the old days of dail up!

[Riverwind (imported)]

As late as 1970 in the Palm Springs Ca. area you could call local using only 5 numbers.

Yes State 00977 or 7800977 think about rotery dial, my friends hated to call.

The first modem I used was at work, it was a 2k modem, yes thats right, we used it to send information from company to company, it was alway a shaky process. You sent a message saying ARE YOU THERE? it would respond saying YES I AM. Then you sent another message ARE YOU READY TO COPY, and it would say YES I AM, They it would varify each and every card you sent. Opps, Card (a cardboard tab type card with 80 colums that had little holes in them) Then oh you get the idea.

I actually miss the tab cards, they were great to use for making lists, fit in the back pocket, now I use index cards, there not as thick or as long.

River

[jdmccrumb (imported)]

OK, you got this REALLY old fart to climb out of his attic.

1979... the computer was a 'new' Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1.

Add to the expansion interface this thing called a UART!?

(Universal Asysncronous Receiver/Transmitter) a serial port.

Plug in a genuine Bell 212A 300/1200baud 'high speed' external modem,

complete with a 6 button 'dataset' telephone on top of it,

and cables going everywhere.

Believe it or not, this Canarpus worked! it was cutting edge, much faster and more reliable than the popular 300baud acoustic modems of the day.

OK, back up to my attic and a fresh, dry Depends!

JD

[Riverwind (imported)]

I worked on computers much older than that by at least 30 years. The oldest was an IBM 1401, it was about 6 ft high, 8 ft long and 4 ft wide, had 8k of memory, all of it was wire. The card reader was a dual purpose machine it read and punched cards, from each side of the machine, the printer had a paper tape that you programmed via punched holes that worked as stops to make your printing go faster and for mass storage we had tape drives, big ones, 6 1/2 ft tall. We also had other assorted machines like keypunch, collator, sorters, interrupters, and each of these could be programmed by how you wired the boards they used, you sorted the wire by color, each color was a different size. Time period 1973.

PC's came years later.

River

[jdmccrumb (imported)]

I worked on computers much older than that by at least 30 years. The oldest was an IBM 1401, it was about 6 ft high, 8 ft long and 4 ft wide, had 8k of memory, all of it was wire. The card reader was a dual purpose machine it read and punched cards, from each side of the machine, the printer had a paper tape that you programmed via punched holes that worked as stops to make your printing go faster and for mass storage we had tape drives, big ones, 6 1/2 ft tall. We also had other assorted machines like keypunch, collator, sorters, interrupters, and each of these could be programmed by how you wired the boards they used, you sorted the wire by color, each color was a different size. Time period 1973.

PC's came years later.

River

Actually, the dawn of the PC was 1975 (in spite of what Bill Gates thinks) In 1975 both Altair and Imsai introduced the first PC's based on the Intel 8080 microprocessor.

They were pretty crude, like the 60's IBM mini mainframe you mentioned, complete with banks of toggle switches to set operating parameters, and about 4K to 8K of memory, but at least in the 70s it was RAM, and not a wire core memory.

Most hobbyists on the 70s were using 300baud acoustic coupled modems. Yuk! Even the IBM 1K modem you mentioned was an improvement.

Things have sure come a long way!

JD

[devi (imported)]

I did once live in an area where there was a six party phone system. I wasn't a part of it since I had no phone myself but relied on them for messages. Some of them were getting irked at a teenage daughter who was tying up the lines for the rest of them. And then there is the case of the even older "leave your message at the bar (icehouse)" system. The family ranch was out in the boonies and no phone lines were out there. If someone in your town happened to be going past the half way major road to the other town and past the ranch and the bar/general store along the road then you would tell that person to please leave a message at the bar for you. And then when somebody would come up from the ranch to the bar they would in turn take that message back with them to the ranch out there. And of course in order to get the message back to the ranch you had to ask around who might happen to be going past that bar. Now folks practically only go out there to hunt elk anymore. The state gives so many elk per season and you either use them, sell them, or lose them.