4 ms·

BBSing at 300 Bits per Second

64 points by zdw 4y ago

sf97ahgf 4y ago
Thank goodness we moved on to broadband.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  There were some short lived quirky technologies at the end of the dial up era, such as using multiple 56k modems bonded into a single connection, the increase throughput. Since this required two telephone lines on both ends, in addition to four modems, only the most data hungry went to that degree of effort. Most simply got broadband when it was offered.
  - ytjohn 4y ago
    As someone that worked at a dial up ISP and had an ISDN connection at home, modem bonding was really fascinating. At the ISP side, these were all T1 lines, so every line was technically 64k capable. The analog 56k modems rarely made a true 56k connection. However, there were some customers that lived one telephone pole away from the CO, and we would see them connected at 57600. One close customer would show at some oddball speed like 58k or 59k (though we don't know what they actually got at their end). But for ISDN, each channel was the full 64k and that would bond two channels to 128k. I had a cisco modem that would let me use either channel as an analog phone. So it would connect up both channels, and when a call came in, drop down to one 64k channel. It was incredibly reliable. Even when I got DSL, I kept the ISDN for quite a while because it had more consistent upload speed.
    - chiph 4y ago
      I was on ISDN for about a year, using a 3Com modem. Compared to dial-up, it was amazing as the connect time was only 3-4 seconds. No more listening to the buzzy connect sequence trying to guess what rate it would negotiate. But something happened to the line and BellSouth could not get it working again. After a couple of rounds of "It passes our tests" and "It still doesn't work" I gave up and went to Time-Warner's RoadRunner cable internet. My ISDN ISP was Uzi Nissan, of nissan-dot-com fame.
    - droid_mike 4y ago
      ISDN was the standard for "next generation" phone lines. It was never really meant for data. The design was to handle converted analog signals their new digital network. The demand for true broadband upended that plan, tough, and not it's just voice over much faster IP technologies.
    - bcrl 4y ago
      I worked on the drivers and firmware for a few ISDN cards back in 1997-1999. One of my performance optimizations for the BRI cards cut ping times from ~30ms to ~16ms. The Motorola MC68302's puny 68000 CPU took a long time to memcpy() packets from the buffer the HDLC controller would DMA them into back to the shared memory with the host. Eliminating that copy was more of an improvement than I expected. The PRI (T1) cards using Intel i960 CPUs, which were quite nice embedded CPUs. The HDLC controller was capable of using individual 64k channels or bonding them together for fractional of full T1. It was a bit late in the lifetime of ISDN, but I learned a heck of a lot about embedded systems from that job.
- zikduruqe 4y ago
  Aw come on. The BBS days were awesome. There still are some to play around with. https://telnet.org/htm/places.htm https://telnet.org/htm/places.htm
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
metadat 4y ago
What year was 300bps the state of the art? Around 1995-1996 I had a 14.4k modem and it was pretty fast at the time.
- daneel_w 4y ago
  It wasn't the state of the art in the early to mid 1980s, but that's when they were still popular. The famous Supra Modem 2400 arrived on the shelves in the late 1980s. I had a 14k4 modem in 1994, and a 28k8 one in 1995. Add.: the 14k4 modem cost me an equivalent of about $350 in 1994.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
    I was about to ask how much they cost but you’d already edited your post. I remember hitting 48.8/56k in ~1996 after I got a modem for Christmas (aged 5). Now I’m on 1000/50mbit, or ~17.5 thousand times faster than my first connection if my math is correct.
    - lokedhs 4y ago
      My first connection was 1200 bps, and now I have 2 Gb/s. That's over 1 million times faster. Downloading a program for my Atari ST at maybe 500 kB in size took an hour. Now it would be difficult to even measure the time needed. It's difficult to explain just how slow downloading things used to be.
  - II2II 4y ago
    Not only was it expensive, but it was a crazy time to buy a modem. There was also 16.8k and 19.2k, which were proprietary if I recall correctly. (I had a 19.2k modem, and was overjoyed when I found a BBS that I could connect to at that speed.) Around that time you also had 28.8k and 33.6k, which I think were standardized by were incredibly short lived. I remember sticking to what was effectively 14.4k until I jumped to cable internet. It did not make much sense to upgrade since ISP rates were lower for slower modems and serial modems were also more expensive. When I did jump to cable internet, I took some flak because of my obsolete computers. I was far happier with an always-on connection on an obsolete *ix box than dial-up on a faster PC (since I didn't have the money to have both at the time).
kcplate 4y ago
Reminds me a bit of a HP mainframe I was an operator on in the mid 80s. We had essentially a paper/typewriter style terminal so that it would record all input and output direct to continuous paper that would be saved for auditing if needed. Type a command, read your book until you heard it print a response, go read the response and do the next step. Repeat.
- linker3000 4y ago
  I had similar on a VAX 11/750. The LA120 DECwriter was connected to the system via a serial port mux adapter. One night the mux adapter glitched and reset itself back to defaults, which turned on local echo, so it reflected 'login:' back to the VAX, which responded with the password prompt. This prompt was reflected too, giving an incorrect password response...which was reflected back to a new login prompt...etc..rinse, repeat all night. Everything was printed on the LA120 until the fanfold paper ran out. I came in the next day and could not see the LA120 due to the amount of paper on top of it.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
Interesting that the terminal appears to have at least an 80 character buffer, as it is able to print after an LF and while performing a CR. My first modem was 300 baud and while it was painfully slow, text interfaces of the era tended to be very efficient. File transfers of high resolution images is where it tended to get very painful, especially since watching the block count increase (if even that) wasn't anywhere near as engaging as actually navigating through menus and reading information.
