Online Services: The Internet Before the Internet 387
jfruh writes "The Slashdot readership is probably split pretty evenly into two groups. There are those for whom full-on Internet access has been available for their entire computer-using lives, and then there are those who wanted to use the Net from home before 1991, and who therefore had to use a BBS or an online service. Here's a tour of some of these services, including Prodigy, Compuserve, and of course AOL. This should be a nostalgic trip for the oldsters among us, and a history lesson for Gen Y readers."
Internet before the Internet (Score:3, Informative)
But I bet the real Internet culture shock for Gen X/Y is probably that they don't remember a time before commercial content or business activity was allowed on the Internet. It wasn't just that there wasn't a web and e-commerce hadn't taken off, it was freakin' prohibited.
Re:How I first got introduced to the Internet (Score:4, Informative)
The Source? (Score:4, Informative)
does anyone remember The Source? Where Ilearned about archie, gopher, telnet,finger,who, ftp and the like. I remember the first time I connected I went exploring on the source and realized that I was connecting to computers all over the world.
Re:How I first got introduced to the Internet (Score:1, Informative)
Bullshit.
9600 didn't show up until the mid 1980s.
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Modem-HOWTO-29.html
If you're gonna lie, at least do some research first so that those of us from that era might believe you for a sec.
Re:How I first got introduced to the Internet (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How I first got introduced to the Internet (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How I first got introduced to the Internet (Score:2, Informative)
He didn't say he had a 9600 baud modem, he said he had a 9600 baud terminal. Quite reasonable for a serial link. I had a 19,200 baud serial link to the campus network in about 1988 or 1989. Also in my computer was a 2400 baud modem.
300 baud ... and counting (Score:4, Informative)
I still remember how proud I was when I bought my first 300 baud modem
That thing did cost me an arm and a leg - and boy - I thought 300 baud was fast !!
Then they upped the speed, and I had to chop off another arm and another leg to get a "new" modem
Then they upped the speed again --- guess what, I chopped off yet-another-arm and yet-another-leg to pay for that too !!
Throughout all these years, I have lost count of how many arms and legs I'd to trade in for those modems
BBC - BBS - The Documentary (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How I first got introduced to the Internet (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, baud is a measurement of signal change, which doesn't always correlate to bit rate. At one time, yes it often did, which lead to the use of "baud" and "bps" being used interchangeably, yet erroneously. When the use of compression grew in modem transfers, baud often stayed the same, or rose slower than the bit rate due to the compression.
Wikipedia Baud article [wikipedia.org]
about.com article [about.com]
tech-faq.com article [tech-faq.com]
I remember the days of connecting to a BBS at 110bps. You had time to go pour coffee while waiting for the ANSI welcome screen to load.
*shakefist* Now git off mah lawn! Dagnabbit, someone stole muh false teeth... *grumble grumble* :-)
Not exactly... (Score:4, Informative)
This Wikipedia article shows the modem types and years released. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem [wikipedia.org]
The Wikipedia article lists the release years of modems conforming to various V.xx standards.
There were modems available that exceeded that timeline by quite a bit. Telebit made their TrailBlazer series that uses quite a different scheme to encode the data on the line from the ITU-T V series schemes. Telebit used what they called PEP which stood for Packetized Ensemble Protocol. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telebit#Models [wikipedia.org]
They exceeded the speeds of the commonly available "Hays compatible" modems by a huge margin. PEP still works faster on very noisy phone lines then today's commonly available modems. In situations where a 56K modem will only hook up at 1200 baud the Telebits will generally connect at 9600+.
Re:How I first got introduced to the Internet (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit.
9600 didn't show up until the mid 1980s. http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Modem-HOWTO-29.html [tldp.org]
If you're gonna lie, at least do some research first so that those of us from that era might believe you for a sec.
Bzzzzzt thankyouforplaying...
AT&T supplied 9600 baud data lines for the ARPANET way back in the late 60s. And yes... They used modems!!!
Almost all of the endpoints for the ARPANET were universities. That would make someone that claiming to use a 9600 baud terminal in the late 70s easily accurate and using a technology that was at least a decade old.
So I suspect two things: (1) You weren't there. (2) You are an anonymous idiot who can't Google.
Re:How I first got introduced to the Internet (Score:5, Informative)
When the use of compression grew in modem transfers, baud often stayed the same, or rose slower than the bit rate due to the compression.
It doesn't have anything to do with compression. The baud rate is the number of symbols per second. The bps rate is the number of bits per second. When you have two kinds of symbol (e.g. beep and silence, high and low) then the baud rate is the same as the bit rate. If you have 4 kinds of symbol then each symbol represents two bits and so the bit rate is double the baud rate. With better ADCs and DACs (and a sufficiently low SNR) you can distinguish a lot more different symbols at the same baud rate. If you could distinguish 256 different tones then a 300 baud modem could run at 300B/s (2400b/s).