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Rolling Out the Internet in the 90s [Best Of] (media.piefed.social)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/bestoflemmy@lemmy.world
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@elrainia@lemmy.world describes working on internet infrastructure back in the 1990s. This was on one of those "drive by" AskLemmys where a new user posts a juicy question, then after a couple hours they delete the topic and their account. However, those posts and comments are still visible in Piefed, ex: https://piefed.social/post/1733969#comment_9969293

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[–] 3 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Yeah, no one sane was still using a 300 baud modem in 1990. 1200 and 2400 baud would have been the bog standard.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    The 300 baud was 1983-84. We must have been near the era of 14400 by 1990, but yeah, definitely 2400.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    You're more or less right, 9600bps modems did exist in the late 80s, but no mere mortal owned them 14.4k came not long after and became really common. I actually saved up and got one of the first 19.2k modems on the market when I was a teen in 93 or so, but almost nothing was compatible with it so it was usually just 14.4k or 9600 if you tried to connect to anything.

    Technically, its gets weird because in the late 80s baud and bits per second kind of diverged because of the way the protocols were able to encode data better. I don't think anything actually went higher than 2400 baud though we kept using baud and bps interchangeably.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

    In '87-88 I distinctly remember a Mac BBS in the Philly area called "19 East," so named because it was run from a 19K bps modem. (EDIT yeah, actually it was probably 9600) I recall that modem being expensive for the time, but not absurdly so. But still, not something we college kids would typically own.

    A 2400baud modem in the late 80's was perfectly fine for normal BBS access / use, and would only bog down a bit for downloading warez, which of course was a super-common activity those days.

    @elrainia@lemmy.world

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I didn't see any 19.2k modems until 92-93 and I was obsessed with finding one, so that's either very impressive or another case of one of us remembering poorly as alluded to in the post. :)

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