Life in the fast lane

[sluckey]

OK old guys. Remember when 2400 baud was not enough? Then jump to 9600, still slow. Then came affordable 14.4K. Game changer! Catch me now. Bulletin Boards, naked women, pirated software! Then USR quickly followed with 28.8K and 56K. We were smoking!

Then WWW really kicked in and made all that dial-up stuff obsolete. Mind you, I don't regret it at all. 

Anyhow, I was digging through some old laptop bags/storage bags and found my old Intel 14.4 modem. But I don't even have a phone land line. I thought there was a tear, but it was just a splash of IceHouse.   

Thought I'd just let y'all reminisce a bit with me. Enjoy...

[shooter]

 
my 1st was a radioshack acoustic coupled 300 baud!  I took it to my 1st civilian tech school, 24 weeks, hacked into the mainframe, looked around, found our class folder and locked it.   
the instructor wasn't amused
all with a Commadore 64
I have a 10th gen i7 connecting at the speed of light and I can't find sheeet, let alone hack anything, it's like I'm reverting back to a true Analog man

[RadioComm]

Looks like I'm not the only hoarder around here. Makes me feel better 

Pictured is my top of the line 2400 modem, that I paid big bucks for it to get me through the last years in college. And not a DB9 serial port, it was full 25 pin RS232. Had the amber colored dumb terminal. A Zenith I think. Kept that after college a little, but can't even remember how I got rid of it. Still remember waking up my girlfriend at 2AM with the dial up tones. She hated it. Can't blame her.

[shooter]

I passed my 64 and 128 to a barista paying his way to become a Computer Engineer, all my prop burning stuff, hackers toolkit, software...a couple months go by and he's like, "Finally got the 128 working, had to wait for the video interface box, those games are way better than the modern crap"
circa 2010


this is as far back as I go, everything else is dust in the wind.
extra credit if you know the front right port, for some reason, ever now and again when I hear the alphabet folks letters stung together, my brain thinks of that port 
couple of homebrew cable testers, circa '93-ish

[Blueboozer]

I passed my 64 and 128 to a barista paying his way to become a Computer Engineer, all my prop burning stuff, hackers toolkit, software...a couple months go by and he's like, "Finally got the 128 working, had to wait for the video interface box, those games are way better than the modern crap"
circa 2010


this is as far back as I go, everything else is dust in the wind.
extra credit if you know the front right port, for some reason, ever now and again when I hear the alphabet folks letters stung together, my brain thinks of that port 
couple of homebrew cable testers, circa '93-ish

Looks like a PCMCIA (PC Card) slot. My first modem was a Realistic (who could afford Hayes when you’re raising 3 kids) manual 300baud modem. It had a switch to throw up for for originate and down for receive. Dialing had to be done manually. You could literally read the text as it was coming down. Took 45 minutes to download 130K disk images. I can’t remember what was on the disks, honestly.

[scstill]

Years ago when I worked for Hughes Aircraft we built defense radar systems powered by the mity intel 286.
Gobs of processing power and speed too....

[acheld]

Geez, you guys, I threw all that crap away.  At one point, I had a 300 baud Hayes, then a 1200, followed by what?  In the late 90's I switched over to an ISDN line.   That unit is still working in my brother's house (?why?  ).

Yeah, it would be nice to have all that sit on a shelf where I could admire it, and my past life, but damn, the amount dust it collected was too much! 

So in the bin it went, and that was years ago.

Truth is, I understood the 286.  Not so with today's stuff.   But who woulda thought an ARM would be so fast?

[shooter]

I understood the 286

I knew the 1802 uP well, had the op-codes memorized
moved to the Motorola's 6500(?)
then when everyone jumped to intel, I went back to the uP, settled on the PIC 16CXXX
now I landscape, garden, do "proof of concept" engineering on things that work when "things we take for granted" quit working.


the PCMCIA module was a 56k modem, when my boss gave me the Gateway and said the acronym, I laughed, said The CIA isn't hiding it any more
Personal Computer Module, CIA approved 
Now that AI is doubling it's "intelligence" every 48hrs, things will be fun again 

[PRR]

I had 300 baud acoustic modems (usta be we could not connect wires to Ma Bell).

I had both a 110baud and a "300baud" printer terminal. (The "300" was more like 250 flat-out but would often keep-up with intermittent 300baud streams because: Buffering!)
video

[RadioComm]

Geez, you guys, I threw all that crap away.
...
But who woulda thought an ARM would be so fast?

"Crap"? Throw it away? Why? I may need it someday. Take my mid 80's 20 meg hard drive (pictured). I use as a door stopper for my basement. If I buy myself a boat (*big* if), I could use it as a boat anchor  Hoarding has its benefits 

Worked with both a 20 pin Intel 8086 and a Zilog Z80. And agreed, who could have imagined the processing power of an ARM, let alone a USB wifi dongle with a micro sized radio chip capable of handling TX/RX of OFDM rf signals.

[PRR]

....Then WWW really kicked in ....