DonHopkins 4y ago
Modems used to cost a dollar a baud.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  This was just something I remembered observing (ads in computer magazines for 300 baud modems for $299, 1200 baud modems for $1199). But I just ran across a reference in wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_Microcomputer_Products#Competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_Microcomputer_Products#C... >Competition >The modem market in the 1970s was very simple and stagnant. Modems tended to sell at US$1 per baud. Hayes saw no need to be different—the original Hayes 300 baud modem sold for US$299 retail. At that price point, Hayes could build a "Cadillac of modems", using high-quality components, an extruded aluminum case, and an acrylic front panel with a number of LED indicators. As the modem market expanded, competitors quickly copied the Hayes command set and often the Hayes industrial design as well. To compete with Hayes on price, early competitors manufactured modems using low-cost components that were often unreliable. Hayes quickly gained a reputation for high quality, and for a time held a 50% market share.
thakoppno 4y ago
Any amateur radio operators in the Bay Area doing any digital modes on VHF/UHF? There’s a pretty neat Winlink project written in Go [1](https://github.com/la5nta/pat https://github.com/la5nta/pat ) that I’ve wanted to use. If anyone is out there interested in collaborating, please let me know.
- tonyarkles 4y ago
  I have one of these sitting on the bench and have dreamt for a while of setting up some kind of BBS on 70cm. Life has perpetually gotten in the way though. Also… I’m a long long way from the Bay Area :). 73 VE5AJA Edit: forgot the link https://wiki.analog.com/university/tools/pluto https://wiki.analog.com/university/tools/pluto
- joerango 4y ago
  I'd be interested in trying it out. I currently have a 2m packet node in the Bay Area using an HT and direwolf.
  - thakoppno 4y ago
    awesome my call sign is kn6mxi look me up on qrz for contact info
herpderperator 4y ago
How does the Whisper Writer work?
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  Check the link, he shows some internals. The printer seems to be a thermal type judging by the (lack of) noise.
whartung 4y ago
My Model 100 had a built in 300 baud modem. It was a modular plug vs an acoustic coupler, but still 300 baud. The nice thing about the terminal program on the 100 was that you could upload text files. So, on a BBS you’d enter New Message, then upload the text file. And it loaded just like typing it in. No Xmodem or anything, just “type it in”. Not a real problem at 300 baud. But the nice feature of the 100 was that even though it was a 40 column display, you could set the right margin to something like 78 or 80, and it would word wrap your lines. So it would format fine for the BBS. Hardly rocket science but just super useful. Also, 300 baud worked really well with a 40 x 8 display. Filled it up “fast enough” vs a 80 x 24 display. More than usable for BBSing in bed (difficult to do with a VT100).
- walrus01 4y ago
  As I recall from talking to older people, the model 100 with an acoustic coupler was an extremely popular solution for journalists to quickly file stories from remote locations/while traveling. All you needed was the model 100, a payphone, and the coupler.
  - droid_mike 4y ago
    I worked at Radio Shack in the early 1990s. I was shocked to see that Radio Shack was still selling the Model 100s (acutually, model 102 by that time) as it was at least a 10 year old design by then. The manager told me that journalists still liked to buy them, because it was rugged, super portable, ran on batteries, had a great keyboard, and they could upload their text over a phone line. All I can say is their articles must have been very short as the memory limitations of the device were severe.
    - walrus01 4y ago
      I might not remember this right, but I don't think that the memory limitation was a factor, as they were often used with rudimentary dialup terminal software as a dumb serial terminal dialing in to a newspaper run system. The story would sometimes be typed live from the reporter's notes directly into the shell session of the remote (minicomputer, etc) system on the far end. This mean that even if there was 5-8KB of text it wouldn't be a problem. Then any formatting/line wrapping/typo and other mistakes from the raw submitted story would be fixed by copy editors from their local workstations.
ck2 4y ago
Something neat I discovered about my first 300 baud terminal is that I could record the connection on a tape recorder and play it back and the whole process would work for a replay. There was just wide enough tolerance and such a small part of the audio spectrum that it worked. Stopped working with 1200 baud modems. And 2400bps modems initially had a fight over compatibility, 9600bps went completely out the window, hayes vs everyone else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_Microcomputer_Products#Higher_speeds_and_increased_competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_Microcomputer_Products#H...
thelittleone 4y ago
I was fortunate to be a sysop on one of Sydney's popular BBS. At first we offered some MUDs and chat. Then multilayer doom and ultimately IRC gateway before it became redundant. But through that I learned Linux, then novel which started my career. Forever grateful for that modem. Old BBS thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147583
jtode 4y ago
'87 BBS kid here, started out at 300baud on my C64 and worked my way up as things progressed. No leap in speed was more visually impressive and delightful than going from 300 to 1200 at 40 columns. Going from 1200 to 2400 at 80 columns felt weirdly slower.
pgib 4y ago
My first modem was a 300 baud Hayes modem that was given to me. I used it on my Atari 1040 STE. It was ... slow. The next bump was to 1200 baud, and that definitely made things a bit more bearable. A new family computer came with an internal 2400 baud, and then eventually I got my own USRobotics 14.4k. It was akin to getting on the highway after being stuck on rural roads with a low speed limit. I still miss those connect tones (14.4k being my all-time favourite.) I still have a USRobotics 56k vEverything modem.

