I remember spending $200 to buy a modem for my nearly state of the art IBM PCjr. Getting home, I realized that the software that came with it was very lacking and soon found another program (written in Basic, I believe). The modem was specially designed for the PCjr, and instead of using the Hayes compatible "AT" command set, rather used Control-N as the command identifier. (Let me tell you, uploading anything was a nightmare)
Well, this rockstar of a modem cruised along at the blazing fast speed of 300 Baud. Whats a Baud? Simply it is "bits per second". A character (such as the letter "A" or a Control-N) is 8 bits long. And for communication sanity, they used a start bit and a stop bit. So, every character is 10 bits long. (Get it? Ok, it gets less technical from here on out.) In a nutshell, this monster transmitted characters at an amazing 30 characters per second. Now in the pre-Windows(tm) world, most screens were 80 characters across by 25 characters down. Therefore it took almost 3 seconds to transmit a complete 80 character line of text. (Go ahead and count 3 Mississippi's, I'll wait...) And for you math wizards out there, it would take over a minute to fill one screen. A 4MB MP3 file would take 37 hours 56 minutes with no interruptions - though most of what we transfered back and forth was in the 50-200kb range (that would be 0.05-0.20 MB). Of course, this is also back in the days when you could fit your ENTIRE operating system and the program that you were using on one 360kb 5 1/4" Double Density floppy disk.
So, with a list of phone numbers that I got from some people in High School I started dialing into the BBS world. After a few months, I came across one called the Motel West. The sysop (System Operator, or BBS Owner) was named Sir Duke, and befriended me and asked, "Hey, do you want to go meet some of the other users that I know?" I said sure, and he took me to meet Frank Zelba, White Lioness, and GW Hayduke. I told some of my friends about the place - Prof. Faust and Herb Doom...and together we all took over and in many ways, became "The Motel West".
So, here's to all of you who went to coffee at Denny's - It's 2am, do you know where your restaurant is?
Antelope Island
8 years ago
5 comments:
I taught a computer class last year and when I described the pre-pubescent internet (BBSs) the kids were all amazed. "You could watch the letters come through?" "Like someone was typing it as you watched?". They asked me how long it took to download a picture. I just laughed.
You know, just after I upgraded to a 1200 baud modem a person told me that "It's good you only got a 1200 baud, you can't read any faster than that..."
It's amazing how one's perspective changes.
Yeah, like when I got my first 20MB hard drive and thought "There is no way in freaking hell I'm gonna ever fill this thing." Now I have a camera that can take pictures bigger than that....
I know...I remember when I spent $300 for a 100 meg hard-drive. I figured it would take decades to fill that up (WRONG!). Now a full install of Windows alone takes 1-2 Gigs of space.
That's why today I always roll my eyes when someone tells me something has "more storage capacity than I'll every use..."
Of course that brings the counter argument, the 80GB iPod. If you use that only for music, you can store more than 22,000 songs...which means if you listen to it continuously 24 hours a day, it would be a little more than 46 days before you would hear the same song twice.
I've got an 8GB iPod, and I'm hardly using any of the memory. Maybe I'm old school, but I hate these you-can-use-it-for-everything iPhone gadgets. I like my phone to ring and call people, that's all. I like my iPod to play songs. If I want to watch videos I'll stay at home and slip in a DVD.
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