Way, way back when, I had a 300 bps modem. It sent data about as fast as a typical person can read. So, for example, it took maybe 3 seconds to display a line of text. I’m serious.
I had a TRS-80 and the Tandy-whatever 300 bps “autodial” modem.
“Autodial” meant that the phone could generate its own dial tones (or pulses). So I didn’t need to use my real phone to dial the number and then set the phone into a cradle, ala the film Wargames.
Back in the early days, there were a few hobbyist places you could phone into. They were called BBSs, for Bulletin Board Systems. It was the prototype of today’s online forums. Only one person could connect at a time (mostly), so you often heard a busy signal. Then you’d just call another BBS until you hit all your favorites, and then the cycle repeated.
I met a guy at a user group forum. A “real” forum, one that happened in the real world, not online. Anyway, he had a TRS-80 and so did I. And he asked me if I’d ever downloaded any games.
Nope.
Other than paying for software, I didn’t know that you could obtain it online.
He had a few games, and he wanted to share them. So he said that he’d send them to my computer. I had no idea how that worked. So he handed me five sheets of hexadecimal numbers. He said, “Type in this program and then call my computer.”
I sat down and typed in the code. It was BASIC, but only about four lines of BASIC code. The rest were hexadecimal values that represented the bulk of the program.
After typing all that in, I called him. He called me back, but had the computer answer. Once it was connected, I ran the BASIC program with all those hexadecimal numbers.
As if by magic, my computer became a terminal for his computer. I saw him typing and it appeared on my computer’s screen.
He dumped code for a game program into my TRS-80. It was a 16K program. The file transfer took 16 minutes.
After the transfer was completed, he hung up and I called him back. He said to run the file, which had been saved to a floppy diskette.
I forget what the game was called. It was some kind of space game and I found it fascinating. The TRS-80 had severely low-resolution graphics. The “pixels” were large blocks, not tiny dots. Still, the game was enjoyable and I must have played it for months.
Eventually things got more sophisticated for online life. I wrote my own Xmodem file transfer program, but I was too late: At that time, the Zmodem program was popular, and it was far better. And, of course, the 1200, then 2400 bps modems started to show up.
But I still remember my first file transfer.
I remember that film wargames that was an early version of the internet, I remember thinking it was really hi tech. If you think about it the film was quite ahead of it’s time with all the young kids in their bedrooms nowadays hacking into top security government sites. A bit like anonymous.
Comment by chiefnoobie — September 5, 2011 @ 2:59 am
It wasn’t really the Internet, because you had to dial into each system separately. So, if this were 1982, you would dial into a local theater to get their showtimes — not that any theater was that well-connected back then.
Services like Google were irrelevant because each system was essentially an island unto itself. There were BBS lists, which had the numbers of all the systems you could phone up. We published such a list in the magazine I edited, and it was one of the most popular features. By 1989, when I left the magazine, the list was up to 2 pages with very small type, and that didn’t even list all of the systems.
Comment by admin — September 5, 2011 @ 9:48 am
oh right so it was just a different way of using a phone line. I suppose that it what the noise the old dial up connections was all about, I had to use a fax machine the other day the noise from that reminded me of dial up internet.
Comment by chiefnoobie — September 5, 2011 @ 1:43 pm
Yes, they made lots of noise. There was an option on the old modems where you could have the speaker 1) Off all the time, 2) On until the connection was made, or 3) On all the time. On all the time was interesting, but annoying.
Remember that was during the time of all text and no graphics. Images were available for downloading (mostly porn), but the bulk of the modem traffic was online BBS and message systems and pirating software.
Comment by admin — September 5, 2011 @ 2:48 pm