64 points by zdw 4y ago

sf97ahgf 4y ago

Thank goodness we moved on to broadband.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
There were some short lived quirky technologies at the end of the dial up era, such as using multiple 56k modems bonded into a single connection, the increase throughput. Since this required two telephone lines on both ends, in addition to four modems, only the most data hungry went to that degree of effort. Most simply got broadband when it was offered.
- ytjohn 4y ago
  As someone that worked at a dial up ISP and had an ISDN connection at home, modem bonding was really fascinating. At the ISP side, these were all T1 lines, so every line was technically 64k capable. The analog 56k modems rarely made a true 56k connection. However, there were some customers that lived one telephone pole away from the CO, and we would see them connected at 57600. One close customer would show at some oddball speed like 58k or 59k (though we don't know what they actually got at their end). But for ISDN, each channel was the full 64k and that would bond two channels to 128k. I had a cisco modem that would let me use either channel as an analog phone. So it would connect up both channels, and when a call came in, drop down to one 64k channel. It was incredibly reliable. Even when I got DSL, I kept the ISDN for quite a while because it had more consistent upload speed.
  - chiph 4y ago
    I was on ISDN for about a year, using a 3Com modem. Compared to dial-up, it was amazing as the connect time was only 3-4 seconds. No more listening to the buzzy connect sequence trying to guess what rate it would negotiate. But something happened to the line and BellSouth could not get it working again. After a couple of rounds of "It passes our tests" and "It still doesn't work" I gave up and went to Time-Warner's RoadRunner cable internet. My ISDN ISP was Uzi Nissan, of nissan-dot-com fame.
  - droid_mike 4y ago
    ISDN was the standard for "next generation" phone lines. It was never really meant for data. The design was to handle converted analog signals their new digital network. The demand for true broadband upended that plan, tough, and not it's just voice over much faster IP technologies.
  - bcrl 4y ago
    I worked on the drivers and firmware for a few ISDN cards back in 1997-1999. One of my performance optimizations for the BRI cards cut ping times from ~30ms to ~16ms. The Motorola MC68302's puny 68000 CPU took a long time to memcpy() packets from the buffer the HDLC controller would DMA them into back to the shared memory with the host. Eliminating that copy was more of an improvement than I expected. The PRI (T1) cards using Intel i960 CPUs, which were quite nice embedded CPUs. The HDLC controller was capable of using individual 64k channels or bonding them together for fractional of full T1. It was a bit late in the lifetime of ISDN, but I learned a heck of a lot about embedded systems from that job.
zikduruqe 4y ago
Aw come on. The BBS days were awesome. There still are some to play around with. https://telnet.org/htm/places.htm https://telnet.org/htm/places.htm

