So basically you had 56k and due to line noise, frequently 48k instead down or My trusty old I think I actually played EQ phase 2 beta over that thing.
On some nights, you could have a This was prek on uncompressed data, so it was a big YMMV type of thing. However back then, it was cool to be able to download something overnight. It beat running to the university campus's 24 hour computer lab with a boxful of floppies and a pkzip splitter. No mention of Codex or Pairgain devices. We had 64kbps, leased-line Codex modems humming along until, well, even today you'll find an odd one laying around. And T-1 Pairgains not technically models are still the best way to service outlying buildings on most campuses.
I understand that not every article can be complete. The Codex was the shit. Until the came along. Still, if my life depended on a modem working and dealing with crappy lines and marginally compliant other parties I'd go with the There were many magazine articles for homebrew modems.
Most of these derived from the FSK radio modems in widespread use by Hams at the time. The computer was a DECsystem It was difficult to keep up with the blinding speed of the text scrolling past on the screen! Do you recall the type of serial interface cards it used?
Or was the modem connected to the console? If still have the octal interrupt vector and bus address sequence imprinted on my brain:. A DECsystem10 is a mainframe that does timesharing.
I never saw the thing - it lived in the main school district office downtown. Then IBM changed the world two years later. That means transitions per second. Many MODEMs work at , , , bps bits per second, or pieces of digital information per second. MODEMs at baud or less did not require flow control -- they worked at serial line speed, and did not buffer.
Modems at bps and higher did buffering and would do various flow-control techniques. Original MODEMs didn't start at baud, they started at 75baud, but lazy authors write lazy articles. The acoustic-coupler worked great at baud TI Silent , miserably at baud, and terribly at baud.
Still this technology made itself obsolete. Hence it should be capitalized. Generally when an acronym is pronounced as a single word and has entered general usage, it is not capitalized. These days scuba, laser, and radar are not capitalized. Nor is modem. A word formed from the initial letters of a name, such as WAC for Women's Army Corps, or by combining initial letters or parts of a series of words, such as radar for radio detecting and ranging. It is using the initial parts of a series of words.
This has little to do with RS We all agreed that in a way, it is almost a shame that kids today are growing up with remarkably better technology than we had at their age and it hasn't been that long ago that we were their age. We all sort of miss dealing with cobbled together and salvaged parts, trying to eek out any performance we could from our machines.
One of the friends present recalled helping me overclock my 33 mhz machine to 36 mhz woohooo! Even things like the clock source of a PC would probably drift by about 0. Given that most modern CPUs do a lot more "work" per clock than old XT era processors, that means that just random variations in the. You're right about most of the components in a PC, but not what determines the clock stability.
The clock speed is set by a phase-locked loop [wikipedia. Quartz crystals used in your garden-variety PC typically have a worst-case environmental stability specification of 10 to ppm 0. I did my second incarnation of BBSing using a Datarace modem. It would only do when connected to other modems, but it would do if connected to another Datarace modem, but it did that by using up all of the voice bandwidth at once by going half-duplex over the line.
This is how I remember it. This would cause non-Hayes modems hang up if they ever transferred such documents. The trick sounds rather Microsoftian. I remember other vendors complaining to the press, saying "you cannot patent pauses.
Next they'll patent Ummm's" or something like that. Obama would have a big bill if they did. After thousands of times listening to my various modems connecting from bps to 56K and with the various incarnations of error correction I was eventually able to knowing how fast I was connected by sound alone. The problem was that as modems got faster and more sophisticated the connection time kept getting longer and longer.
Sometimes I'd have to wait through 45 seconds or more of whistles, grinds and groans before the two modem would train. Ah, the good old days. The original workhorse. I was trying to put together an inexpensive homebrew computer-to-transceiver audio interface for digital radio transmissions and needed a pair of audio frequency transformers.
I knew that all POTS line modems had a transformer in them that would work and I thought that this would be a cheap source for parts that cost about ten bucks apiece new. Of course, I had just recently sent all my old modems to the recycler so I started asking around to see if anyone had a modem that they wanted to get rid of.
Out of the more than 20 people I asked, not a single person still had one. Hard to believe that only ten years ago the modem ruled supreme when it came to Internet access. Now you can't even find one to cannibalize. Here in Melbourne, Australia computer swap meets markets for grey marketing, mostly usually have bins of old modems, mostly with their power supplies for two dollars each.
If you buy two or three you can get a working unit. Are there similar markets where you live? They used to be pretty common but not so much anymore. And I just wanted cannibalize them for a specific part--I wouldn't have even cared if the things worked as long as the audio transformers weren't burnt out.
I have a couple of modems I could junk and I am sure a lot of people around here do to. Maybe put up a journal page and point your sig to it. You will have to pay postage. I could send you a few but its going to be from Australia, which could be expensive. Yeah, it would undoubtedly be cheaper to drop the USD 20 on the new parts from Mouser, but thanks anyhow. I only brought it up to point out the current scarcity of modems. You want a modem, you have but to only take out your credit card and go to US Robotics [usr.
To grab a bit of perspective on the actual speed of these modems, consider that a letter consists of eight bits. A speed of bits meant that this modem could only send out around 30 letters a second. While one might think things have improved by four orders of magnitude 10,x , thanks to Parkinson's Law, they have only improved by two orders x. Navigating to the washingtonpost.
