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What year was 300bps the state of the art? Until about 1985. That's when the first 1200 baud consumer-available modems like the Commodore 1670 started arrivin

What year was 300bps the state of the art? Until about 1985. That's when the first 1200 baud consumer-available modems like the Commodore 1670 started arriving. There were others available slightly earlier, but they were commercial-grade and prohibitively expensive for most people.

tssva 4y ago
An XT class luggable of mine had a Memory/RTC/GamePort/Parallel/Serial/InternalModem card installed when I acquired it. Some research on the card showed it was released in 1986. If they were being put on multifunction cards then the market had to already have been full of dedicated cards. I was around and using modems at the time but really don't remember the brief era of 1200 baud modems. The family TRS-80 Model 1 had a Novation CAT 300 attached which my father's work let him take home when they disposed of it around 1980. In the mid-80's my C64 used a 300 baud Commodore 1660 modem. Next thing I remember, I was shoving an internal 2400 baud modem into a new Packard Bell PB500 XT class machine. That modem got well used.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> There were others available slightly earlier, but they were commercial-grade and prohibitively expensive They were not “commercial grade” exclusively. I had a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 in 1983 or 1984. It was absolutely consumer. In fact the case was identical to the Smartmodem 300 but with an extra LED or two. I hooked it up to an Apple 2e. It was indeed expensive, though.
droid_mike 4y ago
1200 bps modems were available for the IBM PC much earlier than that. I think by 1982 your could get a 1200 or even 2400 bps modem for the PC. The AT models in 1984 standardized the faster speeds. 300 baud modems were still popular in the 1980s, because most people still used home microcomputers, and that's what was available for those low end machines. Atari even sold an acoustic coupler modem for their 8-bit computers that was very popular as it was quite inexpensive.

tssva 4y ago

An XT class luggable of mine had a Memory/RTC/GamePort/Parallel/Serial/InternalModem card installed when I acquired it. Some research on the card showed it was released in 1986. If they were being put on multifunction cards then the market had to already have been full of dedicated cards. I was around and using modems at the time but really don't remember the brief era of 1200 baud modems. The family TRS-80 Model 1 had a Novation CAT 300 attached which my father's work let him take home when they disposed of it around 1980. In the mid-80's my C64 used a 300 baud Commodore 1660 modem. Next thing I remember, I was shoving an internal 2400 baud modem into a new Packard Bell PB500 XT class machine. That modem got well used.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

> There were others available slightly earlier, but they were commercial-grade and prohibitively expensive They were not “commercial grade” exclusively. I had a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 in 1983 or 1984. It was absolutely consumer. In fact the case was identical to the Smartmodem 300 but with an extra LED or two. I hooked it up to an Apple 2e. It was indeed expensive, though.

droid_mike 4y ago

1200 bps modems were available for the IBM PC much earlier than that. I think by 1982 your could get a 1200 or even 2400 bps modem for the PC. The AT models in 1984 standardized the faster speeds. 300 baud modems were still popular in the 1980s, because most people still used home microcomputers, and that's what was available for those low end machines. Atari even sold an acoustic coupler modem for their 8-bit computers that was very popular as it was quite inexpensive.