5 ms·

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 lat

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).
- sbarre 4y ago
  US Robotics 16.8k and 19.2k modems were the stuff of pirate boards mostly. Or at least, many pirate boards only accepted those connections from other USR modems.
  - II2II 4y ago
    Could be. I ran into a number of BBSes that dropped subtle hints that they hosted stuff that was not accessible to regular users. I always had the impression that it was adult content, but it could very well have been pirated software. (These were publicly listed BBSes.)
    - sbarre 4y ago
      Probably both, from my experience back then. Most pirate BBSes publicly advertised themselves, as a form of bluster.. But having the phone number and getting an account were two very different things. :-)
  - porbelm 4y ago
    You had a Courier or nothing. They were amazing if your ISP (or warez bbs) had them at the other end. Proprietary compression / connection algorithms, I guess? Pretty much the only modem I got ACTUAL 56K speeds with was a Courier V.34 that I flashed to become a V.90
    - daneel_w 4y ago
      The standardized compression is called v.42Bis, but it was in fact a feature present only on few of USR's models while most of the other brands provided it with consistency. It worked well on plain-text content - I remember hitting 90 KB/sec download speeds when testing large text files on a 28k8 connection - and it made a noticable improvement when bouncing between menus and reading messages and such, but very limited use for actual file transfers since practically everything was already lha/lzh/lzx/dms-compressed.
  - daneel_w 4y ago

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).

sbarre 4y ago
US Robotics 16.8k and 19.2k modems were the stuff of pirate boards mostly. Or at least, many pirate boards only accepted those connections from other USR modems.
- II2II 4y ago
  Could be. I ran into a number of BBSes that dropped subtle hints that they hosted stuff that was not accessible to regular users. I always had the impression that it was adult content, but it could very well have been pirated software. (These were publicly listed BBSes.)
  - sbarre 4y ago
    Probably both, from my experience back then. Most pirate BBSes publicly advertised themselves, as a form of bluster.. But having the phone number and getting an account were two very different things. :-)
- porbelm 4y ago
  You had a Courier or nothing. They were amazing if your ISP (or warez bbs) had them at the other end. Proprietary compression / connection algorithms, I guess? Pretty much the only modem I got ACTUAL 56K speeds with was a Courier V.34 that I flashed to become a V.90
  - daneel_w 4y ago
    The standardized compression is called v.42Bis, but it was in fact a feature present only on few of USR's models while most of the other brands provided it with consistency. It worked well on plain-text content - I remember hitting 90 KB/sec download speeds when testing large text files on a 28k8 connection - and it made a noticable improvement when bouncing between menus and reading messages and such, but very limited use for actual file transfers since practically everything was already lha/lzh/lzx/dms-compressed.
- daneel_w 4y ago