{"id":3105,"date":"2011-09-05T00:01:37","date_gmt":"2011-09-05T07:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=3105"},"modified":"2011-09-04T19:55:22","modified_gmt":"2011-09-05T02:55:22","slug":"my-very-first-file-transfer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=3105","title":{"rendered":"My Very First File Transfer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Way, way<\/em> 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.
\n
\nI had a TRS-80 and the Tandy-whatever 300 bps “autodial” modem.<\/p>\n

“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<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Nope.<\/p>\n

Other than paying for software, I didn’t know that you could obtain it online.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As if by magic, my computer became a terminal for his computer. I saw him typing and it appeared on my computer’s screen.<\/p>\n

He dumped code for a game program into my TRS-80. It was a 16K program. The file transfer took 16 minutes.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But I still remember my first file transfer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3105"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3108,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3105\/revisions\/3108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}