Wednesday, May 18, 2011

You Get What You Pay For

Frakking Google Blogger is running about as slowly tonight for posting and editing as though I was using a 1200 baud modem. I ought to go find a CGA or monochrome monitor.
on or about

2 comments:

  1. Mule Breath5/18/2011 10:45 PM

    Orange text on a green screen suddenly popped into my memory. The Internet was something called "arpanet," and that "modem" was a phone cradle. If the speed was anywhere near 1,200 baud I'd be very surprised.

    ReplyDelete
  2. BadTux5/19/2011 1:41 AM

    The phone cradles were 300 baud modems, Mule, that used acoustic coupling rather than the choke-and-capacitor coupling used in modern moderms. The way we dealt with that slow speed (which was mandated by Ma Bell, which refused to allow direct connection of gear to "their" network, even the phones were hard-wired, there were no RJ-11 plugs) was that there were "smart" terminals that allowed you to edit a screen full of data then transmit the whole screen at once, then operate on the next screen of data, so you didn't have to wait for 300 baud responses to e.g. hitting cursor keys. The one I'm most familiar with was the Delta Data 4000, which I used hooked up to a Honeywell mainframe back in, err, olden days, okay? IBM had their 3270 terminal, which operated on the same basic principle, but I avoided IBM mainframes somehow. So anyhow... 300 baud was *slow*, even with smart terminals. Now I have a 5 gigabit per second cable modem. That's faster than the data transfer between CPU's and main memory back then, eeep! Some things such compared to the "good ole' days", but technology ain't one of'em...

    - Badtux the Reminiscing Geek

    ReplyDelete

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