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I miss the days of BBS'ing on my 300 baud modem, boosted to 420-ish. Things were so much simpler. I'm thinking this might make a good xmas present for myself! :

I miss the days of BBS'ing on my 300 baud modem, boosted to 420-ish. Things were so much simpler. I'm thinking this might make a good xmas present for myself! :)

IT4MD 1y ago
100% with you. I miss those times.. High-5 to a fellow 300bauder!
- leptons 1y ago
  I built my own 300bps modem as a teenager, to connect to my C64. Tech was a lot more fun back in the day. It was exciting every year to see the speed of modems go up, and up, and up. 300 bps, 1200bps, and then when I got a 2400bps modem the C64 built-in serial code was too slow, I couldn't transfer files because there were so many dropped bits. So I wrote my own serial port code in assembly language and hacked it into my favorite terminal software (CCGMS) and that fixed the problem. I think by the time I got a 9600 baud modem I probably had an Amiga.
  - jandrese 1y ago
    By the time you get to 2400bps you're starting to stress how fast the abysmal disk interface on the C64 could write data, you had better not hit too many seeks.
    - leptons 1y ago
      The 1541 drive can write at ~400 bytes per second, much faster than the 2400bps modem could deliver (240 bytes/s). And buffering was a thing back then. A simple ring buffer would suffice. I had no problems downloading at 2400bps after I fixed the serial code.
      - jandrese 1y ago
        Faster, but not "much faster". Depending on where you were writing it could be as low as 300 bytes/second. You're starting to cut close to the margins, especially if the C=64 is having to also manage the modem communications at the same time. So yeah, doable but that's about the max you can expect out of the hardware. A 4800 baud modem would be right out.
        leptons 1y ago
        The C64 doesn't control the disk drive directly, the 1541has its own CPU, about as powerful as the C64. > A 4800 baud modem would be right out. Not with a "Warp Speed" cartridge. It does write speeds on a stock C64/1541 up to 2900 Bytes per second. I'm pretty sure reading serial data faster than 2400bps is easily doable too. https://www.obliterator918.com/the-warp-speed-cartridge-from-cinemaware-is-nice/ https://www.obliterator918.com/the-warp-speed-cartridge-from...
        rasz 1y ago
        Modern 1541 turbo, like Krills Transwarp, tops out just shy of 20KB/s on unmodified hardware https://csdb.dk/release/?id=214786 https://csdb.dk/release/?id=214786 with steady 16KB/s in normal use https://www.obliterator918.com/benchmarking-transwarp-the-insanely-fast-1541-loader/ https://www.obliterator918.com/benchmarking-transwarp-the-in... The trick is encoding files in special way to minimize drives CPU load.
  - joquarky 1y ago
    CCGMS was the best.
js2 1y ago
> boosted to 420-ish I was there in the 300 bps days with a Novation Apple Cat II and I never heard of such a thing. How did that work? Did you have non-standard modems on both ends?
- reaperducer 1y ago
  If you had a pretty clean line, you could do 450 baud. Some BBSes had separate numbers for this speed. Sometimes it just worked with regular 300 lines.
  - js2 1y ago
    Really? What standard allowed that? I'm only aware of 300 bps and 1200 bps. I'm not seeing anything in between those besides a V.22 standard for 600 bps I wasn't previously familiar with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interface_bit_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interface_bit_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ITU-T_V-series_recommendations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ITU-T_V-series_recomme... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#Dial-up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#Dial-up I also don't recall intermediate speeds. The modems at both ends would negotiate the highest standard speed they could. I must've owned a dozen dialup modems over the years starting with that Novation Apple Cat II (300 bps, 1200 bps half-duplex to another Apple Cat II) and just have no recollection of variable speeds like you're describing, and I spent a lot of time dialed into BBSes.
    - reaperducer 1y ago
      There's lots of knowledge from that era that didn't make it to the internet age. Not being listed on Wikipedia does not mean something didn't exist. Maybe your modem just didn't support it. Or maybe it was one of the many mods people did to their modems. I know that at least one of the modems I had (a combination of Commodore, Hayes, and Avatex modems) supported higher-than-usual baud rates out of the box. I can't say how exactly it worked, you just issued commands or the terminal program handled it.
      - 1y ago
georgemcbay 1y ago
> I miss the days of BBS'ing on my 300 baud modem, boosted to 420-ish. Things were so much simpler. I have a lot of nostalgia from this time, but also remember it was all fun and games until my mom or one of my sisters picked up one of the phones (standard issue AT&T handsets) in the house, causing a rapid burst of line noise and usually a disconnection due to lack of error checking/correction at the hardware level.
- xen2xen1 1y ago
  And if that happened, you might not get back on. The line might be busy, you might have run out of time or logins for the day..
  - Mountain_Skies 1y ago
    If you had some idea of who was on the BBS and they had Call Waiting, you could give them a ring to knock them offline. Very bad manners but teens will be teens.

