The end of the token ring era?

Posted May 17, 2012 13:25 UTC (Thu) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246)
In reply to: The end of the token ring era? by pr1268
Parent article: The end of the token ring era?

Kids these days. :-)

My first modem was a 300 baud acoustic modem I scored off a disused DecWriter II. The DecWriter and modem were sitting on the porch of one of the houses along my paper route. I asked the owner if I could have it. The owner said I could have the whole kit, but I settled for the modem, seeing as it was the only thing I could carry with me on my bike. ;-)

Granted, even by then (~1990), it was a woefully out of date modem. But, it was the right price for someone whose only income was a paper route in a small town.

I still have it somewhere...

At any rate, I guess Dilbert will have to find another excuse to give the PHB about the network.

The end of the token ring era?

Posted May 18, 2012 23:55 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

Please. I was overjoyed when I upgraded to a 300 BAUD acoustic modem.

It meant I rarely had to use the "drain" key, which tells the computer to discard everything in its output buffer because you don't have time to wait for it to deliver it to you at 10 characters per second.

The end of the token ring era?

Posted May 19, 2012 0:17 UTC (Sat) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

Heh. You must be slightly older than I. Bell 103 was introduced to the world in 1962, about 13 years before I was. ;-)

Speaking of crappy modem stories: Unfortunately for me, I didn't have a proper phone more my acoustic modem. I had one of those "flat-phones" that became so popular in the late 80s, the kind that was all integrated in the handset, with a little flip-out mic that served as the "latch hook."

So, needless to say, it didn't make a very good acoustic seal with the modem, so I had to be very quiet while using the modem. Meanwhile, everyone in the house could hear the carrier tone coming out of the modem. (90 year old farmhouse w/ almost zilch for insulation.) The "good" old days.

I remember almost getting banned from an BBS with that modem for downloading a 15K GIF. The SysOp didn't mind me doing text-only on there because 30CPS isn't too much slower than reading speed. Tying up the line for ~15 minutes for an ugly GIF -- call back when I get a faster modem. (Ideally, it would only take ~500 seconds to dl. a 15K GIF, but XModem sucks pretty hard.)