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

metadat 4y ago

What year was 300bps the state of the art? Around 1995-1996 I had a 14.4k modem and it was pretty fast at the time.

daneel_w 4y ago
It wasn't the state of the art in the early to mid 1980s, but that's when they were still popular. The famous Supra Modem 2400 arrived on the shelves in the late 1980s. I had a 14k4 modem in 1994, and a 28k8 one in 1995. Add.: the 14k4 modem cost me an equivalent of about $350 in 1994.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  I was about to ask how much they cost but you’d already edited your post. I remember hitting 48.8/56k in ~1996 after I got a modem for Christmas (aged 5). Now I’m on 1000/50mbit, or ~17.5 thousand times faster than my first connection if my math is correct.
  - lokedhs 4y ago
    My first connection was 1200 bps, and now I have 2 Gb/s. That's over 1 million times faster. Downloading a program for my Atari ST at maybe 500 kB in size took an hour. Now it would be difficult to even measure the time needed. It's difficult to explain just how slow downloading things used to be.
- II2II 4y ago
  Not only was it expensive, but it was a crazy time to buy a modem. There was also 16.8k and 19.2k, which were proprietary if I recall correctly. (I had a 19.2k modem, and was overjoyed when I found a BBS that I could connect to at that speed.) Around that time you also had 28.8k and 33.6k, which I think were standardized by were incredibly short lived. I remember sticking to what was effectively 14.4k until I jumped to cable internet. It did not make much sense to upgrade since ISP rates were lower for slower modems and serial modems were also more expensive. When I did jump to cable internet, I took some flak because of my obsolete computers. I was far happier with an always-on connection on an obsolete *ix box than dial-up on a faster PC (since I didn't have the money to have both at the time).

kcplate 4y ago

Reminds me a bit of a HP mainframe I was an operator on in the mid 80s. We had essentially a paper/typewriter style terminal so that it would record all input and output direct to continuous paper that would be saved for auditing if needed. Type a command, read your book until you heard it print a response, go read the response and do the next step. Repeat.

linker3000 4y ago
I had similar on a VAX 11/750. The LA120 DECwriter was connected to the system via a serial port mux adapter. One night the mux adapter glitched and reset itself back to defaults, which turned on local echo, so it reflected 'login:' back to the VAX, which responded with the password prompt. This prompt was reflected too, giving an incorrect password response...which was reflected back to a new login prompt...etc..rinse, repeat all night. Everything was printed on the LA120 until the fanfold paper ran out. I came in the next day and could not see the LA120 due to the amount of paper on top of it.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago

Interesting that the terminal appears to have at least an 80 character buffer, as it is able to print after an LF and while performing a CR. My first modem was 300 baud and while it was painfully slow, text interfaces of the era tended to be very efficient. File transfers of high resolution images is where it tended to get very painful, especially since watching the block count increase (if even that) wasn't anywhere near as engaging as actually navigating through menus and reading information.

DonHopkins 4y ago

Modems used to cost a dollar a baud.

DonHopkins 4y ago
This was just something I remembered observing (ads in computer magazines for 300 baud modems for $299, 1200 baud modems for $1199). But I just ran across a reference in wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_Microcomputer_Products#Competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_Microcomputer_Products#C... >Competition >The modem market in the 1970s was very simple and stagnant. Modems tended to sell at US$1 per baud. Hayes saw no need to be different—the original Hayes 300 baud modem sold for US$299 retail. At that price point, Hayes could build a "Cadillac of modems", using high-quality components, an extruded aluminum case, and an acrylic front panel with a number of LED indicators. As the modem market expanded, competitors quickly copied the Hayes command set and often the Hayes industrial design as well. To compete with Hayes on price, early competitors manufactured modems using low-cost components that were often unreliable. Hayes quickly gained a reputation for high quality, and for a time held a 50% market share.

