. .. ..
______________________
\ __,,_ \
\ //_ //// _\ _\\ .. .
\ / ) \\\’ >( |\
\ |( ) _ ‘ )| \
\| \______/ /____/ | \
. .. |______ ~ ______| \
\ \ .).) \
\ \ ( \ . ..
\ \ ` `-.________ \
\ \ _\______ \ \
.. .. \ \ , \| \
\ `. ____.-’\ \ \
\ \ \ \
b’ger/VK \______________`. \___\ .
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\ \
‘-`

WHY YOU YOUNG PUNKS AND YOUR FANCY SCHMANTZY MIGABYTES AND SUCH!!!!

Nice post Cranky.

When that SABRE link died, all those accounts were transfered to Travelocity.

Now compuserve is finally dying (at least the “Calssic” access) this month.

Man, we getting old or what!

I drooled over a 1200 baud glass teletype back in that era, and actually used some Model 33 Teletypes with Bell 103 (110 baud “Omni”) couplers. Worked….

The first one I ever owned personally (as distinct from the former day job) was a cheap Radio Shack direct-wired modem. 300 baud…. It worked well enough that five or six years later, when they about gave ‘em away, I got one for one of our divisions as a total disaster backup. (Running 1200 baud MNP by then.)

My favorite story was a 14,400 Microcom or Hayes with an idiot light that indicated MNP was working.

El Presidente demanded that I rent a Toshiba laptop for somebody or other in the company, and get it in NOW! I spec’d MNP or LAPM because I knew what his situation would be in FL, and when the laptop came in, I loaded it with the necessary software as EL Presidente was beating on me to get it back out to FedEx. Then I tested the thing by calling a host in a back room. Very strange – lots of line noise…. Our phone system was hilariously flaky, but the MNP error detection easily handled that.

Took a walk into the back room and the MNP idiot light was out….

A few minutes of muttering and init string hammering resulted in a definite error message when I tried to tell the modem to switch on MNP. So now I gotta tell the boss that this box wasn’t going to work unless we spring for a Worldport (remember those?) and that’d take a couple days, AND the guy in FL would never be able to install it. (That guy had ONE item on his menu – DOS in those days – and used to call me for help on what to do to start his program…. He actually used the dumb thing or I would have kept him out of that loop entirely.

Naturally, the boss didn’t understand…. When I bought my first 1200 baud MNP modem (maybe $850), he dropped a note from the Wall Street Journal selling modems for $90-ish. For a Commodore…. “Why can’t we use those?” Never did quite explain it….

I was about to go tell El Presidente the bad news when the UPS truck arrived with the FL guy’s old laptop, back from repair. A quick check-out, and it went back to Shipping for a FedEx ride. Then Toshiba Tech Support (tied into the rental deal) calls me to tell me that the rental agency had goofed – the modem in that box didn’t support MNP….

I told the rental folks I wanted full credit, and would be sending the thing back as soon as I got an RMA documenting that. Then somebody in another division found out that we had a loose laptop and had enough “pull” to demand it. My explanations that it was rented were ignored. (RENTED, not leased!) For a while…. She did buy the Worldport, btw….

Eventually the other cost-cutters (she was supposed to be one) got wind of this and bought it for her… I couldn’t get printers for “production”, but…. They eventually fired me. My replacement needed an assistant within a couple weeks…. Never work for family – I would have had a great “age discrimination” suit….

Regards,

I recall in the early 1980’s I dabbled in the Apple ][ warez scene, and the modem to have then was the Novation Applecat. This internal modem had the wonderful ability to transition from Bell 103 300 baud full-duplex mode to Bell 202 1200 baud half-duplex. The best implementation of this was through a program called CatSend which would function as a terminal at 300 baud, but when in file transfer mode (uni-directional) would step up to 1200 baud. It took about 25 minutes to send a 140K floppy versus well over an hour at 300 baud, and it had the little bonus of being able to text message back and forth while the transfer was taking place.

Imagine that. People were piggybacking text on a datastream years before SMS messaging came along.

Because gopher net sites loaded fast and the graphic using sites loaded slow on my machine I wasn’t all that happy about the change at the time.

I have sometimes wondered if some astute business or organization with limited resources or just an urge to save money might still be using the gopher net to shove data around at blazing speeds without running up a big ISP bill.

…

Yes.