Happy Anniversary

[aaron sica]

[quote name=\'clemon79\' date=\'Nov 21 2004, 04:34 PM\']

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You sure it's not quicker than that?

[ClockGameJohn]

[quote name=\'clemon79\' date=\'Nov 21 2004, 05:34 PM\'][quote name=\'aaron sica\' date=\'Nov 21 2004, 01:59 PM\']I wonder if they still make them?

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The craze with printing Internet Yellow Page books ended about the same time that their publishers finally figured out that any given volume was obsolete approximately thirteen seconds after it hit store shelves.

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And the fact that we can now look anything up on the internet for free.  So is it strange that the internet made a book about the internet obsolete?

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'ClockGameJohn\' date=\'Nov 21 2004, 04:16 PM\']And the fact that we can now look anything up on the internet for free.  So is it strange that the internet made a book about the internet obsolete?

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Well, it was a good idea once. One of the very first installments came out JUST when the Web was emerging, so most of the listings were mailing lists, Telnet listings, and Gopher sites, and this was before Yahoo and Google so the few Web listings that existed. So having a boadload of Things To Do in print form was useful to someone who had just gotten their Netcom account and didn't know what to do with it.

Today, though, I agree, the quality of online search engines makes such a beast essentially worthless.

[ClockGameJohn]

Look, I'm digging out my 300baud external Zoom modem and logging on to the BBS now.  I'm glad I was only in middle school!

[dzinkin]

[quote name=\'ClockGameJohn\' date=\'Nov 21 2004, 06:38 PM\']Look, I'm digging out my 300baud external Zoom modem and logging on to the BBS now.  I'm glad I was only in middle school!

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From the definition of "baud," as given by original version of The Macintosh Bible: "If you can stand to watch text come on the screen at 300 baud, you either have no central nervous system or you're the Buddha."

[mystery7]

And I thought 56K was slow.  Amazing how far we've come.

[aaron sica]

[quote name=\'mystery7\' date=\'Nov 21 2004, 09:55 PM\']And I thought 56K was slow.  Amazing how far we've come.

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Amazing how spoiled we've become, too.

And that's not a potshot at you, that's just an observation in general (including myself in that!). When I started logging onto BBSes in 1990, it *was* at 300 baud. I got used to it, and it didn't seem too slow at all. That was on a Commodore 64. I upgraded to an IBM compatible the next summer and got a 2400 baud modem, and was BLOWN AWAY at the speed of it. Same thing happened three years later, when I got a 14.4 modem. That was the modem that first took me onto the net.

I'd wind up connecting as high as 50.6 with a 56k modem, and after being in the workplace and at college with high-speed connections,  56k seemed "too slow". Now, living someplace where it's available, I'm on cable....

ObGameShow: Cable connections make it possible to download BigJon's games in less than 5 minutes.

[ClockGameJohn]

[quote name=\'aaron sica\' date=\'Nov 21 2004, 11:24 PM\']When I started logging onto BBSes in 1990, it *was* at 300 baud. I got used to it, and it didn't seem too slow at all. That was on a Commodore 64. I upgraded to an IBM compatible the next summer and got a 2400 baud modem, and was BLOWN AWAY at the speed of it.

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You and I must have had a previous life somewhere.  I too was on that lightening fast 300 baud modem and upgraded to 2400 (saved up all summer for that monkey).  The BBSes were not slow...there wasn't crap to them!  No high resolution graphics, no streaming video, nothin.  We logged on to a friggin DOS text page.  I can still remember logging on to AOL (when I had a 4 character screename) at 2400 baud.  It took literally 5 minutes until the mail screen would load up.

So, yeah, Happy Anniversary to the veterans.

[DrBear]

Ah, 300 baud...the rate at which a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 would send my copy back to the office, the dedicated servant of reporters on the go...I still remember covering football games and having it take longer to send all the copy back to the office than it took to play the game, or at least it seemed that way. You could, at least, have a pretty good dinner while the stories were being sent...

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'DrBear\' date=\'Nov 22 2004, 05:53 AM\']Ah, 300 baud...the rate at which a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 would send my copy back to the office, the dedicated servant of reporters on the go...

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You will be pleased to know that they're still used, too...at least as of a few years ago. I was covering a San Jose Sharks hockey game, and one of the guys from the local paper a couple seats down from me on press row was typing into one....