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Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I can deal with such a high speed terminal. It really is too fast for comfortable reading.

When I first saw a 300 baud Texas Instruments Silent 700 terminal, it was an eye-opener. Sure, the thermal paper printouts faded pretty quickly, but at 30 characters a second it was three times as fast as the Teletype machines I used before.

Even with all that speed, it wasn't too fast for the human mind to comprehend. Not like this 600 baud monstrosity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_700

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I played on Silent 700s when I was kid. My father would bring one from work every now and again and I would be allowed to play on it... a bit anyway (I was ~10 at the time). I remember being in awe at how sophisticated some things could be... that you could actually put the telephone receiver in a couple of rubber cups and the machine could "talk" to a remote machine far away. Wonder of science that. And no, I'm not saying that sarcastically either! The phone we'd put in the acoustic couple modem was itself still a pulse-dialer with a cord (cordless phones still weren't generally on the scene just yet, though DTMF dialing was a thing, a newer thing, but a thing).

Between that and the copy of 101 BASIC Computer Games book I had (and still have) from that era, my career was really started unbeknownst to me.

Beautiful. I looked at obtaining a teletype or similar device but these things take quite and investment of not only money but also time and effort now.

Maybe it would be fun to try and write a small program at 300 baud or so with a line editor like ed or ex. Not sure though if terminal scrollback is a good substitute for having printouts to refer back to.

Dialing in to the 1200 baud MODEM pool was both uneconomical and didn't even confer any great benefits. The 900 baud pool was only like a buck a minute and the 1200 baud pool was $4 per minute!

That said, I might actually have to get off your lawn. My first was a 900 baud cradle. Hayes, I think? Maybe Digital? That was a whole lot of years ago.

I feel like a young brat now starting directly from 1200 baud.

You young whippersnappers with your fast cars and fast modems!

If it helps, my first computer contact was an HP 9100 in '72. I just hated it and would avoid them for years afterwards. ;-)

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