What history of modems completely skips the Telebit Trailblazer? Roughly 18 kbps in - many years before Expensive enough to be out of reach of most BBS'ers, though.
But worth the money if you were doing UUCP over a long distance call every night. If there were modem complaints such as dial-in problems, I had to first figure out which modem was connected to which phone number. Others didn't always keep the map up-to-date. Plus, it used busy-roll-over. The test phone was a ways away from the modem bank for the VAX minicomputer, so I had to keep the modem trying to connect long enough until I got there to see which modem answered the call via LED.
The only easy way I found to do this was to manually whistle an acceptable modem tone into the phone in order to trick the modem into thinking I was a modem trying to connect.
This would keep it trying long enough to allow me to run from the test phone to the modem bank. It had to be the right pitch and wavering to work most of the time. I got pretty good at it after a while.
I learned to "speak modem" a bit. A computer-room technician once saw me whistling modem sounds into the phone and running back and forth. I later told him why, and he told me I was nuts and mumbled something about whistling sweat nothings to my robotic girlfriends. No I really do, I love modems. I grew up with them. And calling BBSes and running one for several years was really great. I don't think I would have gotten into programming my career if it wasn't for the BBS scene of the s.
Man, remember writing init strings? That was a skill. Every new modem you got, you sat down and figured out how it interpeted the AT codes. Then, you had to fine-tune the string. How long did your line need dialtone before you dialed? How fast could you dial the numbers in ms? Of all my memories of dial-up, I think some of my best are of tweaking the init string so you could dial in as fast as possible.
After all, there was a good chance you'd get a busy signal; you need to hang up and redial ASAP! Before the Bell System modems, there were over-the-airwaves modems, going back to or so. The endpoints were teletype machines, whirring away furiously at 60WPM, 7. I used to have a military modem, a CVV -something, that was the size of a suitcase and weighed about 60 pounds.
I was online with many BBS' with during dial-up modems days before they died because of the Internet. Google Video [google. There is a DVD version that can be ordered [bbsdocumentary. Its a good service, but 10 grand? The early limitations on modems not provided by Telstra were basically there to protect that business. There may be more comments in this discussion.
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Follow Slashdot on LinkedIn. Ant points out this two-page TechRadar article about the history of modems ; the photographs of some behemoth old modems might give you new respect for just how much is packed into modern wireless devices. This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted. Full Abbreviated Hidden. More Login.
Let me be the first to say Score: 5 , Funny. Share twitter facebook. Re:Let me be the first to say Score: 5 , Funny. Parent Share twitter facebook. Re: Score: 2 , Informative. Re:Let me be the first to say Score: 5 , Informative. Re: Score: 3 , Informative. Re: Score: 3 , Funny. Acoustic coupler era and POTS! Score: 5 , Informative. Score: 5 , Insightful. Score: 5 , Funny. Re: Score: 2. Score: 5 , Interesting.
Again, you're confusing things. Actually confusing a couple things: First: T1! Score: 4 , Interesting. However, in the T-carrier systems used in the U. No kidding! You could even download respectably sized files It was so successful that they started up DC Hayes Associates, later known as Hayes Microcomputer Products, and developed several landmark technologies including the Smartmodem and the Hayes Command set.
The Smartmodem was remarkable because it could switch between data mode and command mode and it did this using a sequence known as the Hayes Command Set that incorporated a unique "guard time" to prevent the data being sent from confusing the modem itself. The Hayes Command Set has remained one of the most popular although it has been substantially built upon since its inception to accommodate higher speeds and better technologies.
Soon after baud modems hit the market on V. Speed was noticeably faster and transmissions were substantially more error free along with better compression. The short-lived baud modem followed in the s beaten down by the baud modem that became available in The latter used single sideband transmission so modems could use two channels on the phone line instead of one.
This could certainly change in the future—the definition has changed in the past —but for now, it accurately portrays what most of the country has access to. These speeds helped make the internet what it has become: in the early web years, loading web pages even with simple graphics could take several minutes. Even streaming videos became possible; YouTube first launched in Websites evolved from simple destinations to interactive places where people could buy things and communicate with each other in real-time.
But there are many efforts to bring internet access to those where fixed connections are difficult to deploy. Cable companies are using old broadcasting radio frequencies to deliver high-speed internet, and autonomous balloons can beam internet down to even the most remote locations.
Mobile broadband—connecting to the internet through a cell phone—has exploded in popularity over the last five years. At the end of , there were about 1. You could look at rudimentary pages of the internet, to check things like sports scores or news headlines.
But getting too deep into the internet would likely burn through whatever overpriced data plan you had at the time. The first truly useful mobile data standard was 3G in , when radio technology first allowed for more than calls and texts to be sent over the air. The mobile web truly took off with the iPhone, however, and all the devices that aimed to copy it. Over the last decade, Apple has sold more than 1 billion iPhones and spurred on competitors like Google, whose Android operating system is now installed on over 2 billion devices.
Suddenly, a device that fit in the palm of your hand could access the web in more or less the same way as a laptop. According to a recent consumer report pdf commissioned by networking hardware company Ericsson, the average smartphone owner in the US currently uses around 8GB of data each month. The company expects that number to balloon up to possibly GB per month by But for now, these are still pipe dreams.
But then, people probably said the same things about those early messages pinging back and forth from UCLA in the early s. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership.
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