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> Introduced 1986; 30 years ago Now I feel old. I remember when this was new and clever. Made downloading from BBS's much nicer over XModem. At 2400 baud or wh
by anexprogrammer 10y ago
> Introduced 1986; 30 years ago
Now I feel old. I remember when this was new and clever. Made downloading from BBS's much nicer over XModem. At 2400 baud or whatever was current then!
- ghaff 10y agoThere were a bunch of different something-Modems around that time that fiddled around with window sizes, retransmission approaches, batch transmission, and so forth. In case anyone is wondering, there was a YModem (also developed by Forsberg) in addition to XModem and ZModem along with various variants. I even interned for a small company one summer that implemented one of these for a timesharing service using Prime minis.
- dsmithatx 10y agoI was 12 years old. I had a 2400 baud and ZModem was the second greatest thing that year. Watching Haley's comet on my birthday would be #1.
- hilop 10y agoHalley modems and Halley's comet!
- ptaipale 10y agoYup, the first problem with Xmodem was that it transferred sectors (as in CP/M) and thus file size was always padded with zeros to a multiple fof 128 bytes. Then came Ymodem which fixed this, and then Zmodem which was considerably faster (windowing protocol) and allowed resuming interrupted transfers and handled CRC checksums.
- anexprogrammer 10y agoThe resume was the clincher. You'd spent over an hour getting 3/4 the way through downloading an enormous 1M file to drop to line noise. OK, start again... Saving 400+ for a Courier HST to go an insanely fast 12k (very rarely). They beat everything else at holding a line though.
- sllabres 10y agoSaving for a Zyxel and get 16800 :) Lots of good memories for the Elite 2864ID (ISDN) and U-1496E. I had a project ~15 years ago with several thousand FAX Clients, and interestingly we had problems with every hardware card or modem we used except the (even then quite old) U-1496E which worked without flaw, whatever customer send data.
- anexprogrammer 10y agoAs soon as you saved and bought, they announced 56k! Fun times. :p Talking of modems, a place I worked around '90 had racks full of modems for customer dial-in. What never occurred to me until I saw it was each one needed a phone line - half the back wall was covered with phone points! Some years later a project was trying to do caller ID to computer. Simple idea, ridiculous number of issues. We found one modem that actually talked UK CLI of the dozens that claimed to. UK Cable spoke US CLI.
- hansjorg 10y agoI got my first modem in 1990 or thereabouts. For some reason there was still a lot of XModem use back then, but it was gradually replaced by ZModem. Some years later, just before BBSes were obsoleted by the internet, several multiplexing protocols appeared which let you chat or play a MUD while downloading or even upload and download at the same time. Can't remember any names, but these protocols were only popular for a very brief time before the internet took over. I also recall some BBSes survived a while into the internet age by adding telnet ports. You ran your normal dialer software with a telnet driver that took the hostname as the phone number and then would end up running ZModem and the likes over telnet.
- fapjacks 10y agoThere are still BBSes surviving today accessible via telnet. You can still go play LORD, MajorMUD, TW2K...
- desireco42 10y agoI think autostart was huge for me, aside from faster transfers. It was ages ago, yet it was like yesterday.