[Jan 6, 15:43]Rspaight I started using modems at 300 baud, though I never had to deal with acoustic couplers, thank goodness. First modem I actually bought was a Leading Edge 1200 baud internal jobbie. (Remember when Leading Edge Model D was *the* cheap IBM clone?) I think it was around $180.
In college, my roommate (who owned an Amiga 500) and I (with an IBM AT) would have both our modems on the common dorm room phone line, and figured out how to trick them into connecting to each other so we could transfer (mostly primitive porn) files back and forth using XMODEM. (We may have upgraded to ZMODEM at some point.) Of course, we could have done the same thing with a null modem cable, but what fun would that have been? We were geeks, dammit. (Of course, in addition to our two computers, our room also had a TV, VCR, stereo w/CD, answering machine, cordless phone, standard issue dorm phone, novelty "pay" phone, and standalone autodialer/speakerphone. This was extreme in 1987. Also a fire hazard, I'm betting.)
Ah, those were the days.
My all-time favorite modem is the US Robotics Courier. (Mine's still in a closet somewhere.) These things will connect to *anything* and are built like bricks. They still sell 'em for the princely price of $300:
Worst modem ever would be any of the early Rockwell (or RockHell as we called them then) based 14.4 cheapies. It took days of fiddling with setup and connect strings to get it to work at all, and even then they were cranky. Bleah.
Ryan
[Jan 25, 12:26]Michael [e-mail] Goodness people,
I'll tell you what makes me feel old. I'm working on a gaming website. I wrote a preview for the upcoming Ninja Gaiden (which will rock no doubt) and realize that most of the other members for the website were 2 or younger when the original came out!
But I remember getting excited about accessing the encyclopedia on Compuserve, playing Tradewars for hours on end. My first computer was a tandy 1000 EX. It had TWO joystick ports and an RGB monitor. And with a whopping 256 k of RAM it could play all the latest games.
I remember buying my first computer in college an IBM PC300. It had a 1.2 gb hard drive, 8 megs of ram, and the all new windows 95. I remember wondering how I would ever use 1.2 gigs of space. LOL it's funny to think that you can get a gig of RAM now only eight years later. No even funnier is that a gaming console has more power than that computer!