I would also say BASIC.
And I also remember those rogue calls to my phone that really came from a
modem and being able to whistle some tones that the modem at the other end
would react to.
I only used 300 baud rarely, but I did do quite some work over 1200 baud
lines with a terminal at my home. I forgot the brand, but there was a
great new feature in some model that it would have four virtual terminals
which were synchronized so sending some specific escape sequence made it
switch between four terminal sessions at the other end. You could use vi
in one session and have a compile in the other while maybe having elm (the
advanced full screen mail reader) open in a third. Talking about vi, I
also recall it was smart enough to change the actual number of lines
displayed depending on the terminal speed. At 1200 the default was 16, at
300 it was 8. The quantum leap with modems was going from 9600 to 56k as
the latter did allow a reasonable performance with TCP/IP.
/Bjørn
On Mon, 4 Jan 2021 at 22:17, Mark W. Farnham <mwf@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Excellent sonic replay! I whistled the link carrier tone before it came on
and it was right on pitch!
I wish I had a picture or could find one on line of using a fred box and
two acoustic modems to make computers talk to each other pre-internet.
Part of the process of establishing the link was to whistle the carrier
tone to move from the teletype’s modem where you got a remote program ready
to talk to one of the modems connected to the fred box. Transmitting the
source code and then verifying it was a bear until things like DaTapaSS and
Kermit were written with cdc and limpfel zif to ask for real time
retransmission. It turns out sending files twice and running diff was the
pragmatic solution, occasionally sending a third copy if groking which line
was the good one was a challenge on differences. And yes, everything was
line numbered so our “xdiff” program could easily synch up. When you’re
porting to 26 different targets, you had better write a portable diff of
your own…
it was a real drag when one of them could only do 300 baud…
Okay, for 42 points:
1) What was the hardest target to get the handshake of the sending and
receiving target to work on? (CDC chronos was 2nd hardest.)
2) What was the most portable language circa 1981-1984? (OMG. 40 years
ago.)
mwf
*From:* oaktable-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:
oaktable-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *douglas rady
*Sent:* Monday, January 04, 2021 1:58 PM
*To:* oaktable@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [oaktable] OT: Dial-up visual
Remember what that dial-up modem sounded like?
Here's what it looked like ...
https://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured.html
