Anybody ever use a 14.4 modem?

[lpbk2713]

Well, I have Roadrunner Broadband and tonight opening up some of the threads here on the forum are like using a 14.4 modem. I wait and wait and nothing happens. Or maybe after a minute or so I'll get the top of the page of the thread I clicked and then wait and wait some more. It was OK earlier today and it is OK tonight when I try another site. I guess the DU web server is getting a lot of traffic tonight or maybe the freeper geeks are playing games. I'm sure if I'm patient things will get better later on tonight.

[Ghetto_Boy]

1. Yes ... it sucked.. but not as much as.."BUSH SUCKS!!!!"

[name not needed]

3. Will you stop for fuck's sake?

[Ghetto_Boy]

2. Yes ... it sucked.. but not as much as.."BUSH SUCKS!!!!"

[amerikat]

4. my first modem was 2400 baud!!!!!!

It's just busy tonight I guess.

[Spiffarino]

26. Oh yeah?

My first modem was a 300 baud with phone cups. Pretty cool, we thought. Imagine two computers talking to each other over the phone!? Spiffarino!

[Frodo]

5. 14.4?? I remember how excited I was...

... moving from 300 Baud to 900 Baud.

14.4 was three upgrades later!

[papau]

6. Good grief -I had 300 baud in the late 50's, 600/1200 baud in the mid 60's

and 2400 shortly thereafter - the date escapes me as my memory fades

But I forgot the 1977 TRS-80 modem was indeed 300 baud.

Adequate for short text transfers if you had a minute or two!

[madinmaryland]

8. 300 baud, yes i remember that

trying to transfer assembly language programs, after converting them over on the card punch machine! that was just fun, spent many a night downloading.

[papau]

17. 5081 card punch stock for the card reader - ah - memories .....

Why the stock number for 50 years was "5081" and printed as such on the card I will never know.

But it was a great improvement of the old MAI 60/20 stock that printed out the"read" in 2 lines that were obviously not aligned!

Those were the days.

A real programer did or/nor/and gates with real wire on the 40 or 60 pound MAI control pannel - and then you did your sort.

My back hurts just thinking of it.

The Prudential Life Insurance Company was using this "system" and 15 to 20 year old MAI equipment to obtain the totals needed in the financial statement for the individual Health insurance line all the way into the early 70's.

[lapfog_1]

22. Oh yes

026 and 029 punch cards...

assembly language with programs in the thousands of cards (boxes).

Freaking out the dispatch staff by hollowing out the middle of the
deck, filling with chaff and letting the card reader create
the fun!

300 baud modems (complete with acoustic phone coupler).

OK, enough with the old days.

[bowens43]

15. 300 baud? you were lucky

I had to print out the bits , put them in an envelope , send them via snail mail and type them back in at the other end......

;-)

[papau]

20. Silly :-) - but 300 baud in the 50's did a drop back all the way to 20

baud for "unclean lines"

Indeed one would ask AT&T for a "clean" line for a data transfer!

MCI was useless when they came along in the 70's and early 80's because their transmission was always via "microwave" dish - and always dropped a few bits so with the constant resend you had lousy throughput.

[Spiffarino]

27. Ha! That's nothin'

We had to chew sinew for days, tie two rocks together with it, then fasten it to an abacus with pine sap and crossed twigs.

[YellowRubberDuckie]

7. My first computer, a Packard Bell, had a 14.4K modem.

I thought I was soo cool. It had 3.1 too. lol
Duckie

[BelleCarolinaPeridot]

9. I am using Roadrunner as well and my connection this evening ...

has also been slow . It started around 30 minutes or so ago .

[madinmaryland]

10. Does anyone remember punch cards?

No, I'm not talking about the florida ballots, but those things they used to program computers. I never had a problem with dimpled punch cards!

[arwalden]

13. My First Program Was Saved On An AUDIO CASSETTE Tape

wooooo! Impressive, huh?


And I typed it in from a magazine listing. Nibble or Byte... or something like that.

10 HOME;
20 PRINT "HELLO WORLD";
30 GOTO 20;

-- Allen

[madinmaryland]

14. i see that you remember Basic . .

and learned it on a TRS-80. I always hated having to wait for the tape to rewind. I finally got rid of the TRS-80 a couple of years ago. It had a couple of neat games that could never be found today. It had one of the space invader games that was pretty cool. Computer was from 1981. It really amused my son.

[lpbk2713]

16. I did the same thing with my TI-99/4A

I thought I had entered a whole new time dimension. Made music etc, one note at a time.

[BlueJazz]

18. Cool!...I've still got one and 2 or 3 games.

I believe one is called "Tombstone Territory" :)

[BlueJazz]

19. Cool!...I've still got one and 2 or 3 games.

I believe one is called "Tombstone Territory" :)

[papau]

21. So you never dropped a box of cards that had not reserved col 72-80 for

program sequence numbering?

Lucky you!

Remember the assembly program modification cards that IBM called "TXT" cards - it was the way you did a bug fix on the operating system. I remember one time in 66 I screamed at IBM because an "upgrade" to the operating system meant I had lost the ability to add large numbers - and I was told it was a "known problem" and then I had to wait 2 days for the TXT patch!

[Wcross]

11. My dad had a 300 baud modem...

I didn't have a computer until the 9600 baud came out. I had prodigy as my first isp. Things have gotten a little better.

[arwalden]

12. My First Modem Was A Hayes Micromodem 300 Baud (Pic Inside)

[Festivito]

23. had no trouble around 9, SBC went down for the last hour.

My old 110 baud teletype with paper tape was fast as blazes for me, but, cards on an 029 keypunch were used since they ended up being faster so I used them for long outputs.

We're all spoiled these days by broadband.

Fact is a 14.4 modem well tuned operates DU quite nicely, I did it. I still download a dozen pages and read some while others continue to load and I don't finish my reading any faster than that 14.4 modem would allow me.

In that era we'd ask AT&T to drop an RJ45 jack so they would tweak and test the line. Now, the local companies don't even know how to test it and only put in a standard resistor, not the one that balances the line, and it doesn't even matter.

Spoiled in a strange world I am.

[DemWitch]

24. My first 'puter was a screamer... Packard Hell Legend 2000+

9600 Baud modem... I upgraded to a 14.4 and thought I was living high on the hawg... it even had a 4X CD!!!! course, that was 1991 and I was using the original version of AOL...

[Guy Fawkes]

25. I remember the 14.4. Oh, and check out this website:

www.internettrafficreport.com You can see if your area of the world is getting a good connection overall, or if it's just you.