4 ms·

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 wa

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.

hagbard_c 5y ago
Hey, I resent that! I built my own 300 baud modem from parts I got from a dumpster, more or less guessing my way through the circuit for lack of documentatino. It worked, it had lots of blinking LEDs, a sturdy plywood box with a mass of switches which made it look like an ICBM launch console but it did get me online with my Commodore-64. Initially I had to dial by hand using a rotary phone, later I made a pulse-dial circuit and program so I could do some war-dialing - at 300 baud. On a shared phone line in a student house, with one of those pulse counters which clonked loudly when another quarter was added to the phone bill. At night. Boy, did they support my late-night hobbies...
litoE 5y ago
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 in speed!
- thwarted 5y ago
  I was able to do this with my C64, reducing the amount of time (cracked) games took to download, and reduced the upset my mom had about me being on the phone all the time.
ck2 5y ago
First computer exposure for me was phone coupler 300-baud modem on a paper terminal to compuserve billed by the hour (was it minute? or hour? I think rounded to hour) Eventually got a tiny green-screen terminal and discovered I could record the modem sessions on a tape player and play them back offline sometimes! When TRS-80 came out and then 1200baud modems I thought the future was amazing.

hagbard_c 5y ago

Hey, I resent that! I built my own 300 baud modem from parts I got from a dumpster, more or less guessing my way through the circuit for lack of documentatino. It worked, it had lots of blinking LEDs, a sturdy plywood box with a mass of switches which made it look like an ICBM launch console but it did get me online with my Commodore-64. Initially I had to dial by hand using a rotary phone, later I made a pulse-dial circuit and program so I could do some war-dialing - at 300 baud. On a shared phone line in a student house, with one of those pulse counters which clonked loudly when another quarter was added to the phone bill. At night. Boy, did they support my late-night hobbies...

litoE 5y ago

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 in speed!

thwarted 5y ago
I was able to do this with my C64, reducing the amount of time (cracked) games took to download, and reduced the upset my mom had about me being on the phone all the time.

ck2 5y ago

First computer exposure for me was phone coupler 300-baud modem on a paper terminal to compuserve billed by the hour (was it minute? or hour? I think rounded to hour) Eventually got a tiny green-screen terminal and discovered I could record the modem sessions on a tape player and play them back offline sometimes! When TRS-80 came out and then 1200baud modems I thought the future was amazing.