation purposes. thus, bits/sec * 60 sec/min --------------------- == words/min 60 bits/word The 'units' conversions cancel out, as do the two '60' scaling factors. _X_ bits/sec === _X_ words/min If the 'character' is something other than 10 bits, you have to adjust accordingly. thus: 110 baud - 100 words/min (11 bit characters) 300 baud - 300 words/min 1200 bps - 1200 words/min 2400 bps - 2400 words/min Cool, I never noticed that. Dave Hinz |
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#36
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test - test
Dave Hinz wrote: On Sun, 5 Dec 2004 04:07:02 -0500, J T wrote: Sat, Dec 4, 2004, 10:23pm (EST+5) (Robert Bonomi) says: No, _no_, *NO*! _Don't_ 'crumple it into a ball' -- the correct approach is to 'fold it until it is -all- sharp corners" *then* emplace it. I stand corrected. I'm not sure. Is "emplace" a real word, then? |
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