31–40 of 46 posts
We had a bank of dial-ins to the college back in the 90's. I loved the old US Robotics equipment. I use a modem sound file for my wake up sound. It gets you out of bed mighty quickly.
Did anyone that didn’t live inside the CO ever actually connect at 56k, or was this only the stuff of legends? Edit: My personal max downlink record was 48 kbps, despite being subscribed to 56k service. This is why I ask. This also brings back memories of hovering the mouse cursor over the dial-up icon in the system tray in Windows to see your line speed.
As we went digital we used PM3's. I saw some 53k connections but it wasn't very common. Most common was 48k to 50k.
The PM2's were an amazing machine. We never had an issue with them in years of service. The PM3's were buggy until the later years. Eventually the firmware got good and they were very reliable. Rocky start though.
In college I had a 300 baud connection to a school PDP-11, with a phone handset coupler. The modem dropped the connection constantly so the handshake connect was constant. And those sounds were increasingly annoying. You whippersnappers with your always on internet have no idea how tough it was for us brave pioneers.
300 baud modems used frequency shift keying, meaning they generated two different sounds for 0 and 1 bits. The sound frequencies were high enough that the receiving modem didn't need a full 1/300 of a second to decide if it was getting a 0 or a 1. Based on that, if you had a good phone connection it was possible to reconfigure the UARTs on both ends to operate at 450 baud instead of 300. This gave you a 50% increase…
Did anyone that didn’t live inside the CO ever actually connect at 56k, or was this only the stuff of legends? Edit: My personal max downlink record was 48 kbps, despite being subscribed to 56k service. This is why I ask. This also brings back memories of hovering the mouse cursor over the dial-up icon in the system tray in Windows to see your line speed.
Owned an ISP. When we started we used USR Sportsters at 28.8k then flashed these up to support 33.6k. They were hooked up to Portmaster 2's. As we went digital we used PM3's. I saw some 53k connections but it wasn't very common. Most common was 48k to 50k. The PM2's were an amazing machine. We never had an issue with them in years of service. The PM3's were buggy until the later years. Eventually the firmware got goo…
Later on a place I worked at used old PM2s to run serial consoles. The things used a lot of space, naturally.
Use the power of Linux and minimodem to hear modem sounds... And transmit a file — wirelessly! The future is now! Sender: $ cat /etc/passwd | minimodem --tx 300 Receiver: $ minimodem --rx 300
The way I heard it, the higher the bitrate, the better the grade.
Use the power of Linux and minimodem to hear modem sounds... And transmit a file — wirelessly! The future is now! Sender: $ cat /etc/passwd | minimodem --tx 300 Receiver: $ minimodem --rx 300
#!/bin/bash
cat /dev/zero | minimodem --tx 2400 & sleep 0.25; pkill minimodem
cat /dev/zero | minimodem --tx 2400 & sleep 0.25; pkill minimodem
cat /dev/zero | minimodem --tx 3600 & sleep 0.25; pkill minimodem
cat /dev/zero | minimodem --tx 3600 & sleep 0.25; pkill minimodem
cat /dev/zero | minimodem --tx 4000 & sleep 0.25; pkill minimodem
cat /dev/zero | minimodem --tx 4000 & sleep 0.25; pkill minimodem
cat /dev/zero | minimodem --tx 3600 & sleep 0.5; pkill minimodem
Did anyone that didn’t live inside the CO ever actually connect at 56k, or was this only the stuff of legends? Edit: My personal max downlink record was 48 kbps, despite being subscribed to 56k service. This is why I ask. This also brings back memories of hovering the mouse cursor over the dial-up icon in the system tray in Windows to see your line speed.