Mon, Jul. 7th, 2008, 11:20 am
I own the net

The cable installation went smoothly on Saturday.  We're now getting all data services -- TV, phone, and internet -- through one pipe.  The net bandwidth is 10Mbps down, 1 up.  That, my friends, is what we professionals refer to as "screamingly fast".  My spine tingles every time I watch the progress bar on a download.  Yes, I'm a geek, I know -- but I'm a very happy geek.

The first modem I ever used on a home system carried 1200bps (on a good day, with a tailwind, downhill).  It's rather awe-inspiring to realize that home connection speeds have increased by a factor of roughly 10,000 -- four orders of magnitude -- over the past 25 years.
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Mon, Jul. 7th, 2008 11:24 pm (UTC)
[info]aspasia93

congrats! congrats!

My cable company offered me 15Mbps, but 7Mbps is already plenty fast enough for me, and whenever my $29 "6 month intro rate" expires, I just drop down to dragass 1.5Mbps for a month or two at $25 until they call me back with a "great introductory offer!" again. Now if only my cell phone company would be so nice ... LOL!
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Tue, Jul. 8th, 2008 05:18 am (UTC)
[info]slq

What, you never used a 300 baud modem with acoustical coupler? (i.e. you had to dial the phone, then fit the handset into these rubber cups so the modem could "talk" over the phone). If the phone line was noisy (like when it rained), random characters would be introduced onto the screen of the terminal.

Seems prehistoric, but I was using one of those in 1979. Yikes, has it been 30 years already?

The Hayes Smartmodem (remember those?) didn't come out until 1981.
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Tue, Jul. 8th, 2008 06:48 am (UTC)
[info]isomeme

I used a few acoustic-coupled teletype terminals (in fact I first learned to program on one), but none at home. We had one at my high school, and we discovered you could make it print by whistling into the coupler. Ah, young geeks at play.

My first home data connection was a Hayes 1200-baud external modem. I still remember the sense of awe when I connected to my first BBS; I wish I could remember which one it was.


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Tue, Jul. 8th, 2008 06:18 pm (UTC)
[info]ommadawn: memory lane...

FIDO

and i remember how exited i was when i found that there were gateways to "the internet" from FIDO, even though I never used it.

Have you ever sought out your first usenet post on google groups?
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Tue, Jul. 8th, 2008 06:41 pm (UTC)
[info]isomeme: Re: memory lane...

Man, those were the days. I ran a FIDOnet BBS for a while in the mid-80s. I loved tweaking the mail and group forwarding settings in concert with the sysops on adjacent nodes to make everything more efficient. "Okay, I'll call you at 2:20am, and then you schedule your call to Modem Magick at 2:40am so that stuff will get picked up, and then..."

And yes, the first Usenet post of mine that I can find is on the old sf-lovers group, gushing about David Brin's novel Startide Rising. It holds up pretty well. :)
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Tue, Jul. 8th, 2008 07:26 pm (UTC)
[info]ommadawn

a funny thing about when you got dropped in those days.. it would put all these random characters, but many times it was a string of U's (sometimes with umlauts, for some reason) and when you got back online to whoever you might have been chatting with, you could say:

*prepare a groan*

"I got U'd, babe"
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Wed, Jul. 9th, 2008 12:52 am (UTC)
[info]baal_kriah

1200 bps? You were jamming. My first modem was 300 bps.
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