On the path to the scrapheap...

[alexpgp]

An old note caught my eye in something I was throwing out. It reads: "2/24/83 - I am now the proud owner of a CONFIDENS 300-baud modem, for which I paid $42.50 at a garage sale."

Three hundred baud was slow enough to allow the unit to operate by seating a telephone handset into rubber-lined sockets located on the top surface of the modem. Finding this note brought back the distinct memory of seeing telecommunicated characters appear on the screen of my Osborne-1 for the first time, from a local BBS. (This, after painstakingly rearranging wires and pins in a couple of RS-232 connectors of the respectively proper gender to create a simple null modem cable.)

Until the next generation of modem came out (1200 baud!), that CONFIDENS was a valuable part of my computing inventory (even if the brand name seemed, frankly, more appropriate for a line of condoms). If I am not mistaken, my first electronic submission to a computer magazine was sent through its circuitry.

Things sure do operate faster today, though. :)

Cheers...

Comments

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

A company I worked for subscribed to Timeshare, a remote timeshared mainframe service, and ran Timeshare Basic programs via a 300 baud modem and a teletype keyboard with paper tape punch. You could work out the program in advance and punch a paper tape, then connect and run the tape through the reader, with the program's results coming back over the teletype keyboard. Sheesh. It was as bad as using punched cards ;p

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Hmm. With the Timeshare system, it would appear that changing a line of code would involve repunching either the entire program (or more likely, of some part of it, with the subsequent careful use of a tape splicer).

On the other, knocking over a tape or dropping one on the floor didn't have the same consequences as it did with a card deck.

Doze wuz da days!

Cheers...

[eastexpert.livejournal.com]

Somehow, I missed 300 bps communications and started at 2400. Hell, I used it to transfer faxes to potential and actual customers, and the program I used for it was the Windows Inbox... you sent faxes as e-mails, under Windows 95.
My next modem was a 14,400 and you could actually dial into Internet, and get communications at a lovely, stable 1.6 KB/sec -- for 5 minutes you could download the entire program of 480KB. (Don't ask me how much did it take me to download Internet Explorer 3 at about 10MB size -- the file downloads could break at that day... and you paid per minute 8-( )

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't remind me! The first time I downloaded a file from an early commercial service called The Source, using something called XMODEM, it took five minutes to get 10 Kb!

And as you mention, each minute was chargeable!

Cheers...