30 years ago, one decision altered the course of our connected world
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/30/1172276538/world-wide-web-internet-anniversary

CERN celebrates 30 years since releasing the web to the public domain
https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/02/world_wide_web_30th_anniversary/

[shooter]

...and that's when the web slooowed way down.  with P2P, using FTP, you could grab a complete semesters worth of work from say MIT, Cal-tech... in 15 minutes.  Then everyone quit using text files and the world went full graphics to dazzle the world with pics of cats and food 

[RadioComm]

>>>> Internet Boom

So when I say that I worked with an Intel 8086, actually I was doing embedded firmware development on an Intel 8086 unit. This unit was an "Interactive Television" appliance that hooked up to your television and connected via two way RF to an interactive broadcasting station. This was to be the test setup anyway. Obviously this was pre-internet boom and pre-digital broadcast tv (atsc). The initial functionality was really limited. It provided home access to an electronic tv guide that allowed you to program your VCR. You were also able to "like" commercials. And that was it for the initial testing. The company got FCC approval to broacast in some small town in Illinois, and were looking for volunteers to test the system. The investors were heralding this as "The Future of Television". A ridiculous amount of time and capital venture money was pumped into this. But they never made to it market or even to test their system in that small town. I guess the investors didn't see the internet boom tidal wave coming. But it was huge, and was coming fast and furious. When it hit, it obliterated a whole lot of time, technology, and money.

>>>> ftp

For the Unix/Linux users, there is the wget command line tool that allows you to rip entire web sites.

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/wget.1.html

ttfn

[shooter]

For the Unix/Linux users,

and that's why I gave up coding, all those rules and dashes n commas and and
give me
MOV 21F7 028C
done!
 


My 1st hello world was on a Burroughs(sp?) mainframe, had to punch my own cards, feed the beast, few seconds later the tracker feed started up, walla, I was 14.  I had A LOT of help from the software engineer.


we were on an extended deployment, 8 months and only 1 3 day port call.  Most of the lead Techs smoked some herb, we brainstormed Ideas, then 3 of us hacked my Radar, wrote code, debugged, then about 30 days, once of weed later, we had the satellite signal displayed on the 200 pound spectrum analyzer.  We chose the satellite that transmitted the early 80's "pay-per-view".  the "blackbox" used to decode the signal got lost "In-transit", we put everything back the way Raytheon had it and played cards for entertainment til we got back home.   

[scstill]

Me too...
Back in the day we programed in Fortran and submitted to mainframe with punched cards.
Then you'd wait to get it run by the next day, only to find a syntax error.
And don't even think about dropping your card box.

[acheld]

Yah, we programmed on paper tape first, and graduated to punch cards, which were more forgiving when making changes.   

This was in HS, so you knew what was gonna happen.  So most of us used a marker on the edge of the stack to help when we "tripped" in the hall way, which seemed to be a weekly occurrence for some.  Of course, each line of Fortran code was numbered, so you could put it all back together when needed.  But, yes those boxes were protected . . .

[DummyLoad]

Somewhere buried in my shed, there's a Cromemco Z2D, a Z80 2MHz S-100 bus based system that ran/runs CPM, remember that OS? Pre MSDOS stuff, ya I've being hacking for a few years... 


--Pete

[ShoemanGB]

...and that's when the web slooowed way down.  with P2P, using FTP, you could grab a complete semesters worth of work from say MIT, Cal-tech... in 15 minutes.  Then everyone quit using text files and the world went full graphics to dazzle the world with pics of cats and food 

That woke up a memory Shooter.  One of my best friends and fellow homebrewer went to MIT mid '80's and one break he brought me home a huge printed out binder (that green and plain alternating line tractor feed(?) paper landscape style in a blue plastic cover) of a homebrewers usergroup mailing list kinda thing.  I did not quite understand the concept of what he had access to but what thankful for all the info.  I'm sure they actually spent some time using that computer for submarine hull designs when they were on the clock

[PRR]

...Remember when 2400 baud was not enough?....

[shooter]

guess he doesn't subscribe to the "Patience is a virtue thing"


teaching 90's teens I ran across a study that "measured" the attention span of the average teen, 9 seconds.  The article described the common garden slug having an attention span of 11 seconds   

[shooter]

this showed up in my feed
and we think computers were slow in the '90s,


the clock speed falls into the typical tremolo range...Hmmm

[PRR]

Clock speed is unclear without knowing how much stuff can be done in each clock.

The contemporary and similar Harvard Mark I would do an add/subtract in 5 or 10 seconds, log (sin, tan) functions over a minute.

[Lectroid]

Clock speed is unclear without knowing how much stuff can be done in each clock.
The contemporary and similar Harvard Mark I would do an add/subtract in 5 or 10 seconds, log (sin, tan) functions over a minute.

That's still faster than I can do it...   

[scstill]

I recall starting engineering college with a slide rule.
Fortunately the TI SR10 was released just before Freshman year.
Wasn't long after when they started letting us use it on tests.
The square root button was a game changer.

[shooter]

 
yep
I was in computer class, big grin on my face, the instructor asked "ok, dave, what are you up to know"
"was just wondering if the CPU gets bored waiting on the rest of the system"

[sluckey]

Fortunately the TI SR10 was released just before Freshman year.
Wasn't long after when they started letting us use it on tests.
The square root button was a game changer.

Best hundred dollars I ever spent! 

[PRR]

> I recall starting engineering college with a slide rule.

Bourns (the trimmer resistor people) had a 75th anniversary showing founder Marlan's tools.