I miss the days of BBS'ing on my 300 baud modem, boosted to 420-ish. Things were so much simpler. I'm thinking this might make a good xmas present for myself! :)

IT4MD 1y ago

100% with you. I miss those times.. High-5 to a fellow 300bauder!

leptons 1y ago
I built my own 300bps modem as a teenager, to connect to my C64. Tech was a lot more fun back in the day. It was exciting every year to see the speed of modems go up, and up, and up. 300 bps, 1200bps, and then when I got a 2400bps modem the C64 built-in serial code was too slow, I couldn't transfer files because there were so many dropped bits. So I wrote my own serial port code in assembly language and hacked it into my favorite terminal software (CCGMS) and that fixed the problem. I think by the time I got a 9600 baud modem I probably had an Amiga.
- jandrese 1y ago
  By the time you get to 2400bps you're starting to stress how fast the abysmal disk interface on the C64 could write data, you had better not hit too many seeks.
  - leptons 1y ago
    The 1541 drive can write at ~400 bytes per second, much faster than the 2400bps modem could deliver (240 bytes/s). And buffering was a thing back then. A simple ring buffer would suffice. I had no problems downloading at 2400bps after I fixed the serial code.
    - jandrese 1y ago
      Faster, but not "much faster". Depending on where you were writing it could be as low as 300 bytes/second. You're starting to cut close to the margins, especially if the C=64 is having to also manage the modem communications at the same time. So yeah, doable but that's about the max you can expect out of the hardware. A 4800 baud modem would be right out.
      - leptons 1y ago
        The C64 doesn't control the disk drive directly, the 1541has its own CPU, about as powerful as the C64. > A 4800 baud modem would be right out. Not with a "Warp Speed" cartridge. It does write speeds on a stock C64/1541 up to 2900 Bytes per second. I'm pretty sure reading serial data faster than 2400bps is easily doable too. https://www.obliterator918.com/the-warp-speed-cartridge-from-cinemaware-is-nice/ https://www.obliterator918.com/the-warp-speed-cartridge-from...
        rasz 1y ago
        Modern 1541 turbo, like Krills Transwarp, tops out just shy of 20KB/s on unmodified hardware https://csdb.dk/release/?id=214786 https://csdb.dk/release/?id=214786 with steady 16KB/s in normal use https://www.obliterator918.com/benchmarking-transwarp-the-insanely-fast-1541-loader/ https://www.obliterator918.com/benchmarking-transwarp-the-in... The trick is encoding files in special way to minimize drives CPU load.
- joquarky 1y ago
  CCGMS was the best.

js2 1y ago

> boosted to 420-ish I was there in the 300 bps days with a Novation Apple Cat II and I never heard of such a thing. How did that work? Did you have non-standard modems on both ends?

reaperducer 1y ago
If you had a pretty clean line, you could do 450 baud. Some BBSes had separate numbers for this speed. Sometimes it just worked with regular 300 lines.
- js2 1y ago
  Really? What standard allowed that? I'm only aware of 300 bps and 1200 bps. I'm not seeing anything in between those besides a V.22 standard for 600 bps I wasn't previously familiar with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interface_bit_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interface_bit_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ITU-T_V-series_recommendations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ITU-T_V-series_recomme... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#Dial-up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#Dial-up I also don't recall intermediate speeds. The modems at both ends would negotiate the highest standard speed they could. I must've owned a dozen dialup modems over the years starting with that Novation Apple Cat II (300 bps, 1200 bps half-duplex to another Apple Cat II) and just have no recollection of variable speeds like you're describing, and I spent a lot of time dialed into BBSes.
  - reaperducer 1y ago
    There's lots of knowledge from that era that didn't make it to the internet age. Not being listed on Wikipedia does not mean something didn't exist. Maybe your modem just didn't support it. Or maybe it was one of the many mods people did to their modems. I know that at least one of the modems I had (a combination of Commodore, Hayes, and Avatex modems) supported higher-than-usual baud rates out of the box. I can't say how exactly it worked, you just issued commands or the terminal program handled it.
    - 1y ago

georgemcbay 1y ago

> I miss the days of BBS'ing on my 300 baud modem, boosted to 420-ish. Things were so much simpler. I have a lot of nostalgia from this time, but also remember it was all fun and games until my mom or one of my sisters picked up one of the phones (standard issue AT&T handsets) in the house, causing a rapid burst of line noise and usually a disconnection due to lack of error checking/correction at the hardware level.

xen2xen1 1y ago
And if that happened, you might not get back on. The line might be busy, you might have run out of time or logins for the day..
- Mountain_Skies 1y ago
  If you had some idea of who was on the BBS and they had Call Waiting, you could give them a ring to knock them offline. Very bad manners but teens will be teens.