On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 23:52:24 -0000, Barnacle Bill
wrote:


Some of us have gotten spoiled rotten by our wideband connections. I for
one have a T1 at work and do most of my downloading there. Maybe it's time
to step back, take a deep breath, and recall when we had a 1200 baud modem!

Dear BB,

Amen!

My first experience with "dial-up" was in 1965. I was asked to try out
a program in Basic that designed electric motors. You had to dial up
this big main frame in Boston - Dartmouth, I think. We had a teletype
as a terminal and an acoustic modem at 300 baud. The acoustic modem
was a telephone handset with sponge cups for earpiece and mouthpiece
that snugged around the telephone handset. Acoustic coupling means no
electric connection - good for lightning isolation - Hi!

You typed in your Basic program and tried it out. If you wanted to pay
a monthly fee for storage you could save your typed in program on
their disk for a monthly fee. Talk about a text based interface -
primitive doesn't even begin to describe it.

I am tickled to have V.90 at somewhere above 33 kBaud. It makes your
head swim to think about where it will be 5 years from now.
Bob, W9DMK, Dahlgren, VA
http://www.qsl.net/w9dmk