Re: Dial-up modems (Re: FREE GAME: Spirit of the Mouse)

On Thu, 10 Oct 2024 20:23:29 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:16:58 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

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Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, 08 Oct 2024 02:07:34 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com> wrote:

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We had an acoustic coupler for awhile.  I think I could type faster than
it sent letters.

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That's like 300 speed. ;)

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Depends on how fast you can type :-)
300 baud is probably amazingly fast to hunt-n-peck typists.

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I hunt and peck on smartphones since I have to have one hand hold it and while other hand type!
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And in the 80s, before GUIs were common and everything -even a lot of
games - were character-based, 300 baud was probably usable, if a bit
slow. Although I can't imagine using anything that pokey for
downloading stuff; even 28,8kbps was tedious at those speeds (the
original Doom Shareware took me over an hour to get, back in the day).
Even looking at images was a chore; you'd queue up two or three and
that would be it for the night ;-)

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Yeah, but you had those evil line noises!!!!!!!!!!!!

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No, you didn't. Most modems supported the AT M0 command, which turned
off the speaker from the start. It was one of the first AT commands I
learned, and boy howdy did I make sure every AT string I used included
it! That squeal people associate with the dial-up era of the Internet?

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I never heard it.

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No, not the modem connection audio. The line noises that lag and even
disconnect your connections. If the dial-up modem didn't have error
corrections like my 2400 modems, then you get bunch of characters on
screen if using text mode connections like in BBSes with terminal
clients like $^UY&HW24tr856g65 (pretend some of these are extended ASCII
characters too). :(

Oh, that.

I was fairly lucky; I never had significant problems with line noise
(then again, as noted, the majority of my modeming-years were in an
era where modems _did_ have built-in era correction). Disconnects were
actually fairly uncommon for me. And software existed to automatically
redial if there was a disconnect, so even when it did happen it wasn't
more than a momentary annoyance.

Maybe it was more of an issue on the Apple ][; I really don't
remember. It may or may not have had error-correction; I have no idea
as to the specs or capability of the modem I used. (I dont' even know
the brand).  But, I think, between the wonderousness of just being
able to connect to another computer, and the fact that I didn't make
much use of the thing, I've no recollection as to how often I had to
redial because my connection got unceremoniously dumped whilst
browsing some BBS.  It may have happened -it probably did- but it
didn't stick with me as some tremendous disadvantage.

Honestly, given the limited capability of the Apple ][, the computer
probably froze long before the line noise had a chance to kill any
connection. ;-)