"where we might as well save the bandwidth"

I come from a world (yesteryear) where a computer had 1KB of RAM (ZX80). I've used links with modems rocking 1200 bps (1200 bits per second). I recall US Robotics modems getting to speeds of 56K - well that was mostly a fib worse than MS doing QA these days. Ooh I could chat with some bloke from Novell on Compuserve.

In 1994ish I was asked to look into this fancy new world wide web thing on the internet. I was working at a UK military college as an IT bod, I was 24. I had a Windows 3.1 PC. I telnetted into a local VAX, then onto the X25 PAD. I used JANET to get to somewhere in the US (NIST) and from there to Switzerland to where this www thing started off. I was using telnet and WAIS and Gopher and then I was apparently using something called "www".

I described this www thing as "a bit wank", which shows what a visionary I am!

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quesera 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I've used links with modems rocking 1200 bps

Yo, 300 baud, checking in.

Do I hear 110?

+++ATH0

	▲	robflynn an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Ah, the good old days. I remember dialing up local BBSes with QMODEM. AT&C1&D2S36=7DT*70,,,5551212

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drzaiusx11 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Fellow old here, I had several 56k baud modems but even my USR (the best of the bunch) never got more than half way to 56k throughput. Took forever to download shit over BBS...

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Jedd 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> several 56k baud modems

These were almost definitely 8k baud.

	▲	davrosthedalek 27 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, because at that time, a modem didn't actually talk to a modem over a switched analog line. Instead, line cards digitized the analog phone signal, the digital stream was then routed through the telecom network, and the converted back to analog. So the analog path was actually two short segments. The line cards digitized at 8kHz (enough for 4kHz analog bandwidth), using a logarithmic mapping (u-law? a-law?), and they managed to get 7 bits reliably through the two conversions. ISDN essentially moved that line card into the consumer's phone. So ISDN "modems" talked directly digital, and got to 64kbit/s.
	▲	tfvlrue 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		In case anyone else is curious, since this is something I was always confused about until I looked it up just now: "Baud rate" refers to the symbol rate, that is the number of pulses of the analog signal per second. A signal that has two voltage states can convey two bits of information per symbol. "Bit rate" refers to the amount of digital data conveyed. If there are two states per symbol, then the baud rate and bit rate are equivalent. 56K modems used 7 bits per symbol, so the bit rate was 7x the baud rate.