thakoppno 4y ago

Any amateur radio operators in the Bay Area doing any digital modes on VHF/UHF? There’s a pretty neat Winlink project written in Go [1](https://github.com/la5nta/pat https://github.com/la5nta/pat ) that I’ve wanted to use. If anyone is out there interested in collaborating, please let me know.

tonyarkles 4y ago
I have one of these sitting on the bench and have dreamt for a while of setting up some kind of BBS on 70cm. Life has perpetually gotten in the way though. Also… I’m a long long way from the Bay Area :). 73 VE5AJA Edit: forgot the link https://wiki.analog.com/university/tools/pluto https://wiki.analog.com/university/tools/pluto
joerango 4y ago
I'd be interested in trying it out. I currently have a 2m packet node in the Bay Area using an HT and direwolf.
- thakoppno 4y ago
  awesome my call sign is kn6mxi look me up on qrz for contact info

herpderperator 4y ago

How does the Whisper Writer work?

GekkePrutser 4y ago
Check the link, he shows some internals. The printer seems to be a thermal type judging by the (lack of) noise.

whartung 4y ago

My Model 100 had a built in 300 baud modem. It was a modular plug vs an acoustic coupler, but still 300 baud. The nice thing about the terminal program on the 100 was that you could upload text files. So, on a BBS you’d enter New Message, then upload the text file. And it loaded just like typing it in. No Xmodem or anything, just “type it in”. Not a real problem at 300 baud. But the nice feature of the 100 was that even though it was a 40 column display, you could set the right margin to something like 78 or 80, and it would word wrap your lines. So it would format fine for the BBS. Hardly rocket science but just super useful. Also, 300 baud worked really well with a 40 x 8 display. Filled it up “fast enough” vs a 80 x 24 display. More than usable for BBSing in bed (difficult to do with a VT100).

walrus01 4y ago
As I recall from talking to older people, the model 100 with an acoustic coupler was an extremely popular solution for journalists to quickly file stories from remote locations/while traveling. All you needed was the model 100, a payphone, and the coupler.
- droid_mike 4y ago
  I worked at Radio Shack in the early 1990s. I was shocked to see that Radio Shack was still selling the Model 100s (acutually, model 102 by that time) as it was at least a 10 year old design by then. The manager told me that journalists still liked to buy them, because it was rugged, super portable, ran on batteries, had a great keyboard, and they could upload their text over a phone line. All I can say is their articles must have been very short as the memory limitations of the device were severe.
  - walrus01 4y ago
    I might not remember this right, but I don't think that the memory limitation was a factor, as they were often used with rudimentary dialup terminal software as a dumb serial terminal dialing in to a newspaper run system. The story would sometimes be typed live from the reporter's notes directly into the shell session of the remote (minicomputer, etc) system on the far end. This mean that even if there was 5-8KB of text it wouldn't be a problem. Then any formatting/line wrapping/typo and other mistakes from the raw submitted story would be fixed by copy editors from their local workstations.

ck2 4y ago

Something neat I discovered about my first 300 baud terminal is that I could record the connection on a tape recorder and play it back and the whole process would work for a replay. There was just wide enough tolerance and such a small part of the audio spectrum that it worked. Stopped working with 1200 baud modems. And 2400bps modems initially had a fight over compatibility, 9600bps went completely out the window, hayes vs everyone else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_Microcomputer_Products#Higher_speeds_and_increased_competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_Microcomputer_Products#H...

thelittleone 4y ago

I was fortunate to be a sysop on one of Sydney's popular BBS. At first we offered some MUDs and chat. Then multilayer doom and ultimately IRC gateway before it became redundant. But through that I learned Linux, then novel which started my career. Forever grateful for that modem. Old BBS thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147583

jtode 4y ago

'87 BBS kid here, started out at 300baud on my C64 and worked my way up as things progressed. No leap in speed was more visually impressive and delightful than going from 300 to 1200 at 40 columns. Going from 1200 to 2400 at 80 columns felt weirdly slower.

pgib 4y ago

My first modem was a 300 baud Hayes modem that was given to me. I used it on my Atari 1040 STE. It was ... slow. The next bump was to 1200 baud, and that definitely made things a bit more bearable. A new family computer came with an internal 2400 baud, and then eventually I got my own USRobotics 14.4k. It was akin to getting on the highway after being stuck on rural roads with a low speed limit. I still miss those connect tones (14.4k being my all-time favourite.) I still have a USRobotics 56k vEverything modem.