Anyone ever use a 300/1200 baud modem using 5 1/4" floppies

   / Anyone ever use a 300/1200 baud modem using 5 1/4" floppies #1  

The kid

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I'm thinking of how far computers have evolved in such a short period of time. I still have my old IMB XT with 10 megabytes of hard drive space and a wopping 256 kilobytes of ram. My son a I ran a single line SciFi themed Bulletin Board where users would call in and play games download files and such. This was pre-internet. The internet existed but few used it because it took some tech know how to do it. My oh my how things have changed. -kid
 
   / Anyone ever use a 300/1200 baud modem using 5 1/4" floppies #2  
Yup, and single sided floppies on an Apple II.
 
   / Anyone ever use a 300/1200 baud modem using 5 1/4" floppies #3  
TRS-80 and Commodore 64 ruled the day when I first started. (at least for me)
 
   / Anyone ever use a 300/1200 baud modem using 5 1/4" floppies #4  
Try a Timex Sinclair 1000 - look it up! Apple ][ (not +, not E, nor C!) .. Hayes Smartmodems and US Robotics modems.. ahh, the good old days when you actually had to be smart to get online!
 
   / Anyone ever use a 300/1200 baud modem using 5 1/4" floppies #5  
I still have my old Osborne. Dual 5 1/4, 64K and a 5" CRT built into a single, suitcase size case... the first "laptop" - well, er, "portable". Went with me on the road for business trips. CPM operating system, word processor, spreadsheet, database... hi tech stuff back in the day. Paid something like $3k for it in 1982.
 
   / Anyone ever use a 300/1200 baud modem using 5 1/4" floppies #6  
I started working for Honeywell in 1969 on their entry level mainframe, the H200. It had a maximum 32 kilo-bytes of memory and had a processor with 2 micro-second cycle time. (same as VIC-20?)
Physically, these systems occupied the space equivalent to a one-car garage, and needed air conditioning equipment that occupied that much more space.
Most were TOS based (tape operating system), later units had 2 or 5 megabyte disc drives.
Of course, this was the era of the punched card readers and huge printers.
Working on these systems, I was primarily a mechanic.
Only the accumulator portion of the CPU was made up of integrated circuit chips, everything else was just diodes, transistors, etc.

Good memories, though.

Pete
 
   / Anyone ever use a 300/1200 baud modem using 5 1/4" floppies #7  
I still have my old Osborne. Dual 5 1/4, 64K and a 5" CRT built into a single, suitcase size case... the first "laptop" - well, er, "portable". Went with me on the road for business trips. CPM operating system, word processor, spreadsheet, database... hi tech stuff back in the day. Paid something like $3k for it in 1982.

My first computer was a Kaypro II which copied the Osborne but improved on it since it had a 80 character screen vs Osborne's 50 or so. My first modem was 300 baud.

Here is the wikipedia link for Kaypro:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaypro
 
   / Anyone ever use a 300/1200 baud modem using 5 1/4" floppies #8  
I go back even further to the Altair 8800. 256 bytes of memory. I programmed it using toggle switches on the front panel. First use of the S-100 bus. No video display nor keyboard back then. All you could see were LED's flashing on the front. It used the Intel 8080 processor. I was so enamored, later I went to work for Intel.
 
   / Anyone ever use a 300/1200 baud modem using 5 1/4" floppies #9  
The first modems I used were 2400 baud and I always limited the login access on the BB's I ran to 15 minutes once a day...had 4 hard lines one of which was dedicated for 'CompuServe'...
later I ran an ELM and later yet a PINE (where my moniker came from) server via a leased shell account...
 
   / Anyone ever use a 300/1200 baud modem using 5 1/4" floppies #10  
My first computer was a Kaypro II which copied the Osborne but improved on it since it had a 80 character screen vs Osborne's 50 or so. My first modem was 300 baud.

Here is the wikipedia link for Kaypro:

Kaypro - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I still have a Kaypro just like that in the garage, but I got it long after it was already old.

Our first comp, if you ignored the atari 2600, was the Commodore 64. First modem we had was a 300 buad acoustic coupler for it. And we used cassette tapes in the datasette drive until we got a 5-1/4 floppy drive. I remember calling out pages of hexadecimal from the back of some magazine as Dad typed it into the C64, calling out the checksum at the end of each line to verify it was entered correctly. That's how you used to "download" programs.

Keith
 
 
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